First Person: My local school didn’t teach my son the way I hoped it would. To tackle segregation, we need to talk about that, too

First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others thinking and writing about public education.

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent New York Times Magazine article, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City,” struck a chord. “This city has made integration the hardest choice,” she writes. Unfortunately, as both a parent and a teacher, I know that is true.

New York City schools are not just segregated by race and class, but also divided by pedagogy — how teaching and learning happens in a classroom. What often goes undiscussed is how how parents from different backgrounds often hold different beliefs about what learning should look like and choose schools accordingly, yet another factor fueling school segregation.

I spent years teaching in schools where most students came from low-income families and were black or Hispanic. I fought against the narrow and sometimes joyless approach to basic skill development that many school officials promoted as the best way to bridge the achievement gap. Even before I was a mother, I often asked myself if I would want my child sitting in my own classroom.

Still, there are pedagogical silos in New York, and the skill-and-drill approach is more prevalent among schools that serve mostly low-income families. As the city begins a few efforts meant to better integrate its schools, families and educators need to talk more about our often starkly different ideas about what makes a school “good.”

When Hannah-Jones and her husband chose P.S. 307, a school outside of their zone, she writes that she was fueled by her desire to play a part in integrating that school economically. She was also influenced by seeing that students there played musical instruments, had access to an advanced science and technology program, and benefitted from the school’s strong leadership.

My own story of choosing a school for my child is complicated and marked by some of the same impulses, though it didn’t work out the same way.

My son attended pre-kindergarten in a school that largely serves low-income students, especially in the upper elementary grades. We started the school year intending for him to remain there as long as our family stayed in the neighborhood. We liked the principal and thought it was important to support our zoned school — that such actions were in line with our ideals.

My child had a warm teacher who he loved, but the classroom environment proved to be a challenge. Though his teacher was aiming for a play-based environment guided by children’s questions, as a new teacher, she understandably struggled to set expectations for children’s behavior, and I wasn’t sure she was getting the support she needed.

The school was also still working out what kind of instruction it wanted to see. While some classrooms, like the science lab, showed signs of active use with meaningful student work on the walls, others showed few signs of what children were actually creating and working on. Looking ahead to kindergarten, I became increasingly concerned about the amount of time such young children spent filling in worksheets, the early introduction of homework, and the school’s preoccupation with testing.

Unlike Hannah-Jones’s description of her daughter during her first year in school, my son was not flourishing. By the spring, he no longer wanted to go to school.

I was torn, because I valued the school’s sense of community, the music program, and the administration’s openness to parents. But for my child, who often had difficulty focusing, the teaching practices weren’t working.

I eventually secured a seat for him at the school where I also ultimately took a job, a decision that left me relieved but also conflicted. Had my son’s experience been more positive, our choice would have been different. But when your child would benefit from a different kind of teaching, what are the right decisions then?

Of course, having the resources and knowledge to even ask this question has become a privilege in New York City, where navigating the system can easily become a full-time job. While many schools talk about their progressive practices, their interpretations range from children deciding on their own units of study to the repetitive skill-and-drill activities used by many large charter networks. Parents are asked to figure out what school environment will be best for their children amid a flurry of conflicting information.

This year, the Department of Education has allowed seven public schools, including the one where I work, to embark on a pilot program that alters admissions to promote integration. The program is a good thing, and has already diversified the incoming kindergarten classes.

These efforts also make it even more important to find ways to talk about what families expect. Some will want more recess. Some want more structure. Some want to take the state tests and others don’t. Some want to see more reading and writing in kindergarten, others find this developmentally inappropriate, and still others are unsure. These differences are shaped by our own experiences in school systems, our aspirations for our children, our backgrounds, and, in some cases, our individual children and their needs, strengths, and challenges.

Other assumptions about what makes a school good are destructive, especially the idea that the affluence of a school’s families can serve as marker of its quality. Hannah-Jones points to a few disturbing ideas voiced by parents who were rezoned from P.S. 8, the wealthy Brooklyn Heights school, to P.S. 307. Several parents seemed to believe that when a school serves poor children, that school is compromised and not as safe — a gross generalization.

Yet, for school integration to be successful, we have to find ways to talk about what does matter: our beliefs about what teaching and learning should look like in our children’s classrooms. We have to be willing to engage in these discussions as parents and educators without feeling defensive about what we believe to be right. We have to decide when advocating for our own child could support other children, and when it is potentially at the expense of other children. Once we learn how to do that, New York will be closer to having more integrated schools.

This post is part of a new series we’re calling How We Got Here, explaining how students and families chose, or ended up at, the schools they did. Interested in contributing? Email us here.

About our First Person series:

First Person is where Chalkbeat features personal essays by educators, students, parents, and others trying to improve public education. Read our submission guidelines here.