Choosing a school in neoliberal times
The first iteration of this newsletter was a series of posts on my blog, but they weren't about socialism and school finance. Before the pandemic started, as my pregnant partner's due date was approaching, I decided to start a research/writing project about where this child would go to school. I've read a lot of critiques of neoliberal education policy and practice in cities, but I haven't seen too many personal accounts from socialist parents navigating that reality.
Before the pandemic set in, I was going to focus exclusively on this project: writing, researching, and organizing around our own elementary school choice process in Philadelphia. The question weighed on me. The problem of privatizing public education, neighborhood schools being weakened by marketization, had been weighing on me politically and intellectually since I started studying education, but it became so much more personal as my partner's pregnancy advanced. This child would have to participate in this system and we'd have to guide them.
But when the pandemic hit, I got knocked off course with everyone else. The baby was only a couple months away from arriving and my anxiety got me fearing the worst. I started studying finance more in-depth. I was partially dissociating to relieve the anxiety to distract myself, but I'd also wanted to go really deep into municipal finance so I could talk more confidently about school funding. The school choice project took a back seat.
Time rolled on. Thisbe started daycare recently. She's turning two in May. The pandemic's machinations are sort of old hat and, feeling confident about my finance-speak skills, I started thinking about the school choice question again. We've still got about three years until we really have to make a decision, but research and organizing take a long time and I'd like whatever we do to be intentional, informed by solidarity, and obviously what's good for Thisbe. So a couple weeks ago I took out my notes from 2020, dusted them off, and got writing. I ended up learning something I didn't expect. (This is a long post, so I won't bury the lead: after reading, thinking, and talking to people I've concluded that you should just send your child to your catchment school and don't think about it too much!)
Comegys
Looking at my notes, I had originally started out wanting to know about our zoned, neighborhood elementary school, Benjamin B. Comegys. I wanted to know everything and anything about it as a researcher, organizer, and potential parent. I found out catchment using the Philly School District's school finder map. We're right at the boundary of the orange and blue catchments. Comegys is there at the red marker.
I'd done some googling about Comegys as a first step. The school's facebook page shows smiling faces, teachers, leaders, brightly painted murals, photo ops with the superintendent and several elected officials (all of whom I'd enthusiastically voted for!). There's even a new turf area with a freshly painted Eagles logo on it next to their pretty new playground. A teacher there just recently won some awards, which warranted a visit from Quinta Brunson (who developed the show Abbott Elementary), $20,000 of books donated by Scholastic, and a donation of $40,000 from Wells Fargo. I don't want to yuck anyone's yum and schools need everything they can get, especially schools like Comegys, but it looks like a dystopian sweepstakes where resources suddenly fall from the sky rather than being systematically, structurally, and frequently distributed over time.
Other search results were less encouraging and more evidence of the dystopia.
I know enough not to trust these sources and data points, yet one encounters them. I also know that they impact others' thinking about schools so I got into it: the demographics (96% black, 100% economically disadvantaged, enrollments dropping), the school's facilities (needs $11.3 million in repairs, including an out of date fire alarm system and water damage in the library), and, worst of all, for-profit school rating websites that make money from presenting a school's standardized test scores in comparison to certain averages (Comegys gets a D+ on niche.com). The latter websites really are the worst. Research shows that they basically encourage racial steering, lowering property values in districts and robbing residents of revenue for their public schools. I think the term white supremacy is overdetermined and actually refers to a whole host of things beyond what we think of as race--the best term I know for it is racial capitalism--but all these data points are paradigm cases of what's sometimes called white supremacy. I didn't want to let that make my decision. So I decided to talk to people.
Dead ends
I thought I could get around the white supremacy by meeting, organizing, and chatting with actual people who go or have gone to Comegys. I had some conversations. I asked friends on our block first. They send their kid to a nearby school in another catchment. They told me they'd heard from friends and colleagues of theirs not to go to Comegys. More specifically, they said they'd talked to someone who used to teach there. Apparently this person told them they'd never send their kids there. Another contact who lives across the street--a long-time education organizer with some impressive cred--sends their kid to a private school. I asked our neighbors who'd been on the block for decades if they knew anyone related to Comegys or had any experience with it. They said no.
I was hitting dead ends. As a teacher, I know that school leaders like principals and assistant principals have so much going on that an uptight email from a white parent who's kid is years away from going to their school wouldn't be a priority. But I emailed them anyway. I got no response. I talked to my ward leader (an elected official representing a very small unit of city government) if he knew anyone. I made it clear that I didn't want to propose anything new or change anything. I just wanted to get involved, meet people, listen, see about the school and if/how my family might be part of its community. He told he'd introduce me to some folks at Comegys, but our conversation veered in a lot of unrelated directions. He invited me to his house for an outdoor graduation party but I couldn't make it. We lost touch.
I heard about a tutoring program run by a nearby church that did after-school programming at Comegys. I emailed the organizer and they said they'd cancelled the program given the pandemic. I found out that the University of Pennsylvania's Netter Center, an office that develops partnerships in West Philadelphia, has a relationship with Comegys. They apparently work with UPenn's philosophy department to do a philosophy for kids program. I used to do that kind of work as an undergraduate, so I reached out to the professor in charge of it. She was excited to meet with me, but after I asked when she could meet she didn't respond. That was April 2020.
I was hitting dead ends. I imagined that I could meet families who go to or went to Comegys, or even meet teachers or others that work there or with the school. I thought I could get involved in organizing, initiatives, and general stuff in and around the school so I could find out more. I couldn't find anyone. Like I said before, the pandemic had set in at that point and I wasn't focusing much on the issue. It was only recently, for instance, that I found out how to properly pronounce the school's name. (It's cahm-eh-geez.)
An ethic?
Another section of my notes had ideas about how to make this decision, or what principles to use. This decision will get made in conversation with my partner, Thisbe, and our community. Right now, I'm getting clear about what I would want or propose. So what are my ethics?
Sociological research shows school doesn't have as much impact on life outcomes compared to other resources like housing, healthcare, nutrition, care networks, parents' education, etc. For those who do not have those resources school can be a path towards better lives (although the jury is out on whether education in the absence of social programs can create more equality). School is obviously good for all kinds of reasons. But if you have educated parents with solid income, housing, and good health then chances are you'll be fine. We have those things for now at least so, all in all, no matter which school we end up at, Thisbe will fine.
Pedagogically, I want Thisbe to have a good experience at the place she has to be a lot of the day. She's too young for us to really know what'll work for her so I have to wait to figure that out. It could be that she'll need something educationally about which we have no idea yet.
Politically, I support unionized traditional neighborhood public schools. I think charter schools make things worse, though I understand why many working class families in cities have gone for them. The traditional neighborhood schools haven't served them in places like Philadelphia, which is chronically underfunded. I largely agree with what Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote about in an early piece talking about where she'd send her daughter. I was also mindful of dynamics that can emerge when white professional-managerial class people get interested in diverse working class schools in cities. The Nice White Parents podcast made an impression on me.
Even though the two pieces are New York Times projects and I don't share a lot or even most of the ideological tendencies in them, they're two mainstream texts I've encountered taking on this issue of choosing schools in neoliberal times, particularly given the return of PMCers to cities. I don't know how to exactly crystallize all these into a single ethic but they're the stuff I think about when I think about making this decision.
Neoliberal interpellation
The last part of my notes had to do with Philadelphia schools themselves. The district is one of the most charterized/school-choicey districts in the country. A third of our schools are charters. The district also has a school selection program where you can apply for seats at neighborhood schools outside your catchment. Not to mention the cyber and private schools. No matter what you have to choose.
For instance, many people in the Comegys catchment don't send their kids to Comegys. A friend who knows about these things sent me the other schools that kids in the Comegys catchment go. (They got the info from the District's report on "School Catchment Retention Counts".) It's a lot of different places. And looks like a lot of kids, though I'm not sure how to compare it to other catchments.
You're maybe starting to get a sense of the mess here. In principle, Thisbe could go to any of these schools and--as long as they weren't private--it'd be paid for with property taxes. We could just go to Comegys without any application. But we could apply to go Lea or Mitchell schools, or another public elementary. That's how school choice works. Without the school choice system, we'd just go to Comegys. But because there are so many options I'm compelled to find out, make a decision, and send Thisbe where we think is best. It's a neoliberal interpellation par excellence: to participate in a market, you have to do market research, then think about what's best. The whole policy makes me become a market actor, permitting all kinds of racial capitalist calculations. I'm called by the social structure to ask myself if this school, according to call these factors, is 'good'.
Whatever, just go!
To get all the notes straight, I wrote a thread on twitter. I haven't seen many people publicly working through these issues. I wanted to show what I'd learned, the question I was asking, the dead ends I was encountering. If I was experienced this strained silence then others must be too, and those kinds of silences reproduce unjust social structures. I wanted to give a sense of informed struggle with a difficult issue. I didn't really know what I'd propose to my partner for Thisbe's school, so I was writing from a place of that not-knowing. I didn't think it would get too much attention but a good number of people saw it. It helped me decide and I learned something new and interesting.
The most provocative and helpful stuff came from people who shared their experiences in making this decision as well. One person who has written about this publicly is Stephanie King, a writer and public school advocate here. She sent me an essay she'd written about her decision to send her daughter to their catchment school. But in summing up that process, she said quite clearly it wasn't the result of market research. She wasn't being all "social justice warrior" about it. To her and her partner, the catchment school was walking distance and, as she put it, "a school." In other words, they just sent their daughter there. And it was fine! She talks about it like she's not really thinking about it. She just does it. All her neighbors think she's crazy, but she says "whatever."
This approach was revelatory. At this point in the project, I'm thinking that even the process of researching, visiting, and finding out about schools is part of the whole neoliberal project. This 'thinking' is racial capitalist market rationality. It's wrapped up with clearly derogatory evaluation on websites, in test scores, and the ideas people in my networks have of Comegys. You see the bad numbers, you hear about a failing school with a nearly all Black population, and people like me might think "where else could my child go?" I understand why parents who had been let down by the public system wanted to get out of it. But I also know that providing all these "options" mollifies a newer, wealthier, and whiter population's prejudices against schools that have historically served the diverse working class of the city. And all of that is part of a suite of policies that dispossess the working class of their communities.
Stephanie's approach reminded me of some contemporary critical theory of education. French theorist Jean-Luc Nancy has a concept of the "inoperable community" where existing modes of rationality get suspended in a collective context. Building on earlier French surrealist thinker Georges Bataille, Nancy and Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben talk about the suspension of oppressive thinking, a mode of being that takes a "whatever" approach to dominant ideologies. It's like what we said in Occupy using Herman Melville's character Bartleby the Scribner: I prefer not to. In this case, I prefer not to participate in the racial capitalist market rationality imposed by the neoliberal school choice system.
So right now, I like Stephanie's approach. Whatever, just go! No need to hem, haw, and do market research. No need for any grand organizing. Just go to the local school, be a parent, and see how it goes.