Last week was rather stressful. I became one of those crazed, stressed out parents worried about her kid's comparative education. There's nothing more humorless than an hysterical parent freaked out that her kid is not achieving as much as a kid in the next town. I've made fun of those hysterical parents, but their fears are valid. Some schools are better than others. Schools and peer groups do make a difference in future career options and quality of life. I'm too aware of the statistics to brush these concerns away as the baseless ravings of a soccer mom.
For two days, I went to bed worried and woke up worried. I got on the phone with other moms in town and started to piece together all the facts.
I found out that a group of moms had complained to the school earlier in the year that there was too much writing homework. They had their kids in the town recreation baseball teams and on the traveling teams, and felt that homework was interfering with their kids' busy after school sports activities. Academic achievement wasn't important to them, because the kids were slated to take over the family pavement business after graduation.
Another group of moms with professional backgrounds want their kids to learn their times tables and do book reports.
There's a lot of diversity in this town, which is great, but the school doesn't know how to meet the demands of the different groups of parents.
I need to keep a close eye on my kid in the next few months. He's lost some skills in the past year with a new, untried teacher. We'll have to do a lot on the weekends and in the evenings to get him over this hump. There are a few good websites that help out with drilling multiplication tables. We'll do book reports at home. I'm not sure how we'll carve out time for all that, but we're going to have to do it.
I'm not sure how to keep my hysteria in check. Who wants to be a crazed soccer mom? Not me. We'll just have to keep a close eye on things. If I don't see a big improvement in the school system, then we'll have to move. We will probably have to move to a much smaller home in a town with a much more homogeneous population, but I can free ride on the demands on the school from other crazed soccer moms.
Hopefully, things will work out. Because we love our funky old house with a new kitchen. We are getting rather settled into this community. It is rather well situated near NYC and our family is so close by. Even though I passed on the request to run for town council, I think Steve is going to do it.
I worked a lot out in my head over the weekend, and I'm looking forward to going to sleep without worrying.
Apt. 11d 
Thinking about your comment about how other parents don’t value academic achievement because their kids are going to take over the family businesses. What do you want your kids to do? Why is a particular kind of education so important to you? What’s the goal? A particular college? A particular career? For your kids to have options? For them to seek personal fulfillment?
The worst case scenario is that you stay there and … what happens to your kids?
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Laura doesn’t have a pavement business, so she can’t really go the non-academic route. Barring a family connection, isn’t it easier to get a job with the mafia than to get into the trades?
I literally own the “Helicopter Mom” t-shirt. In fact I wore it to school once accidentally last year. Mine is black-on-white, but the white-on-black is more striking.
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I read Laura’s post again, and it occurs to me that having poor math skills is a huge handicap for future tradesmen and construction people. I get the feeling from listening to my favorite radio show that there are a lot of guys out there who love the hands-on side of things but the business side of their operation is a complete disaster. They hate the paperwork, they don’t know enough about their costs to set bids correctly (i.e. they get lots of jobs but aren’t making any money), their billing is a mess, they’re buying too much equipment, and they’re up to their eye balls in debt. And let’s not even talk about the IRS and how these guys pay yesterday’s payroll taxes with today’s revenue, so that if there’s no income tomorrow, there’s going to be no money available to pay today’s payroll taxes.
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good luck, laura. I haven’t figured how not to be a crazed “soccer mom.” I read obsessively, but hearing about the benefits of stepping back doesn’t teach me how to do it. I found “blessings of a skinned knee” by Wendy Mogel fascinating. But how do you protect your children from being run over by a truck, while still allowing them the blessing of lesrning to fail, and take responsibility for their own futures?
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This is a busy week for me, but I want to make a book recommendation – the two books by Judith Rich Harris The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike. Maybe more, maybe less crazy-making, but her argument is that our kids make an enormous amount of their adult personas by aping the kids around them. The actual result of non-genetic input from the parents is really small, compared to their soaking up the ambience in their little troops of children.
Good thing? Bad thing? At least worth reading. Meanwhile, I need to drill my number two on common denominators. When I get done, maybe I come back to the fray.
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There’s something in between having THE BEST EDUCATION and having no education at all. I see these students all the time. They come to me with a wide variety of skills, and they graduate college with more skills and very often with a career path they are quite happy with and successful in.
I’m assuming Laura wants Jonah to get THE BEST education so that he can go to THE BEST college. But I’ll point out that I went to an Ivy League school and Laura went to a state school in the same state, and there’s not really a whole lot of difference between us, is there? In NJ, I guess the equivalent would be the difference between Jonah going to Rutgers or Princeton. Or maybe he could go to Seton Hall or Ramapo or Montclair State. Will his life be substantially improved by going to Princeton? I don’t know. It depends on what sort of career he wants.
It’s hard for me to know if I went to a “good” school growing up. I know my former HS isn’t in Newsweek’s top HSs, while Syosset, Jericho, and Great Neck all do end up on that list. I wasn’t drilled in the times tables; I had to learn them in a week because I skipped a grade and missed that part and had to catch up.
I guess in my 42 years I have come to think that there is a lot more to life than academic achievement. I did that. I got my PhD, and I found myself living in the middle of Maine, miserable. I worry way more about my kids’ social development. My daughter is already showing signs of being her father’s daughter, a bit anti-social. My son may end up alienating everyone with his goofy aggressiveness. Sort of like his mom. 🙂
Just throwing in some ideas into the mix. I do have an inner crazed soccer mom, but I try to repress her as much as possible.
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I don’t care in the least about an Ivy League education for Jonah. My guess is that he’ll get As in the classes that interest him in high school, but he’ll daydream through the boring ones and get B+s. He’ll be too absent minded and too disorganized to get the straight As necessary for Ivy League college. He’ll have his moments of brilliance and a few teachers will predict great things for him, but won’t have the consistency for straight As.
DNA is a powerful thing.
I want Jonah to graduate from high school with a large range of options before him. He can choose to be a plumber or go onto to a decent college. His choice, but I want there to be a choice before him.
What worries me most is that a large number of the kids who graduate from the local high school go onto to college. However, they go onto a crappy local college. OK, you can get a good education at one of the local colleges, but you can also rig your schedule, so that you end up with the deaf professors who give you the answers before the final.
Rutgers is an excellent college. They have a great honors program. If Jonah went there, that would be fine with me. He could graduate from Rutgers and still have nearly a full menu of new options open to him. At one of the local colleges, his choices would be much more limited.
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I was hearing recently that a lot of out-of-staters don’t realize that Rutgers isn’t a hotsy-totsy school. And that was certainly true in my case until very recently. I think it’s hard to assess the reputations of schools from within or from too close.
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Here’s another confession of ignorance: being a West Coaster, until a very late date, I didn’t know that Rutgers and Princeton were in New Jersey. Worse yet, I was in college before I realized that MIT was not in Michigan.
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Speaking of ignorance, I was in graduate school and one day it hit me that this Max Weber I kept reading about was the same guy as the Max “Veber” that I had been hearing professors talk about since my undergraduate years. This was swiftly followed by a similar inside about Goethe/”Gerta”.
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Another area where math is crucial to the blue collar guy is in dealing with interest rates, mortgages, vehicle purchases, HELOCs, credit cards, pay day loans, cash advances, taxes, etc. None of this is super advanced math, but even highly educated people make mistakes in these areas.
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I found out that a group of moms had complained to the school earlier in the year that there was too much writing homework. They had their kids in the town recreation baseball teams and on the traveling teams, and felt that homework was interfering with their kids’ busy after school sports activities.
That’s kind of what I figured from your last post. Why not give writing homework, unless the parents have complained about all of the writing homework? And homework doesn’t “matter” if over half of the kids don’t do it because it conflicts with soccer practice.
We live in your “if I don’t see a big improvement” option — a tiny rancher amongst the Victorian mansions in one of New Jersey’s ritziest school districts. There are definitely 4 or 5 crazy-overachiever families in our classes who come to school with projects obviously done 95% by mom and dad, but the majority are relatively normal (from our perspective) parents who want to best reasonable education, and support extra-curriculars, but only to the extent they don’t interfere with academics.
It has made the whole school thing very easy for us. The down sides are (a) no guest room in the Ragtime casa; (b) high taxes; and (c) all of the black and asian kids — and there are a bunch of each — are adopted kids with white parents (or multi-racial kids with a white primary-caregiver-parent — I don’t know everyone’s history), so there’s very little economic or cultural diversity (for some definitions of “diversity”).
Those of the trade-offs, and I don’t think I made a bad choice at all. Obviously, you weighed diversity more highly in your original decision, which is perfectly reasonable, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with reconsidering.
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“I found out that a group of moms had complained to the school earlier in the year that there was too much writing homework. They had their kids in the town recreation baseball teams and on the traveling teams, and felt that homework was interfering with their kids’ busy after school sports activities. Academic achievement wasn’t important to them, because the kids were slated to take over the family pavement business after graduation.”
I wonder if you could win over some of that camp by settling on a compromise position of pushing on the school to get more done during school hours, more writing and more multiplication practice. The writing may be a hard sell, but I think that the multiplication thing is something that parents (even less educated parents) get. I’d suggest grilling some of these guys about what they do and the skills that are needed, with special emphasis on “kids today” and what they wish their 18-year-old employees knew. From reading Tracy Kidder’s “House,” it seems like home-building is one big, hairy arithmetic problem. I wonder if a teacher might be interested in doing a career day type visit?
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If I had it to do over again, I would not allow my children to set foot inside an affluent suburban school.
Here is William Sanders:
I’ve caught the most political heat from some of the schools in affluent areas, where we’ve exposed what I call “slide and glide.” One of the top-dollar districts in the state had always bragged about its test scores, but our measurements showed that their average second-grader was in the 72nd percentile. By the time those children were sixth-graders, they were in the 44th percentile. Under our value-added scheme, the district was profiled in the bottom 10 percent of districts in state.
Interview with William Sanders
And here is Richard Elmore:
One of the huge fallacies of performance-based accountability systems is the misconception that nominally low-performing schools don’t know what they are doing and that nominally high-performing schools have something to teach them. This year, I have been in nominally low-performing schools that know far more than nearby nominally high-performing schools do about the processes of instructional improvement, creating settings with strong norms of practice, and managing the multiple demands of urban schools.
Most high-performing schools in our highly segregated society have gotten there not by knowing a great deal about instructional practice or improvement but by getting and holding on to students in high socioeconomic groups. The practice in most nominally high-performing schools is emphatically not about improvement but about maintenance of a certain level of confidence with the surrounding community. When I speak about improvement with people in these schools, they often look at me as if it had nothing to do with them. Most of the knowledge about improvement is in the schools where improvement is occurring, and most of those schools are, by definition, schools with a history of low performance.
A Plea for Strong Practice
This is what we’ve lived through. Bad instruction combined with chronic public relations, open dislike of parents, and explicit blaming of kids when they fail to learn. We are now pulling our children out of the local schools to send them to private schools we can’t afford.
Before we moved here we didn’t understand why parents living in communities with “good schools” would pay for private school.
Now we know.
The “high performing” schools we’ve seen aren’t high performing schools at all.
They are medium to low-performing schools taking credit for high-performing parents, students, and tutors.
I would steer clear of Ridgew–.
I say that as a parent familiar with the situation there.
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“OK, you can get a good education at one of the local colleges, but you can also rig your schedule, so that you end up with the deaf professors who give you the answers before the final.”
But you can get those professors at the elite colleges. My husband (a fellow alum) still laughs about the time he got an A in a course he didn’t submit the final/only paper for. I got a B in LaFeber’s History of Foreign Policy course and I stopped going sometime in early February. It was snowy all the time, and Baker Hall was way up the hill, you know?
I’m just wondering what are the criteria for determining what a crappy college is.
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this is a hard post for me to respond to, since i live on the west coast and life is so very very different here, so as to practically be a different country. 🙂
however, i noticed in your previous post you mentioned that you deliberately chose to live someplace where not everyone is the child of a doctor or other professional. that’s interesting to me, because one of the main reason my husband & i live where we live (a PAC-10 university town) is because we DO want our child to grow up with the children of other doctors, engineers, professors, &c.
i grew up in a place where few professionals lived, mostly farmers, ranchers, and the small businesspeople who catered to them. academics was most definitly NOT a priority in our community, and i had a terrible time in public school, despite the nominal presence of a GATE program.
like i said, i understand that the east coast is extremely stratified, more so than here. but, like i said, my experience in life has been so different that it’s hard for me to get where you are coming from on this.
but this is why the interwebs are good – the opportunity to hear the perspective of other experiences.
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But again, trishka, there is something in between, isn’t there? My daughter’s friends’ parents are a marketing professional, a landscaper, a pharmacist, a realtor, an accountant, a banking administrator, an electrician, a former history teacher now SAHM. They don’t have to be all doctors and lawyers OR the total opposite, whatever that is.
But then again, I also grew up on Long Island, where everyone’s parents are teachers or cops (tm Steve Gilliard, RIP).
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We didn’t move to this town because of its diversity. We moved here, because we could afford a house here, the schools had a good reputation, and it had a good commute into NYC. I grew up and have scars from growing up in very affluent community, so we always perceived of the diversity as an added bonus. However, we are in a position to move to a more affluent community now and are weighing the pros and cons. One of the major cons is that my husband hates to move. See Jane Doe in the comments above for more downsides.
Since you know Long Island, WendyW, part of my stress has come out of my discussions from one of my best friends who has kids in the Cold Spring Harbor district. Their schools are run so differently from mine. I have school envy.
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This threads reads like a lot of arguing from anecdote. There are Gut classes at Princeton, and millionaires who graduate from Mercer County College. That doesn’t mean that that one doesn’t give you more opportunities for success.
Kids in rich districts are snooty, spoiled, and bad influences (or else, they are doctor wannabes are good influences), which kids in poorer districts are good examples of diversity (or else, bad example of anti-educationism.)
Jane Doe sees that “high performing schools” may just be getting credit for “high performing families.” That is almost certainly true, but if you move to a neighborhood with high performing families, your kids and schools get pressured by them. If you move to a richer district and you child’s performance improves, it doesn’t really matter to you why.
Also, New Jersey (unlike, say, Massachusetts) does not have wide stratifications in school funding. High income/ high performing schools pay about the same per student as all the rest (the poorer the district, the more state funding there is). So, the wealthier districts are certainly not performing better solely because of more money, but because of more academically oriented families, rather than the schools themselves. You can decide yourself whether that is a feature or a bug.
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Laura, CSH is a *very* wealthy school district.
Don’t have school envy. The shining star of all the local schools around here has a rotting underbelly–a problem of serious alcohol/drug abuse among the HS population.
I know you have a lot on your plate, but have you considered volunteering in the classroom? You might find it interesting. I love going into my daughter’s class when I can. It’s chaotic, but fun. I love 3rd graders.
My students and I have been doing community service at an inner city school here, and we spent the bus ride back this morning talking about our previous school experiences. One of my students from western MA said she’d made it to 3rd grade without knowing how to read, so her mom put her in a parochial school for the next 3 years. (She’s a good student now, by the way. Not a great writer, but confident and motivated.) Another student talked of graduating from a HS with 4000 students (NYC of course).
And yet they’re all here in my class, trying to learn and succeed and make lives for themselves. And I do think most of them will. Maybe I’m just overly optimistic, though.
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Not that I advocate moving, but my semi-snooty town is very diverse and the schools are not only good, but lean progressive WRT their educational model. (And the sped is pretty good, too.) If you are seriously considering moving, email or call me. I honestly think it’s a better all-around choice than Ridgew… Much less homogenous, much more tolerant than most rich districts. (And the commute to midtown is faster.)
Having said that, I love your house and I suspect you can make it work with the school system where you are. You might also check out the flashmaster for math drilling.
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Ragtime, I have a feeling that you’re in the same NJ town as Tamar. Yeah, it’s a great place. I have some other friends there, too. Lots of funky old homes there. My highway-phobic mom would hate it, but she might have to deal. Good special ed there, too.
One of the features of this middle class community is that they don’t pressure the school to let parents into the schools. There are ZERO opportunities for parental involvement. I always make myself available to the teacher, but without pressure from the administration, they never, ever let parents into the classroom. In four years, I’ve never been asked to come in to help out.
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Laura, Ragtime is probably not in my town. The classrooms here are usually a little more than half Caucasian; the rest of the kids are mostly black, with a sprinkling of other ethnicities. The town has a long-standing black community. At the grade school level, I see a nice, comfortable integration, thanks to the every-school-is-a-magnet system. I gather this changes somewhat as the kids get older, that they self-segregate more, but I don’t have personal experience to comment on that.
Homework tends to be relatively light as compared to more competitive achievement-oriented school districts, but they do have a fair amount of essay and story writing at this grade level (third grade). I personally find it a good compromise. Good education without the insanity of some nearby districts. D would have a hard time in some of those other places, for various reasons (less tolerance, more pressure).
It’s not perfect. The class sizes creep close to 25 kid per class, and though they do split into smaller groups for differentiated learning, some parents of gifted kids feel like their kids are not challenged enough.
If you do start seriously considering it, feel free to pick my brain.
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Ragtime, I have a feeling that you’re in the same NJ town as Tamar.
I don’t know where Tamar lives, but its unlikely, since I’m in South Jersey, near Philadelphia.
The commute to mid-town would be horrendous (but I know people who do it!).
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Hi, I just stumbled onto your blog from Grace over at Bad Mom, Good Mom. I have to add a comment even though you don’t know me at all. I say don’t stress too much about the schools. I went to fairly crappy public schools (out West, though). I doubt I had much homework in grade school- I don’t remember. It was a shock to my system when I arrived at college (University of Chicago, if that matters) and found myself in classes with kids who’d learned all of the first year material in high school. In the end, though, I think I came out ahead. I learned how to study in my first year, while the kids who already knew the stuff kind of coasted. By third year, we were all in new territory, and there weren’t as many institutions set up to help us out. I was a straight A student and they were getting Bs and Cs. I graduated with honors, went off and got a PhD, and am living a happy life with a good career. I think that as long as you give your kids opportunities to read and learn outside of school, they’ll be fine. You’ll worry, because we all worry, but they’ll be fine.
Of course, this is just another anecdote. If you want some statistics to make you feel better, go read Freakonomics. If I remember properly, the main predictors of how well a kid does are the education level of the mother and the number of books in the house. I think you are probably good in both of these categories. I know that these statistics gave me comfort when we decided not to stretch our budget to live in the neighborhood with the BEST schools in our area.
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wendy, i think the point that got lost in my post is that i can’t fathom a community with nothing but doctors & professors. even in our college town, there are certainly other professions represented quite well in many of the neighborhoods – though that is changing as our real estate prices continue to rise.
so i hear laura saying she is scarred from having been raised in an affluent community, but i have no experience at all with that & so can’t relate to what she is saying, at all. but that doesn’t mean i don’t respect her experience, of course.
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I was hearing recently that a lot of out-of-staters don’t realize that Rutgers isn’t a hotsy-totsy school.
But Rutgers grads are more than happy to tell anyone they meet! 😉 I remember being pinned down at Swarthmore’s admitted students weekend by a dad of another student whose son was at Rutgers; he grilled me about why people from Ohio don’t appreciate how great Rutgers is.
If you have to go around telling everyone that your school is elite, it sort of belies the claim.
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Not allowing or actively discouraging parent involvement in an elementary school classroom would be a real red flag to me. For what it’s worth, I think your focus on your children having choices and options is the way to frame your decision or set of decisions. More choices and options are good. Best of luck.
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Trishka, ok, I see what you mean. I get what people are saying about choices and options, and I also get the importance of being in a community where education is valued.
Another anecdote (and I also see Ragtime’s point about so much anecdotal data being insufficient): in my community service-performing class, we were talking with our HS students about career aspirations, and one of my students, somewhat defiantly :), said that he was going to take over his dad’s roofing business and he was only here in college because his dad made him, but he didn’t see the point. So don’t assume that the working-class types aren’t as motivated as us academic types when it comes to college education.
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We love TimezAttack from Big Brainz for times tables. It’s even more fun if you pay for the complete version.
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From my perspective, education is figuring out what you like, what you’re good at, and how you can serve the world. Math can be learned by a motivated student in about twenty hours (according to David Albert). Exposure to some classic ideas is helpful, but anything that is necessary to a chosen career path can be learned when needed, and it will be much learned more quickly and thoroughly because the learner will be highly motivated. This is third grade, right? Keep some perspective. As long as he isn’t losing his love of learning, high school is plenty early enough to worry about quality education (IMHO). I’m sure you have plenty of great discussions in your fabulous new kitchen, and I’m willing to bet they fill in any important gaps. Some good read-alouds at bedtime, some interesting books strewn around to find in a bored moment . . . . Those are the memories that are most likely to stick. (Whispersing: Read up on homeschooling.)
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I really like the Usborne illustrated science books we’ve got, and an illustrated science encyclopedia is nice to have around. My daughter doesn’t read chapter books, but I often see her paging through those books. I’d like to get her something similar for history eventually, but am not sure what would be good.
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