The Sudden Charm of Public School | Hacker News Reader

The Sudden Charm of Public School

nytimes.com

9 pointstokenadult15 comments

NYT articles with a NYC focus are fascinating to me as an outsider. One thing that jumps out at me, spending my entire life west of the Mississippi river, is that NYC appears to just give their schools numbers:

Public Schools 6, 59 and 290 on the Upper East Side, and P.S. 87 on the Upper West Side

In the states I've lived in the schools have always had "friendly" names, and are never referred to by their numbers, if they even have one.

Furthermore, the phenomenon described in the article reeks of "helicopter parenting", and seems like it might be particularly easy to find in (nearly unique to) NYC. I have no data to back up my prejudice, but between the stereotype of overbearing New England parents and the probable variance in school qualities in an urban area it's not surprising.

In the midwest where I grew up and in Seattle where I live now it's not particularly common to stress over where your children go to school; you optimize if convenient, but most of the choices are pretty good. Likewise, my perception about life in Houston was that some of the schools were pretty bad but given the low cost of living anyone who cared either already lived in the suburbs or made so much money that they could easily afford to send their kids to another school.

Most, if not all, of our elementary and middle schools do have "friendly" names, and as far as I'm aware all the high schools have and go by actual names.

Examples: I went to PS 230 and 217, the names of which I never knew nor can remember now, then to Cunningham IS 234, and graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School.

And, having gone through the public school system in NYC, I can tell you first hand that the right district can make all the difference, mostly because of the environment. A smart student will always be a smart student, but a smart student in a poor environment might well end up incredibly bored when he is unable to move beyond the level that the school teaches at. The largest problem facing the NYC school system has been, for years, the high student to teacher ratio. When I was in elementary, the number was something like 32:1, at one point I remember having 36 kids in my 4th or 5th grade class. The benefit that 'good' schools and districts have are that they usually don't have to abide by the same standards as the rest of the city in teaching and course material. So, while class size might still be rather large (it's gotten better I'm told), teachers are at least free to teach at a higher level and hopefully make a bigger impact.

It's the same in the UK; generally, people are happy with one of the local state schools (a 'public' school here is a posh private school). However, there are definitely a certain set of parents who go to extreme lengths to get little Bobby in the Right State School, since the quality varies so much.

There are frequently TV programmes and newspaper articles about parents who move just to get their kids in certain schools; who have second homes and pretend they live there; who buy to sublet etc; all just to be in the catchment area for particular schools.

It's understandable on one level, but still ridiculous.

Public schools in the US are known to have uneven quality from state to state-- something that is perhaps unavoidable since each state sets its own standards, funding, etc. But why does school quality have to vary so much within a city/school system?

I've always been suspicious that, "we can't live here, the schools aren't good enough for little Johnny!" actually means something like, "We can't live here, little Johnny might have to go to school with black people!". :(

Within a large city, the difference between one public school and the next can be the difference between a serious study environment, and an environment where the majority are in gangs or come from broken families, and class is disrupted on a daily basis.

The explanation is simple: the factors that separate the ghetto from the toniest parts of town will feed into a school system based on geographical location.

School busing has been tried as a solution to this, but it causes other problems - expense, high commute times, and a environment where some of the kids are at an obvious - and painful - advantage to others. The parents in a good neighborhood will fight against busing, if it could put their kid in a worse school. The parents in a bad neighborhood may have too many other problems to be concerned with their kid's education.

at a guess - at least my own feelings on the matter - is that I'm more concerned with class than I am with race. (The problem is that the two can be pretty strongly correlated)

No, some schools really are better than others. Schools are paid for with property taxes. If you have richer people living around the school, the school gets more money. Additionally, you get rich people donating to the schools.

Also, you get better teachers. My friend chose to teach at a rich school over a poor school because (a) she felt unsafe in the poor neighborhood, and (b) she felt the rich school could support her program better. That is pretty common, from what I've heard.

You also get a different peer group for your kids in a rich area compared to a poor area. If it was all about money, we could just throw money at poor schools and they would be equal with rich schools, but I'm not aware of any case where that approach has succeeded.

  > No, some schools really are better than others. Schools
  > are paid for with property taxes. If you have richer
  > people living around the school, the school gets more money.

Is this actually true within a school district? Is it common for the taxes to apportioned geographically all the way down to the neighborhood level? Police and fire services don't work like this, I hope!

Yes. You can donate to a particular school in a school district, so you can have somebody give one school 1,000 computers and a new baseball field while the rest of the schools in the district get nothing. And, teachers usually fight for the chance to work at the better, safer, richer schools; the poorer neighborhoods will tend to have worse teachers and a lot more teacher churn. Parents will use open enrollment or request exceptions to get their kids into the schools in the better neighborhoods.

When my school district implemented open enrollment, the schools in the richest neighborhoods nearly doubled in student population. To accomodate the overflowing student population, they (mostly) centralized special education to the poorest school. In turn, attendance shifted further as nobody wanted to go to the "special ed school on the poor side of town."

Is this actually true within a school district?

Schools can certainly vary in the quality of their staffs within any one school district. If parents can't shop for schools within the school district, they may want to go to another district entirely.

Request to residents of New York City: please correct me if I am wrong, but if I correctly understand the public school system in New York City, there is an overall public school system run by a chancellor for the entire city of New York, but within the city there are multiple "school districts" that each have their own attendance boundaries and some degree of local governance under the overall leadership of the chancellor. So I think what the newspaper article describes is parents trying to move to different neighborhoods in the same city to have a claim for their children to attend a particular local group of public schools, right?

Wow. Scary. I'd hate to think that my children would end up in the same school as all of those other schmucks paying $5500/month for rent. Thank goodness we can move to the $6500/month place and get in a better district.

sheesh

Yeah, it's funny how the NYT never mentions one important - get involved and improve the school where you live!

I'd like to hear from people who live in New York City how readily the public schools there accept parental involvement. My main volunteer work here in Minnesota is leading an organization of parents concerned about gifted education in this state, and local school districts here vary quite widely in how well they encourage parental involvement. This state was the first in the country to have statewide open enrollment for public school districts, the first in the country to have charter schools, and the first in the country to have a statewide program of dual enrollment (college-level study for high school credit) for eleventh and twelfth graders, and all the hundreds of parents I know locally have to continually think and rethink about how to shop around for the best educational fit for their children. Some parents can make meaningful changes in their local school district, and some cannot. But in New York City parents have substantially less shopping power than parents in Minnesota have, so the school districts may be correspondingly more inclined to blow off parental concerns. What do those of you in New York observe about the situation there?

Hmm,

Since this is an article in the New York Times that is going to influence behavior rather than just describe it, It seems like the various stages of encouragement should be: A) Encourage parents to get involved with the public schools that they will be sending their kids to. B) Raise enough ruckus to make sure the parents can get involved. This is the New York Times talking (again).

I personally find Americans thinking in terms of "Better Schools" and "Worse Schools" to be rather vile. There are two kinds of schools - schools where, when the child puts into the effort, they can thrive and other schools. Once a school reaches that point, it is up to the child and the parents to make sure their child thrives. But since of this implies some responsibility on the parents' and children's the parts, it appeals not all.

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