Good Parenting vs. Good Citizenship?

But it’s also the height of arrogance to think that YOUR kid is so special as to individually make that much of a positive difference. For one thing, we’re speaking in generalities, and individuals are particulars. Your kid may NOT be a godsend to wherever you send them to school.

And if your kid is a positive, the effect of one kid, just one kid, one family alone, doesn’t really make a difference. It’s a collective action problem, in that defectors can maximize their individual gains…you know the story. And without a way to get large-scale cooperation, the benefits your individual child brings to a school are probably less than they get from advantage-seeking.

Everything you say here seems right–except I’d add that one possible cause of this internal struggle are driven by the failure of past people to be good citizens and consider, e.g., the inegalitarian effects of undermining the public education system, and the creation of what’s being called the ‘dream hoarder’ class.

The anxiety that drives our conflict as parents could be due to this winner-take-all economic system, and the inevitable shrinking of pathways to the type of life parents in the US probably want for their offspring.

A problem is that–when a system is set up to create a potentially severe disadvantage for your child–then being a good parent really *might* force you to see other children as competitors for the small number of slots promising a decent life, and appear to obligate you to position your child accordingly. I suspect this is how many parents think about it.

What I’m saying is that many parents will see the situation where you don’t position your child the right way as less about failure to optimize, and more about failure to *save* their child. Economic anxiety, and the shifting sands we live in with respect to the social future drives this effect. People see that the doors are closing, and they become less and less willing to take chances.

The problem is that our rush to the doors involves knocking others out of the way. Rather than push back about the situation where the elevator to leisure time and security only fits a tiny percentage of our youth, we sharpen our elbows. And then we are praised for our good parenting if we’re one of the lucky ones who made it in on time.

“When affluent white parents are making these decisions about parenting, they could consider in some way at least how their decisions will affect not only their kid, but other kids. ”

I guess I just disagree with the premise. I appreciate the racial sentiment, but I don’t believe me making a family choice for my child is a race decision. As noted above there is a massive collective action problem and a child’s parent’s are given agency over that from conception to adult-hood.

My wife had agency to choose life and did – should she have not since that would mean another white baby in the world with all the advantages that entails?

As parents we chose to vaccinate, breast feed, when to send to day care, how soon to potty train – should we not do these things since that would confer the advantage of health and wellness others less fortunate might not enjoy?

All had societal implications had we made different choices about the sort of person they might become, their safety and the health and safety of those around them. None of those choices were at the expense of others even though, quite logically and fairly, any number of parents would have made different choices about each of these.

Now you’re telling me that when it comes to choosing an education that this thing should be done in consideration of what impact it might have on those less fortunate? That I should seek to right decades of racial and financial inequality though school choice? That’s nuts.

I’m sorry. Choosing an education is an individual decision and in all cases I would choose whats best for the person for whom I am responsible. If that’s public, private, in-home or on the streets – that’s my call, to the best of my ability, based on what I know about my child (by I, I mean both parents but that’s harder to write). I don’t expect anyone else to do any different for their kid either. This is firmly in individual choice territory.

Those who wish to purposely send their kid to a worse school, by all means do so – that is firmly your choice.

I agree that collective, policy-based solutions are best. The need for an effective collective approach to this issue is why busing was invented, was it not?

And how did white America respond to that idea again?

I haven’t faced this particular conundrum myself, but as a general rule I try not to beat myself up over a personal failure to take on individually something my society lacks the will or desire to deal with.

Basic Socialism, isn’t it? We stumble on things that do everybody good when everybody does them; the job of socially useful politics is to create incentives for such things where none exist.

Raising/educating all children well is one of those things, so is TB patients getting treatment, clean air etc etc. Not sure why how you put the baby down is something that Seriously everyone must do samely, but new parents are always like that, so ok.

Additional note: back in the ‘oughts and pre-teens there were several thoughtful and extensive posts/discussions on this and related topics here on CT – I recommend searching those and reading or re-reading.

A curious case, about someone Gina knows. The whitest person I have ever met (literally) was the only white kid in her middle school and the first two years of high school (urban public schools), in a frankly mismanaged urban district. (Her parents moved when she entered eleventh grade, and before you say “ah, well…”, she was the third child — the others had gone fully through the urban district). I’m confident that for her, as for me, being in a school replete with disadvantage was not a cost, and she was a benefit to the school. And, frankly, that she will perform her chosen vocation considerably better because of it (nursing — I can’t say the same about myself, I’m a philosopher). I’ve never asked her parents about their motivations.

But of course for some kids it would have been (I have three kids — I’m reasonably confident one of them would have been just fine, but not at all confident about one of the others). There’s an interesting question about the point at which it becomes not ok to take the risk. I disagree with Trader Joe that you should to the best for your kid, but you should probably do ok for them. Exactly what that means is one of the questions the post poses.

Can’t argue with the marketing problem. If you try to get parents to favour other children over their own, you’re going against hundreds of millions of years of evolution. There’s literally a dinosaur called the “Good Mother Lizard”, and she wasn’t sitting on anyone else’s eggs. That said, if you’re really concerned with whether your child will be a good person, current psychology says you’re about 15 months too late.

“I know I will not be such a good person that I choose where to live based entirely on a judgment that my kid’s presence in that neighborhood’s schools would do the most good impartially construed” “If that’s public, private, in-home or on the streets – that’s my call” “My kids went to public schools until […] they could not be adequately served there [s]o they went to private schools” “I’m reasonably confident one of them would have been just fine [in a school replete with disadvantage], but not at all confident about one of the others”

These statements, ostensibly on two different sides of a debate, puzzle me about equally. In all cases, there is an assertion of a choice: that of choosing the school you want, and changing schools if that is thought to be beneficial or if you think your current one is inadequate in some ways. The possibility of that choice is deplored, celebrated or simply asserted – but it is taken for granted that this choice exists, is important and should be discussed alongside the personal and social consequences of the alternatives it entails.

But strangely, there is an alternative choice that is for me at least equally salient (in fact much more so) that seems completely neglected, for reasons I cannot quite grasp: instead of changing schools, change the school. Choose what you want of a school and change your school in that direction, making it adequate if it is not. Of course your child exists right now and changing the school will take a long time, so the tension doesn’t disappear magically just because the question is framed through the choice of changing the school rather than changing school (French determiners, with the contrast between changer l’école and changer d’école they allow, help formulate this more elegantly).

Yet, by redefining the question as a collective one, as it should be, while affirming the agency of the subject, I believe considering that choice is a much more productive way to frame the debate. It does, I believe, almost abolish the moral dilemma of the young parent as stated by Gina Schouten in the OP: do your best to make public schools around you adequate using all the activist and electoral tools you have. If you do that consistently (in particular, if you do that with a careful examination of what actually helps disadvantaged students flourish and where the actual opposition to these measures lie etc.), I don’t think your own particular schooling arrangements will weigh that heavily in any given moral calculation.

Wonder if Hagerman would classify this kind of thing as ‘being a good parent’ rather than ‘being a good citizen’?

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/sep/13/uk-parents-using-dubious-tactics-beat-school-admissions-criteria-buying-renting-second-homes

That’s where a Job Guarantee with a relatively high minimal wage could help a lot.
Then again, this already exists for the people who face these choices as choices. The people who could send their kid to the high-reputation school, who can safely assume that their kid is a benefit for a lower reputation school, if only as reputation enhancer.

Their kids are not going to struggle to get a minimum wage job. They might struggle to get a good/i> job, that is their parents’ fear. The kind of good job that a job guarantee is not going to guarantee.

Hooray, he fell asleep while I was nursing him …

My daughter developed early childhood caries, which we were assured was a consequence of falling asleep while nursing. I’d never heard of it before, and wished I had. So I share the knowledge.

As for the main topic: I think we tried to give her her own choices about schooling as much as we could, and I don’t regret it. (Admittedly, the way schools are funded here is different from the way they’re funded in America, but I’m not sure that affects the principle.)

Roger (2): I’m with Steve (8). You are way overachieving here!

My own kids went to excellent, integrated public schools in an American college town. But it’s not clear how much benefit the integration, the local progressive attitudes, or the various rounds of initiatives to close the ‘achievement gap’ have provided. This seems like a pretty good summary of the situation:

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/06/the-college-town-achievement-gap/526305/

Our experience was that by high-school, the black and Latino kids lead mostly separate lives from the white and Asian kids — they took different classes and even played different sports. What are you going to do — tell your kid to play football instead of soccer or lacrosse or not to take advanced college-prep classes because there are almost no minority students in them?

Given the persistent achievement gaps in school systems like ours, I’d have to say, sure, pick a diverse school system if you can, but focus on your own kid’s well-being (where you know you can have a major impact) and don’t expect integration to have any magical properties.

@24 “I took myself to be talking mainly about fairly secure middle class people, and I took Hagerman to be doing the same.”

If this is the target of the post aren’t we really talking about a pretty narrow subset of potential actions for most people? In general, most ‘secure middle class people’ are going to send their kids to the public school where they live – they might switch neighborhoods a bit to optimize, but if they live in the proverbial median neighborhood in their city, they aren’t likely to suddenly buy a house in an expensive neighborhood nor are they likely to sell down to a lower neighborhood either.

Likewise, more likely than not they aren’t going to be in a position to afford any sort of elite private school of privilege. They may consider some sort of faith based school or in some cases a special needs type school, but often those decisions are more motivated by the characteristics of those programs than something more classist.

I don’t deny people move house to get what they perceive to be “better” schools – but its usually something of a parallel shift. If their decisions are solely racially motivated – the problem isn’t whether they want what’s best for their kid, the problem is the racism and the school choice is simply a manifestation of that.

Maybe said better – if a person isn’t fundamentally racist or classist in the first place – any decision they are making on school choice is likely to be motivated primarily by what they see as “best” or “optimal” for that kid based on whatever factors they are keying on (socialization, intellect, athletic talent etc.). If they are really moving cause “this school is crummy and there are too many brown people” (or whatever) then I don’t think an argument of “think of the poor” is really going to reach them – their entrenched biases are already pretty established.

“If you don’t want your kid to be sleeping in your bed when he’s sixteen, you must put him down drowsy but awake!”

Problem is, babies go to sleep while being fed. That’s just how they like to handle business. So the drowsy but awake thing (which plagued me too) basically amounts to ‘you must wake your baby up so you can then try to get him/her to go to sleep’, which to the sleep-deprived parent sounds like madness.

@29 I can’t think of a middle-class family of any ethnicity who would willingly place their child in a school where disruptive students make it impossible for the teacher to do anything besides manage these children with difficulties. We went through this experience ourselves when we relocated (willingly) to a very mixed income/skill community. It only takes 3-4 young children from a class of 25 to 30 to significantly lower the chances of positive outcomes for other students.

The average African-American family has far, far fewer options and a much, much greater chance of being forced to place their children in schools where positive outcomes are very, very difficult to achieve.

I’ve long favored mandatory drug testing for parents because whatever we’re doing in lower-income public schools it’s generally not working. Hence, the support for charter schools among minorities. Think I’m wrong? Suggest to your partner that you remove your child from a successful school and move your child into one with a ‘more diverse’ eco-socio-ethnic mix. Try teaching even basic skills in a class where significant numbers of students are unable to communicate with each other, or the teacher. I know people who do, or rather try. It ain’t easy.

These problems these children face are real. Their parents do not worry their children falling prey to gangs, drugs, shootings, etc. on a daily basis – they’re fucking terrified, every day. And your view is that some of the people fleeing these schools do so on the basis of race/ethnicity?

Who exactly do you imagine wants to place their child in a failing school?

A lot of this stuff about the moral wrong of teaching in or sending your kids to private schools (which I agree with) needs to be updated now that UK higher education is itself a kind of extension of the private school system.

“If you don’t want your kid to be sleeping in your bed when he’s sixteen, you must put him down drowsy but awake!”

Why would anybody believe nonsense like that? If even half of standard parenting advice were true, it would be a mystery how the species even survived for so long.

Under the cloak of anonymity I have an awful, but relevant, admission. I went to a state school in the uk, which was in a very socially mixed area. My parents were both well educated, we had lots of books at home, and I also had some great teachers at school. I then went on to a very famous University, where many of my peers were from private schools. When I was at University I was a staunch advocate for the State system, mocking others for their insistence that they would have floundered in a state school. Now I live next door to the local state secondary – in an area which is, again, very socially heterogeneous- and I gulp at the prospect of my young kids going there. The reason is not that I think they wouldn’t be ok, or even that they wouldn’t reach their full potential, but more because, on the basis of what I hear, I worry that they would receive the bullying I received for being ‘clever’. For all I know, it’s the same at private schools, but I sense it isn’t. Part of me holds onto the idea that the bullying was outweighed by the advantages, whether to me or more broadly, but, still, as the choice gets closer, my nerve gets weaker. I’m sorry that this post isn’t theoretically richer or more politically correct, but this topic worries me precisely because there are affective issues which I don’t know how to think about. And those issues might not generalise! (Even from my childhood to my own kids’ experience). Still, I think that there is something missing when we reduce these issues to a kind of ‘maximise your own child’s options’ vs ‘promote social well-being’ issue without bearing in mind the experience of school. (This is not to stack the OP – just to add something).

Marc

Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine a program more likely to backfire than one that calls people racists for ordinary acts – like sending their children to a neighborhood school.

Nobody here advocated a program of calling people racists for sending their children to neighbourhood schools, so why did you fabricate that?

Ok argument as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough.

Anyone living in a wealthy country and who is anywhere near the average in terms of climate footprint prior to having a kid will, by having a kid, shoot far above the globally sustainable per capita climate footprint. By having a kid they virtually ensure that they, and their kid, will be causally complicit in very serious climate change harms against innocent others. Since climate change will predictably generate harmful disease, forced migration and death.

Given that context, and given the logic of Gina’s argument, it seems an extended conclusion is that first radically reducing the climate footprint of your lifestyle is a morally necessary condition for the moral permissibility of later having a child.

Or, if the kid is already here, now make that radical reduction even more strongly, to compensate for overshoot already done and to prevent overshoot going forward.

@S #39: single data point, and it was some decades ago, but I really wouldn’t assume that British private schools are free from bullying for being clever (or the wrong sort of clever) – and not just students but staff.

The charge of racism remains a powerful rhetorical cudgel and tool of discourse/thought policing among the emotionally and intellectually weak. What’s racist?

Everything others do that compels me to question my own beliefs.

I’ve mentioned Geraldine Ferraro before – the now forgotten first woman to be nominated for vice-president, bludgeoned into obscurity for daring to point out that a charismatic African-American man was bound to generate excitement among an electorate hungry for change.
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-ferraro13mar13-story.html

As for programs to brand dissent as racist, there’s this:

At one point, Ackerman suggested that fellow members of the listserv should fight the way the right is fueling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright story by choosing one of Obama’s conservative critics, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

At another point, Ackerman acknowledged that, while he didn’t like having to toe a partisan line…” What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a right winger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear.

And because center-left and center-right and independents are well aware that the term ‘racist’ is used as tool of discourse policing predominantly by entitled white ‘liberals’ and their hypocritical allies, nobody but the snowflake community and the invested much gives a fig whenever the now empty vessel is launched in their direction.

But that doesn’t mean white liberals aren’t still terrified of the charge. So many are easily cowed and quick to prostrate themselves and beg forgiveness, which amuses the rest of us no end. Profiles in courage and all that.

@S #39

While I understand the anxiety that any parent feels imagining their child being bullied it is my experience (having two children of my own and having worked in education for 30 years) that they are going to experience it regardless of where they attend school, and where they live — the basis upon which they experience it will be through the unique combination of their own traits and those of their peers. I believe that all you can really control is how you respond to the circumstances when they arise, with an eye to the development in your child some set of coping mechanisms — because they will likely continue to face similar challenges in adulthood, either in the workplace or in their social scene.

Be mindful also that your children will also participate in bullying of their own, and the challenges that will come in dealing with this aspect of their behaviour.

I hope this doesn’t come across as too pessimistic — just trying to encourage some planning for what I believe to be an inevitable part of parenting.

What dipper says about racial inequality in the UK is true, but choices effect class inequality. One of the ways kids effect each other is by the choices teachers make about where to work — having (maybe a few) more middle class kids in a school can increase the pool of teachers available/make it less likely that good teachers will leave.

I don’t have the stats to hand, but I am pretty sure that among boys there are, actually, small racial achievement gaps in the UK state system, with white boys underperforming other racial groups. (One of the mild irritants of working with liberal cosmopolitan Americans in educational research who are quick to accuse other scholars of US-centrism, is the way that many are so parochial about race).

Yes it was hyperbole (sorry). My main point was that from where I (and I would guess most Brits) stand McIntosh’s most blindingly obvious ‘privilege’ is having attended first expensive private schools and then Harvard before teaching at Brearley (non-Westerners might put American nationality in its place I guess). But as I understand she thinks of herself first and foremost as oppressed because she’s female and privileged because she is white. There’s even an interview with her that I’m not going to Google now where she lists a whole raft of other factors, none of which are class. That kind of discourse seems taylor-made for mystifying people about real mechanics of structural oppression, which imsho is what American academia and media always did anyway long before they became ‘woke’. Plus ça change…

“Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting with, for example, one’s place in the birth order, or your body type, or your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words, or your parents’ places of origin, or your parents’ relationship to education and to English, or what is projected onto your religious or ethnic background.“
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-origins-of-privilege

‘In her original 1988 essay, McIntosh listed forty-six of her own everyday advantages, such as “I can go shopping most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed”; “I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race”; and “If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.”’

”McIntosh was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in New Jersey, where she attended public schools in Ridgewood and Summit, and spent one year at Kent Place School, before attending George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania. After studying English at Radcliffe College and at University College, London, she became a teacher at Brearley, a girls’ school in New York City”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peggy_McIntosh

George School

Tuition & Fees For the 2018-2019 academic year:
Boarding Students — $59,750 Includes tuition, room and board, and some materials/lab fees.
Day Students — $39,975 Includes tuition, all meals, and some materials/lab fees.

http://www.georgeschool.org/admission/affording-george-school/tuition-fees/

Radcliffe College

The total 2018-2019 cost of attending Harvard College without financial aid is $46,340 for tuition and $67,580 for tuition, room, board, and fees combined.

https://www.harvard.edu/about-harvard/harvard-glance

Brearley

2018-2019 TUITION K-XII $49,680 Tuition includes lunch, books, supplies and class trips. By arrangement with Tuition Management Systems, tuition may be paid in ten equal monthly installments.

https://www.brearley.org/page/admission/tuition–financial-assistance

ccc@43,
If we are speaking of our contribution to climate change, or other negative social forces, it is good to keep in mind that our individual contributions are not constrained to be near the societal average, and that we have some control over their level. For instance as far as carbon goes, my family were early adopters of LED lighting, solar, and electric vehicles. We still directly consume some fossil fueled products, but are visibly well below the norm. Other effects have to do with financial shot in the arm that early adopters bring to developing technology, and to the extent we inspire others to copy some of our choices, like going solar, and trying electrical cars etc. We can also choose how we invest money.At least the interest I earn off of solar loans exceeds my residual utility bills. So a given family in an above average emitting country, can have a zero or negative footprint if they make it a big enough priority. The same could probably be true of education: send your kids to the best local school, but offer to do free tutoring to the less fortunate kids…

@ Mercurius Londiniensis – 54

” Even though he is now a successful TV producer himself, WM has yet to forgive his parents for sending him and his siblings to a rough comprehensive, where they were mercilessly bullied.”

… He is now a successful TV producer so it doesn’t seem to have done him lasting harm. Perhaps the experience of being mercilessly bullied means he is now capable of getting on with a wide range of people and not phased at having to cope with numerous suits and egos.

Would he now swap places with those who were bullying him?

I still don’t know what, in literal terms, the metaphorical cudgel represented

If you analyses oppression using typologies of gender and race than you get a 2×2 matrix with ‘white men’ in the ‘oppressor’ square and ‘black women’ in the oppressed. Put that together with a style of ‘activism’ that’s primarily about guilt-tripping people online and you got yourself a moral cudgel for beating up disadvantaged white men. (I’ve also personally seen it used against black people and women who don’t toe the party line on the grounds that ‘you don’t have to be a white man to be a white man’ but that’s another story.)

if you disagree, literally, with those statements, our positions are in conflict

We disagree, as I don’t find ‘privilege’ (in the American college student/amateur sociology sense) to be a useful way of thinking about class (or race or gender).

@59 This strikes me as a remarkably stupid, insensitive, and atypical comment.

What WM is saying, if you’re actually listening and interested, is that despite being a successful producer, he is nonetheless neither happy, nor content because he is haunted by lasting, hard-to-erase, memories of prolonged pain, loss, suffering, and betrayal.

Your response is: ‘But he has money, fame, and power, what’s the problem?’

Think it over, you can do better.

J-D@58:

Some discussions of privilege are badly distorted by entirely or almost entirely leaving out the factor of class.

As per Harry and engels, albeit a bit more succinctly: the problematic “cudgel” aspect is not that conversations about/accusations of/ontologies based on privilege frequently (passively) neglect to include class so much as how said conversations/accusations/ontologies frequently are used to (actively) exclude class from consideration or discussion.

I guess the only thing about the OP that gives me pause is the implied equation between being a good person and being a good citizen. That seems to me a little too quick. What we really need to instil is the sense of justice. Sometimes that implies good citizenship, but often it will be in tension with fulfilling the role of citizen in a particular state both because cosmopolitan duties can trump associative ones and because one can have a permission to pursue one’s ambitions in ways that conflict with the duties of citizenship by, for example, emigrating.

(I wasn’t claiming to have been personally victimised by it, if that’s why you were asking.)

(Also while I don’t wish to detain the Crooked Timber readership with the details of how I earn my screw I’m more than happy to confirm it isn’t by teaching at a $50K/yr Upper East Side prep school or leading corporate diversity symposia.)

Re engels The statement that “the concept of privilege” was “invented” in 1988 makes so little sense one seriously has to wonder.

So the charge is that a feminst who wrote about white and male privilege was herself privileged. Had McIntosh been a black poor orphan, would that change engels’ atttude? And more importantly, would it change the validity of her arguments?

Had McIntosh claimed for herself to be free of privilege, perhaps the charge would be worth considering. But even a cursory wikipedia reading proves him wrong:
Both papers rely on personal examples of unearned advantage that McIntosh says she experienced in her lifetime, especially from 1970 to 1988. McIntosh encourages individuals to reflect on and recognize their own unearned advantages and disadvantages as parts of immense and overlapping systems of power. …
“In her original 1988 essay, McIntosh listed forty-six of her own everyday advantages …”

Perhaps that advice would be of benefit even to engels himself.

Ah, Pimlico school. Not a bad school when he went there. I don’t know, though, the notable list includes 7 footballers and 1 notable nazi (the unlovely Patrick Harrington (no relation to the great character actor) who must have been a contemporary of Miller’s). The interview doesn’t say how long he was there. And there are many explanations for unhappiness and depression (If I were being flippant I’d suggest it was the architecture, but I would be being flippant, not serious, and don’t want to be taken the wrong way). To be fair he sounds like what he really resents is a neglectful father, and the article is making more of the schooling stuff than is warranted. Who knows what the paper’s agenda is?

Trader Joe:

I’m sorry. Choosing an education is an individual decision and in all cases I would choose whats best for the person for whom I am responsible. If that’s public, private, in-home or on the streets – that’s my call, to the best of my ability, based on what I know about my child (by I, I mean both parents but that’s harder to write). I don’t expect anyone else to do any different for their kid either. This is firmly in individual choice territory.

Those who wish to purposely send their kid to a worse school, by all means do so – that is firmly your choice.

In my experience, having had two children educated in the public system, this is framed the wrong way. The neoliberal-captured media and other parents were, when our kids were nearly high school age, firmly of the belief that private schools were where it’s at and that public secondary schools, especially the one in our area, were sinks of iniquity, drugs and squalor. Having visited and researched the school in our area, I found that its performance (in both STEM and the arts) was fairly high and rising. By the time my youngest got there it was becoming stellar. In that time there have been numerous media reports of publicly bad behaviour and drug use on the part of kids from the elite private schools. If I had my time again, I’d still send my kids to Local Public school, but aspirational snobbery and the scare stories from the tabloid media have a firm hold on the public mind.
So it’s not about sending your kids to a “worse” school necessarily, but maybe about letting them use local resources rather than (as happens here) pantomime religious belief to get the kids into a private school where it’s believed they will receive superior teaching and ethical standards (not borne out by reality), in order to demonstrate that you’ve Made the Effort wrt your kids’ education.

As Jerry Vinokurov says here often, as long as there is no decent floor no matter what (whatever your level of education, your economic options, your race…), parents will do whatever they can to ensure that their children don’t fall down, and in doing so perpetuate or often worsen the situation.

It’s nice to be remembered! Even nicer to be remembered positively!

Hopefully this will get published after my previous comment so everything makes sense in sequence, but yes, this here is part of the problem. If there’s no floor to how bad things can get, and if the only way to ensure that you don’t fall into the abyss is to climb the bodies of your rivals so you can snatch up one of the few available prizes (in the form of a steady income, a decent place to live, etc.), then you can certainly expect a lot of body-pyramids to spring up in short order. As real opportunities shrink away from people who didn’t check all the requisite status boxes, it makes perfect sense that the fight for status will become increasingly more vicious. This, again, is not a problem that can be solved by a few rich, white parents sending their kids to a poor, black school, but I suspect that most rich, white parents aren’t going to like the collective solutions to this problem any more than the individual ones.

It’s nice to be remembered! Even nicer to be remembered positively!

Jerry (if I may), half of the time I push Submit in a CT’s thread, I’d rather press the Summon Jerry Vinokurov button. For instance, I would have used it to produce this

“Actually addressing those issues would require major structural reforms in everything from how schools are funded to how non-white communities are policed, and I’m sad to say that not many white Americans, especially of the relatively affluent variety, have any interest in solving those problems. This belief in the transformative power of individual experience strikes me as unrealistically romantic in the best case, and downright toxic in the worst; it feels like a bad inheritance from our uniquely deranged form of Protestantism to insist on a personal spiritual transformation as a solution to what are clearly social ills […] This, again, is not a problem that can be solved by a few rich, white parents sending their kids to a poor, black school, but I suspect that most rich, white parents aren’t going to like the collective solutions to this problem any more than the individual ones.”

with which I agree completely. I would push back a bit about this though

Most of the [child development/sleep training/whatever book industry] is only good for exacerbating anxieties in new parents; within reason, whatever you do will work out fine.

I think your conclusion is correct provided the parent is fine with it. If you are happy with what you do, your children will turn out fine. But if somehow a parent finds himself ill-at-ease with his parenting practices, I think reading a couple of books (if that’s your thing) or discussing with other parents (it that’s it) can help.

addition to my comment to Omega Centauri @57:
I meant to say on average 0.5 child per lifetime couple (not per individual person).

By the way, Harry B’s 51

One of the mild irritants of working with liberal cosmopolitan Americans in educational research who are quick to accuse other scholars of US-centrism, is the way that many are so parochial about race

and the TA anecdote startled me quite a bit. I didn’t expect to read this on CT (and just to be clear, I’m happy to read it).

engels @61 I don’t find ‘privilege’ (in the American college student/amateur sociology sense) to be a useful way of thinking about class (or race or gender).

Agreed. Amusingly (but perhaps not surprisingly) I find it especially inadequate to discuss the American situation.

engels

Ah yes the time-honoured internet knockdown: ‘you’re talking about X but you should be talking about Y’.

No meaning is communicated to me by that comment, which I suppose is only a problem if you wanted to communicate with me.

Likening antiracism to a “cudgel” is an old rhetorical strategy of racists.

The discussion about where to send your kids to school displays some path dependence. (Skin in game proviso, anti-TMI version: I have a 9 year old in public school; I live in an area with few private schools, almost all of which are not options for me due to some combination of cost, class-related comfort, or religion; I was in fact compelled to choose a grade school by the rules in my town, rather than having one chosen for me.) Historically, and still among some demographics (upper middle class and wealthy dwellers in city centers), white parents have fled schools as they became racially (not economically) integrates. Traditionally, the expert consensus is something like “any school can be good for any child.” Given these points, it’s hard to see why anyone would choose a private school for other than bad reasons. Obviously, there are other arguments, and these two aren’t always true either (I think), but even if there are counterarguments to be made, I’m not the one to make them.

This just popped up on my Twitter feed (probably more constructive and less inflammatory than my comments)

…Although ‘intersectionality theory’ does not necessarily end up in affirming identity politics, they both share the tendency to focus on oppression and individual experience of it, rather than on what creates the condition for it. [2] We are currently witnessing a problematic intersection of state ideology and liberal leftist politics when it comes to race, class and gender – and ‘intersectionality’ will be a useless tool to question this. Capitalism needs divide-and-rule to maintain itself but even if it wanted to it couldn’t do away with the material basis of racism and sexism. The state has to manage a severe capitalist crisis, which does not allow them to make concessions, e.g. universal childcare, full employment etc., that would do away with the material basis for (black) working class women’s/peoples’ socially disadvantaged position (as prime carers or reserve army of labour). While biological differences between men and women have become less significant, capitalism would not and cannot (afford to) invest in services and technologies that would create an ‘equal playing field’, that would counteract women’s specific needs during pregnancy, after child birth, in certain forms of manual labour etc. So capitalism also cannot integrate the impoverished Black surplus population and is not able to develop the largely Black peripheral economies of the globe. Again, not mainly because racism is a good divide-and-rule tactic, but as a result of the capitalist mode of production and its contradictions. Being confronted with discontent of marginalised groups, the state tries to avert addressing the underlying systemic questions and prefer to talk about ‘changing attitudes’ and ‘transforming norms’. From demands for more women in management positions to more Black cops to more working class people in the BBC. Unfortunately larger parts of the left, often with the understandable humanist goal to support ‘oppressed groups’ in times of a general upswing in reactionary politics (Trump etc.), fail to challenge the state’s attempts to camouflage the deeper systemic crisis by focusing on ‘gender norms and performance’, ‘white privilege’, ‘power relations’ etc., instead of attacking the material reasons from a wider working class perspective. With this focus also comes a change in attitude, which prefers behavioural policing to the hope for collective and individual change in struggle – and thereby avoids the challenge of dealing with racist or sexist behaviour within the class as a collective problem that won’t be solved by merely denouncing it. …

https://libcom.org/blog/limits-intersectionality-angryworkers-book-review-striking-women-13092018

Trader Joe:

I may be wrong but I’d suspect there are many, many kids with various disabilities in public schools. Not outright blindness or deafness, but I know kids in my daighter’s school with significant hearing loss, ADHD, autism, and so on. There are designated slots in certain schools in the district for kids with Down Syndrome and other developmental disabilities, and severe autism. I’m sure there are some parents in the area who choose private schools for kids with similar levels of disability, and I’d think their reasoning is the same as for parents of kids without disabilities: they want to pay extra to get their kid resources the town can’t provide. The parents I know who’ve had issues with teachers not following IEPs have AFAIK not even considered private school instead. I am surprised, frankly, that most commenters here and elsewhere assume so readily that a kid with ADHD will be put in a private school, and can only assume we are living with very different assumptions.

Almost all kids with serious learning related disabilities are in public schools, because public schools in most States are required by law to make what is often very expensive provision (that only the very wealthy could afford out of their own pockets — and, for most wealthy people it is far cheaper to put their kid in a public school which knows it is under thread if an IDEA lawsuit than to pay for private provision). Of course, less wealthy parents are less likely to threaten lawsuits (litigation is the main form of enforcement of the law) so provision for their kids is usually less good if they are in districts without wealthy parents to provide the threat as it were.

Reading Tom’s comment, I might put it a different way: one argument for avoiding certain schools is “I want to pay extra to give my child resources not available at a different school.” Another is “I’m not picky about the resources my child receives, but I don’t want my child to associate with certain people.” Is one of these morally better than the other?

@41: Nobody here advocated a program of calling people racists for sending their children to neighbourhood schools, so why did you fabricate that?

Perhaps no one here did, but Erik Loomis over at LGM does it as a matter of course. Just a couple examples of many:

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/05/education-america-everything-equity

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/12/school-segregation-evil-racist-nation

bianca steele @95 I am surprised, frankly, that <most commenters here and elsewhere assume so readily that a kid with ADHD will be put in a private school, and can only assume we are living with very different assumptions.

Like the “collectively agreed-upon idea in our society that being a ‘good parent’ means…providing the best opportunities you can for your own child” example, I actually doubt that most commenters here and elsewhere believe that. I think that most people know from their own experience or from a basic sense of numeracy that in a country where the vast majority of children go to the local public school, many children with learning disabilities, severe dyslexia, ADHD, autism etc… are by logical necessity in the public system. (Personally, I believe that this is a net good by the way: one of the greatest benefit I think a school can impart to its pupils is a sense both of the diversity and of the commonality of human experience, and that is possible only if the children going to a given school are reflective of that diversity.)

So if it can sometimes appear that the opinion that a child with special educative needs will be in a private school is common or even near universal, I think that indicates less the popularity of that (on the face of it rather absurd) belief than the rhetorical efficience of certain assumptions about schools and education (“education is about maximizing opportunities”, “everything that the public system cannot do perfectly at the moment is the proper domain of the private system”…) which are too rarely challenged in my opinion.

In the end, it boils down once again to the same alternative. Suppose the local public school cannot adequately serve the educative needs of my child. What will I then do? Changer d’école ou changer l’école? I know where I stand in that respect.

Z

That makes sense. But by the same logic of numeracy, how can it be that so many people believe X type of school is almost certainly fine for everyone else’s kid but there’s a 50-50 chance it will be terrible for their own?

In one of those threads I expressed the opinion that people Loomis is addressing are concerned about personal morality, not utilitarianism. So they can be reached by guilt and extreme binary logic (doing this is racist, you can be not-racist by being against doing this), even when the result of everyone doing as they do would be catastrophic.

But I agree with engels to the extent that I think we’re talking in Rawslian terms because that’s where the discussion is, not because it’s likely to lead to anything helpful. (My memory of Harry mentioning Geuss is fuzzy but also aligns with engels’.)

Just BTW (wasn’t sure which post this was on, sorry for multiple posts), Harry’s 104 doesn’t seem to me new or specific to “identity” talk. I’m sure the TA learned the idiom from a white male leftist, and while I’m sure any teacher would have the same sympathy Harry does for their own students, I’m not convinced for most it would extend to consider the TA’s words unfair or actually bad. I’d hope they would but haven’t seen it myself.

Harry, I meant, @52 (engels refers to it as 51 somewhere, I don’t know where 104 came from, I was posting from my phone).

I think my neighbor both wasn’t fully aware of what special-ed services are like these days in public schools (greater unwillingness to segregate kids for one thing), and of what a private school without those services would say if her child was disruptive or missed lots of school and so on.

As for the schools themselves, I take the word for it of wealthy young people who say they were given a progressive education at Catholic schools. In affluent, quite liberal public school districts where the schools are excellent but feature many non-white and non-Christian students, that is not easy to credit. In middle- or lower-middle and working-class neighborhoods like where I grew up*, they’re explicitly defended in conservative and racist terms—no one from that background, at least around my age or older, speaks of the nuns as liberals. I personally find it hard to believe the desire for segregation of any kind is ever liberal or progressive.

* The parish school nearest me has a tuition or $7K/year, half that of most other private schools, though maybe not of the smaller Montessori’s. That’s twice what the parish closest to my childhood home currently charges. The selective convent-run “academy” not far from that has tuition in between the two. These are the schools one means in the places I’ve lived when one says “Catholic school.” These are the schools proposed vouchers would plausibly pay for.