School

February 1, 2016

To: Josie & Romy

Mark Zuckerberg begat a baby girl, Max, on December 1st, 2015. In the public announcement, he also donated about $45 billion to charity. I unfortunately can’t bestow $45 billion to the two of you or the public, but I will donate what every New York parent is rich in: a general neuroticism surrounding the school system. [1]

As I write this, your mother and I are in the midst of applying to kindergarten for Josie. We’ve broken this into four different categories: private, public, gifted & talented, and charter.

Private:

• Saint Ann’s
• Brooklyn Friends

Public:

• Brooklyn New School
• Children’s School
• PS 133 (Spanish, French, general ed, in that order)
• PS 261 (our zoned school)

G&T:

• PS 38
• PS 32
• PS 230

Charter:

• Community Roots

So let’s get through the easy ones. Your Aunt Allison teaches at Community Roots, and your mother, who once volunteered there as the Worm Lady, loves the school. But it’s not in our district, and so the chances of either of you getting in by lotto is zero.

PS 38, 32, and 230 are G&T schools. Josie took the test a few weekends ago, and I asked her if she had fun and wanted to go back another weekend. She said yes, so I suppose that’s a good sign. These schools are pretty decent. 230 is already a highly sought after school, and 38 and 32 are catching up. But as in all G&T, there’s an uneasy ethnic / socioeconomic divide. It’s easy to tell when you walk into a PS 38 classroom if it’s G&T. I have not yet seen 230, but I’ve heard the integration is much better there.

We are not fans of our zoned school, PS 261. While it has a very distinctive progressive core and administration, it’s plagued with problems, both external and self-imposed. It’s the only school which I toured that openly talks about its budget problems, of which one outcome is that there is an occasional science class, and it’s taught in Arabic. Learning science once a week in Arabic is a sure way to not learn any science nor Arabic. Hearing 261’s principal talk about money makes me glad I don’t run a public school. It must be one of the most challenging and grueling jobs around.

As for what I mean by “self-imposed” – the administration’s attitude toward parent questions, as well as their very strong social ideology, turned us off on the school. It’s really not for everyone. That said, I’m sure that it would be a fine place for both of you, but we’re still hoping for a different experience.

PS 133 is an “up and coming” school (which is code for gentrifying), but it does have two strong immersive language programs. I’m divided on this. On the one hand, knowing multiple languages is pretty neat, on the other hand, possibly billions of people around the world know multiple languages, so it’s in actuality not really that unusual.

I believe, though, that there are two things that have the most bearing on the success of the school:

1. The involvement of the parents, which usually translates into a strong PTA, but could also mean how bad the parents care about the school.
2. The (meritocratic) selectivity of the admissions process.

The good news is that #1 is something a school can cultivate, and PS 133 seems to be doing that quite well. The bad news is that an emphasis on #2 makes it easy to bias towards families with socioeconomic advantages. I’m reminded of the recent groundbreaking study that found kids admitted to Ivy League schools but who attended state schools do just as well in life (as measured by income, I believe) as kids who actually went. I am a (possibly weak) example of this: I was admitted to Cornell but went to Berkeley. What I’m trying to get at is the schools themselves might have little effect, but rather they’re simply experts at picking out good students. This makes sense – universities gain reputation by having top notch researchers, who are not necessarily good teachers, but who succeed in attracting the best talent.

Children’s School is an interesting one. It is a complete Integrated Co-Teaching school, meaning children with learning disabilities and general education students are mixed into the same classrooms, for every classroom. Some schools have one class per grade that is an ICT class, but all of Children’s School is like that, which makes it truly a part of their identity. They have a deep institutional knowledge of how to teach kids like this, and their belief is that the kids with the “disadvantages” don’t usually have all around “disadvantages.” They can thrive quite well and can often times surpass the gen-ed kids in their academic abilities. When I toured, I met a 5th grade girl who was quite possibly the most socially impressive 5th grader I have ever met. None of the other schools I toured had children who were quite as thoughtful, well spoken, and mature as her. This is why Children’s School is at the top of my list.

Finally, Brooklyn New School rounds out the public options. BNS is a chaotic, arts, and curiosity driven environment. Your mother loves it. When I toured, there were kids just roaming the hallways, artwork everywhere. I find it a bit too unstructured, but still the school does well by every measure, has a strong parent community, a distinctive culture, and very dedicated / fanatical teachers. These are good signs. Though I like Children’s School a bit more, we placed this school at the top of our public school list.

Both of these schools I would say rank high on the “parents give a damn” scale.

Unfortunately, your chances of getting into either Children’s School or BNS are near zero since they are essentially random lotto drawn from the entire district. Ah, life in the public school system.

As for private schools, I still have a weird hangup about them, as I think a lot of people who grew up in the public school system do. However, Saint Ann’s and Brooklyn Friends are both distinctive in that they don’t just prescribe a method of teaching and what children should know, but they embrace an idea of how children should be. Ditto BNS and Children’s School to the extent they can as public schools beholden to the Common Core. I wrote so much in a letter to Saint Ann’s:

My wife and I both went through pretty intensive academic careers. She has a PhD. I’m the least educated in my family — my father has a PhD, my brother a PhD, and my mom a masters. I spent my childhood surrounded by university professors. The ethnic culture I grew up in strongly values academic rigor, but not necessarily academic joyfulness. I lucked out in that my public high school valued both rigor and joy. In touring public, private, and charter schools for Josie, I’ve found some that focus on rigor, some on joy, but none really do rigor and joy well except Saint Ann’s. The freewheeling intellectualism and independence of Saint Ann’s student body is an experience that we’d love to provide for our children.

When I was a teenager, I read a story about Joseph Campbell that has never left me. At Sarah Lawrence, he apparently had the habit of assigning half a dozen books to read per week to his students. At one lecture, one of his students stood up and confronted him about the work load, pointing out that everybody had other courses to deal with as well. Campbell laughed and said “I’m surprised you even tried to read these books. You have the rest of your life to do that.” Saint Ann’s seems to embody that ethos more than any other school I’ve seen.

As for Brooklyn Friends, we really appreciate the Quaker philosophy and temperament. The high school is also an International Baccalaureate school like mine, which again prescribes how students should be, not just what students should know. The IB program was a formative experience for me, more difficult than Berkeley in some ways, and I would be thrilled if the two of you had the same opportunity.

Saint Ann’s is our favorite between the two private schools, but both are great.

It feels weird to be picking a school for the next 13 years, but this is what happens in NYC and this is why parents are neurotic. And if we don’t opt for private, then we’re looking at going through this process two more times, as well as insane overcrowding and budget problems where we live. Some of the biggest and best schools near us (PS 58) have started rejecting in-zone children because they don’t have space, and developers are somehow able to get by building higher and higher without helping alleviate pressure on the schools. This is the problem with residential real estate in NYC: there is no alignment between developers and the long term interests of residents. The developers get money when a unit sells, but the residents deal with lack of schools long past the point the builders are out of the picture. [2]

We’re fortunate that we have the ability to send you to a place for essentially a boutique education. [3] I think if I were able to look at your career outcomes for each of these options, they would look largely the same. But what your mother and I are hoping to get out of school is something more than just a good job. I find it rare for adults to truly want to continue learning, and truly know how to continue learning. Of course everybody believes they keep learning, but everybody also believes they are right and just, and we know there are plenty of people who are not. Our task is to ensure you will forever make forward progress.

Baba

[1]	Neuroses are non-rival goods.

[2]	I wonder what it would look like if a developer received a portion tax revenue from apartments they built rather than from the sale. This would incentivize them to build things that have long lasting value.

[3]	It’ll honestly be a financial stretch, but we’ve made the decision that we value experiences over things. I think people would agree, but few take it to the logical conclusion: better to live with less but do more.