white flight from city public schools

Me and my five siblings all went to Catholic schools, which, in Southside Chicago were not usually particularly academic. At my all girls h.s. I don't think the majority of girls wanted to go to college, for example. My folks set the expectation that all their kids would go to college but their Catholic side bogged us down in mediocre schools to prepare for college. Water over the dam. . .

My daughter graduated magna cum laude from an IVY.   I have read that most Harvard grades these day (my kid did not go to Harvard) get mostly A's so maybe graduating magna is not a big deal but, fuck that, I am very proud of her magna cum laude.  

 

When she started school, my divorced ex assumed I'd send her to private schools -- Catholic schools, as he and I had both gone to Catholic schools K-12. . .  but not me. Living in Minneapolis, which was known, back then at least, for its good public schools, I decided to send my daughter to public school. This was in the late eighties. I reasoned that if all the white families pulled their kids out of public schools, and many white families had already fled to suburbs but private schools allowed some whites to stay in the city and live in white bubbles. I decided I had a social responsibility to put my genius daughter (she was 'diagnosed' as gifted by her pediatrician when she was not yet two . . . and she is super smart) in public schools. Sure I took care to get her into a magnet school, which is what public education was doing back then, in the Midwest, to retain white kids. Magnet schools were better schools.All schools should be good and magnet schools seem to magnify educational injustice but one lives in the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be.

My daughter's school was also designated as an English as Second Language site so her school had lots of children of recent immigrants, and some of the kids were immigrants. I was thrilled. My daughter was going to school with a worldwide array of cultures!!!  Over sixty langauges were the first language of the students in that school. This thrilled me. And she seemed to love the fascinating kids she got to know.

and my daughter was a star in first grade. She was bored with classes but her first grade teacher was also smart; she appointed my daughter as tutor to a couple Hmong girls to help them read. This gave Katie, my kid, incentive. Hmongs, as not all may know, were a culture with no reading and writing when they fled Cambodia because of war. Hmongs landed in MN at very high rates because MN, at least back then, had such great social services.

In the second grade, my Katie was placed in the gifted kids program at her school. The gifted kid program, and I wish I were making this up, was comprised of one hour a week in the library with other gifted kids. Hanging out. The boys took over the, in those days, very few computers. My star, a budding feminist I guess, borrowed my micro-tape-record, which I had used when I did some criminal defense legal work: the cops wouldn't let lawyers copy the cop files so lawyers would take their micro-tape-records and dictate the entire contents of the police files so they could use them to prep for trial. My seven year old first lodged protests, complaining that only the gifted boys got to use the computers. The teacher in charge denied her accusation. So my star tape recorded the next one hour of enrichment in the library. I did not tell her that I did not think her tape would reveal much. Nowadays, a girl in her position could video, eh? Apparently her staking out evidence yielded results. AFter her tape recording, girls got half of the time on the computers: 30 minutes of computer enrichment a week. Unsupervised computer enrichment. The tech divide had begun: why did the boys know how to play on those computers but the girls had no idea what to do on a compouter? And why did the paid teacher assigned to gifted enrichment only twiddle her thumbs in the library for that gifted hour? The entirety of programs for bored, gifted kids.

Also in the second grade, Katie cried about how much she missed tutoring those Hmong girls. Cried in school, not to me. So she was allowed to spend part of each school day tutoring her Hmong friends again.  Her second grade teacher had done something right and her first grade teacher let Katie return to tutor new kids that year.  Katie was so proud to be the only tutor at her age!!

She could miss class a lot because she was/is so smart that she knew everything 'taught' in classes.  I was the same way. Each new year in grade school, I would read the entire content of all our textbooks for the year within the first week and then bide my time. The nuns tried to get my folks to enroll me in a, gasp, public school for gifted kids, but my parents demurred:  my one older brother, who managd to be an asshole at a very young age, like age 3 and up, my parents decided, would make our whole family life hell if they let me go to that gifted school. I think they were right but I wondered then and I wonder now: how did my two ineffectual, damaged parents decided to NEVER discipline Chuck the fuck (an endearment I only attached to him in my forties when my much younger sister and I compared notes: Chuck was a fuck to all the kids. Silly me, I thought all my four brothers had at least doted on the baby sister . . but, nope, our three other brothers hid for cover, leaving us girls vulnerable to Chuck's nonstop bullying and frequent violence. Where were our parents? Where indeed:|?*

Two pivotal events lead me to take my kid out of public school and put he rin Waldorf (the best decision I ever made): Tony Kennedy began to enlist his cousin to hold down my daughter so Tony, also age 7, could dry hump my daughter. She complained to the playground teacher supervisors who did nothing. She told me and I met with the principal to insist that my little girl had a right to be protected from being assaulted. The principal, a black woman as it happens, with a PhD, shrugged and asked me what I thought she could do. I said 'I don't know, maybe have the teachers paid to supervise recess actually supervise recess? My kid is screaming for help when Tony jumps on her. Help her?" Then the principal said "For your information, I have scheduled several home visits with Tony's parents and when I show up, no one answers the door. There is nothing I could do."

As I stood up to leave, I said "You could provide a safe envirionment for my kid and all the kids without talking to Tony's parents and I think I could sue you for failing to protect my child from this daily assault."

By the time I got to my car, I had decided my liberal guilt experiment of sending my great white hope to the local public school was over.

And, as an added note: in the first grade, her standardized test scores were al in the high nineties. In the second grade, her standardized test scores were all in the seventies and low eighties: her skills were atrophying in the magnet school, allegedly one of the best schools in Mineapolis.

*Chuck ended up living at home with our divorced father and brother Tom, then age 10, 11, 12, 13. Chuck hit Tom most days, telling him a voice in his closet told him he had to hit Tomy. When I found out about this abuse, I asked my dad to stop it. He shrugged broadly, waiving his hands helplessly and asked "what can I do? Chuck is  a man, I can't stop him." I said "You can tell Chuck he can live here anymore if he keeps hitting Tom." Dad said "I can't do that." He could have done that. And this is how my parents had always responded to Chuck's violence.  And no one needs to try and tell me Chuck was just a bully in general: Chuck knew he could not beat up the children of other adults and he knew he could get away with hurting us, his siblings, our parents lesser children. Only one of us got to be the first born penis.