I never went to public schools. In the Post WWiI baby boom, Catholic parents mostly sent their kids to Catholic schools. When my now 35 year old daughter was ready for school in Minneapolis, which had pretty good schooils and some great magnets, I decided to enroll her in public school. By that time, altho Minneapolis had a very small black population (small Asian pop too . . ), there were few whites in the schools. White families either did the white flight thing and move to upscale suburbs or sent kids to private. I decided if all whites did that, the future would not be good for anyone.
My daughter enrolled in what was touted as one of the absolute best public schools in a school system with mostly good schools PLUS her school was designated as ESL (english as a second language) and there were 67 first languages amoungst the kids in her school. I was so pleased that my white child would be immersed in such diversity.
Her standardized test scores her first year were high nineties. Also, when she was less than two, her pediatrician 'diagnosed' her as extremely gifted and told me I had a higher responsibility to a child so intelligent, that I should find gifted schools for her. I knew as that doc spoke that I would not go the gifted route. I got a strong intuitive hit that gifted schools would teach to my daughter's left brain and ignore her right, and ignore her heart/emotions.
Her standardized test scores in her second year plummeted to some high seventies and low eighties. She was having a lot of fun but her intellectual skills seemed to be atrophying. She was so bored in school that she was allowed to return to her first grade teacher to tutor some Hmong girls. Many Hmong landed in MN post the Vietnam war. MN had high level of social services and attracted lots of immigrant refugees. (also lots of Somalis!). The Hmong had no written language when they came to MN. My daughter loved tutoring a few Hmong kids and it kept her from being too bored.
Then the school, seeing that her IQ test scores were about two inches above the top of the chart for IQ scores and she was enrolled in their 'gifted' program, which amounted to one hour -- just one hour -- a week in the library to use computers, a new thing at the time. Only boys got to use the computers got they just took them over. My little dumpling borrowed my miniature tape recorder, which I used in my legal practice when I did a bit of crimina defense. The police would not let lawyers copy files so we'd go read them and dictate them in their entirety for our files to prep for hearings/trials. First Katie told the 'gifted' teacher that it was unfair that boys got all the time on computers and the teacher denied it but my little gifted sleuth tape recorded proof. Presto. Girls got half the time on the computers. But the only thing going on on those computers was playing games. This was around 1987-88 before there were many eduational uses on computers and that 'gifted teacher' didn't know diddly about the computers at her disposal.
My daughter returned for a third year in that public school but I was growing skeptical of my decision to send her there. Then in the third grade, a little boy named Tony who somewhat obviously was not well loved or parents. His hair was always nappy; his hair often had bits in it as if no one ever combed it or cleaned him. And his clothes were so shabby. LIttle Tony looked to me like he was shellshocked, or had just put his finger in an eectric socket. I went on some field trips and one was on a frigid day and poor Tony had no coat, not a sweater. So I was disinclined to get Tony in trouble when he began to have his cousin hold my then eight year old on the ground while Tony would dry hump her. I felt a lot of empathy for that Tony, imagining he was replicating behavior he had seen, behavior a child that young (7 or 8) should not see but my kid was hurt and afraid. There were teachers who supposedly supervised recess but no one ever responded to my kid's cries for help, not even after I tipped the admin to what was happening. So I met with the principle and she shrugged, rolled her eyes, flopped her hands back and forth and said "What do you think I can do?" and I said "You can have the recess teachers keep Tony off my kid" and she said "I have made several appointments with Tony's parents at the home but when I go there, no one answers." Again with the shrugs, eye rolls, hands flipped to show her exasperation. Still very much in a lawyer mentality at the time, I said "Well, have you considered your legal liability if I were to sue the school for failing to protect my daughter after you have been put on notice that she is being assaulted in front of your staff, your negligent staff?" And that is when I decided to enroll my child in Waldorf, which is what I had wanted to do when she started school but I was trying to be a good liberal white person AND I wanted my kid to take diversity for granted. Diversity in Minneapolis in the eighties was not common.
After Waldorf, she went to a fancy prep school on a free ride. Everyone wanted my daughter. She got academic rides to start college after only 2 years of h.s., then academic scholarship to an Ivy to finish her degree plus the first college would have kept her through her BA on that free ride if she had wanted to stay.
I'll never know what would have happened if I had kept her in that public system. She did get accepted into South High, into both their IB program and she was automatically enrolled in a program that allowed her to take free courses at the U. of MN. instead of h.s. classes. But she wanted that prep school. Turned out she was into fashion, status, appearances. She did not get this from me and I nearly refused to let her go to that Episcopal prep school.
I think, but this is self interest, that I gave a lot of thought to how to educate my daughter. And I did have her in public school for those three years, watching her standardized testing results go down each year, seeing that the school was incompetent about providing a safe environment.
I never resented that little boy Tony. A part of me longed to adopt him, or take him under our wing or something.
In the end, I decided I had to make a decision for what was best for my kid, that sacrificing her to public schooling was not in her best interests and she only had me to count on.
Today she works in the Midwest, not Minneapolis, as an affordable housing developer. The housing crisis exists where she works but it is not as bad and there is some state funding in the states her company operates in.Although 'affordable housing' sounds good, I think she works for rich investors who are politically connected and buy up public housing under the story begun with George W that public housing could not afford maintenance but billionaire developers could buy public housing, rehab it and . . and what? It's not really the good work it sounds like. Public housing holds a unique place in this culture and it is almost all gone. The city where I live now sold off all its public housing to a billionaire company just like the kind my kid works for. Or did. I am not clear her new employer even does the token 'affordable housing' thing.
One of my proudest parenting moments: when she was about 15, she told me to expect to have a black son in law because she had always found black people more attractive. Another proud parent moment: as soon as she got to college at age 16 and was rejected by a boy she later had a torrid affair with, she had two affairs with two girls and nattered on to me about them without missing a beat, just as she had nattered on about boys. She may have been hoping to rattle me but being gay was just not something that bothered me. I have a gay brother, her favorite uncle out of my four bros and my best friend as she grew up was a woman who refers to herself as a bulldyke (and her wife was around but not my bestie). Those lesbians were more our family than our blood kin hundreds of miles away in Chicago.
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