The Shifting School Equation
There wasn’t room to discuss it yesterday, but we suspect the public/private school issue is on a number of people’s minds. Over the weekend, The Times ran an article about the number of people who bought their apartments in recent years with the assumption that they would send their kids to private school. Now that…
There wasn’t room to discuss it yesterday, but we suspect the public/private school issue is on a number of people’s minds. Over the weekend, The Times ran an article about the number of people who bought their apartments in recent years with the assumption that they would send their kids to private school. Now that the economic downturn has made that a more difficult proposition, they are left to confront the limitations of their own school district. In some cases, parents are even considering renting a cheap apartment within a good school district just to get access—after all, it would be cheaper than the $30,000+ tuition in Manhattan. (It’s more like $25,000 here in Brooklyn.) Question for the renters and those in the market to buy in Brooklyn: Has the school issue shifted your real estate plans since the downturn began?
The Sudden Charm of Public School [NY Times]
Photo by Steve and Sara
P-D, I pm’ed you on Brooklynian.
Lechacal, first and formost, I echo everyone else’s well wishes for your wife and family. I wish her an easy delivery, and a healthy chacalette.
Brooklyn Chicken, I don’t have kids. But I come from a family of educators, and I’ve been a teacher myself, albeit college aged kids. As Rob said, too, I pay taxes, and I live here, so education is important to me, nonetheless. I also live in neighborhoods where schools are underperforming, but also underfunded, and not high on anyone’s priority list. I am perfectly aware that fixing any school is a difficult task, and I agree that the right principal is crucial to success,
However, I stand by my statements. If we write certain schools in certain neighborhoods, with certain populations off as “bad” or hopeless, then we condemn 99% of those kids to permanent entry level jobs, at best,if they can get those, large families on public assistance, and further generations of the underclass who have no hope of anything, other than what they are given, or can take. This is unacceptable to me, although it happens here, in other cities and states, and all over, it remains unacceptable, and needs to change.
I know this is the conundrum of American education, and can’t be solved on a blog, but I feel that wherever possible, parents, teachers and administration need to work together, pool resources, put in time and energy, and make local schools work. For most people, there really aren’t any other alternatives.
Childless people, like all members of a community and taxpayers everywhere, have a perfect right to comment on and be involved with public education. I never denied it, and furthermore I support it.
What I am sick of is the braying that parents send their children to a bad local school to “improve” it. Now, if YOU did that, you have a right to talk about it. Let’s hear from all the parents who subjected their children to 5+ years of crappy schooling and feel happy about it! But mostly the people who advocate for this path do NOT have children. And, if you did have children, you wouldn’t send your child to the closest crappy school you could find so you could “improve” it. Because, like most sensible people who have children, you would seek out decent alternatives.
Fortunately, in NYC there ARE decent alternatives, and their number has been growing yearly. And I do believe that these decent alternatives demonstrates to the crappy holdouts that there is another way — that there MUST be another way.
Rob, I appreciate your iconoclastic sense of humor, but crotchfruit is a really unkind term. I can’t imagine a lot of children read this blog, but, to borrow a phrase, children are people too. The least you can do is refrain from using hateful and disrespectful language about them.
This is a fantastic discussion, and very helpful! Wish I had something to add, but my son is just turning 2 next week and so I haven’t any experience with any schools yet.
I have to say that just finding out info and trying to figure out which schools are zoned for which areas is in itself a very confusing and daunting task! The DoE website is not really the most user friendly, and the statistics about individual schools are very confusing. Maybe it’s just me.
I’m taking lots of notes which will come in very handy in a couple of years! We are definitely taking school district into account for where we move, along with price and size of the apartment. Depending on where the rental market is at, it will remain to be seen if we will stay in our current neighborhood, move further out for more space, or even move to Manhattan if prices decline. It’s a wait and see game here.
Best wishes to Mrs. Lechacal!
Thanks wasder and haz! For now I’m just timing contractions and enjoying a day off of work (and bumming around brownstoner). I get to see the slope in the middle of a regular workday. Maybe Mrs. Jackal and I can walk around the slope with a camera and see if we can get any good pics for Mr. B.
My heroes have always been English teachers, gemini10. What a great story. That’s some legacy.
beautiful story, gemini10. two of the women I admire most in life were and are schoolteachers. One was MM’s mother- I still miss her. The second still teaches today in the public school system. If everyone were like her NYC would have the best public school system in the world.
Well said, bxgrl.
My mom was a NYC public school teacher for 35 years starting in the South Bronx in the 70’s and then Queens for the rest of her years. She taught the worst grades of all (6-8th grade)
My mom spent a lot of her time,energy and money towards her classes.
A few years ago(10), I am starting my new job here and the workmen comes to my office to put up my name on my door. He says, “are you XX”?
I say yes. We engage in small talk. He says – “you know, I had a teacher Ms. XX, man she was my favorite teacher, she was great”. I said, oh, yeah whereabouts? He said JHS 10 in Astoria Queens. I froze – I said what years he said early 80’s. I said that was my mother. I started to tear up b/c it was one of those life moments where it was so obvious my mom touched his life that 25 years later he felt the need to bring up a favorite teacher to a complete stranger.
Point is – it’s not just about the parents, but so many many teachers work tirelessly and with so much love and care for these kids.
I beleive teachers are at the crux of all this – I mean kick ass teachers. Yes you need more involved parents – but many of today’s kids whether they are poor/rich, black/white don’t have super involved parents. And like other posters have said the actual administrations of these schools and districts spend most of their time lobbying for their own personal progress within the DOE.