The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve - Hardcover

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Peg Tyre is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Trouble with Boys. She was awarded the prestigious Spencer Research Fellowship at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism where she began work on this book. Her writing about education has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, Family Circle, and iVillage.com. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Introduction

My parents used to say to me, "Tom, finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving." . . . I tell my daughters, "Finish your homework. People in China and India are starving for your jobs."
—Thomas L. Friedman

Why Parents Need Information on Schools. Stat!

There was a time when getting a decent education for your kids was pretty straightforward. You enrolled them in the local public school or you signed them up at the parochial or private academy their cousins attended. When you picked them up from school, you looked at the colorful finger paintings hanging in the hallways and noted what a warm and nurturing place it was. Once a year, you went to Parent Night in order to meet their teacher. Three times a year, you signed a report card. Somewhere along the line you might have made cupcakes for a bake sale, gone along on a class trip, or written a check for an annual fund-raiser. Your kids moved smoothly from elementary school to middle school to high school. Twelve years after you enrolled them in kindergarten, you sat on a folding metal chair beaming as they collected their high school diploma.

That era is gone. Long gone. These days, for better or worse, parents are required to do more—in fact, a whole lot more—in order to secure the best possible education for their child. And all over the country, parents are finding themselves in the uncomfortable position of knowing very little about education while making critical judgments about their children's schooling.

In many communities, parents, faced with an array of school choices, are growing frustrated and demoralized. After attending their fourth elementary-school Open House, Phoebe and Braken Hale reached the boiling point. Unfortunately, their story is all too common. Like most young parents, this Austin, Texas, couple care deeply about the quality of the education that their son, Rune, four, will get. But unlike most aspects of child rearing, where best practices are handed down from parents or discussed on message boards, over wine at the book club, or in countless books and magazine articles, they found that when it comes to schooling, good information is hard to find. The more Phoebe and Braken tried to learn about the school options for Rune, the less they felt they knew. Phoebe was partial to private schools, but the tuition was sky-high and the Web sites for the private schools in her area posted very little information about tests scores or their curriculum. Some new charter schools were generating a good buzz in the neighborhood but Phoebe, now an aesthetician, had taught in one and seen firsthand just how hard creating a successful learning culture can be.

Putting their trust in the process, Phoebe and Braken dutifully signed up and attended Open Houses for a charter school, a public school, a specialty public school, and a private school. All the schools looked decent. But on the school tours, the Hales and the other parents—even highly educated professional couples—seemed intimidated. No one, it seemed, wanted to ask hard questions: Why do the children get only ten minutes of recess? Why does the school favor one reading program over another? How do they handle kids who have behavioral issues? Phoebe was growing more anxious as the fall approached. She turned to a popular school-comparison Web site to see how her local public school stacked up. The standardized test scores seemed above average—about in line with the other schools in her area. The parent comments were neutral and guarded. Touring that school, she met the principal and received a list of skills upcoming kindergartners were expected to know before the first day. Resigned, the Hales opted to send Rune there. But as fall grew closer, Phoebe grew increasingly unsettled. She prides herself on making careful decisions about her family—and especially about the life of her child. "There just wasn't a lot of information about the academic program they were offering or what it would mean for my son," she said. "I lie awake at night wondering if I've done all I can do. After all, he only gets one chance at this."

There are other factors that have turned what may have once been routine decisions into high-stakes choices. Right now in this country, parents with school-age kids are the best-educated group in history. Many of us have personally benefited from increased levels of higher education, and even if we haven't, we understand the lasting value it confers. What is evident to almost everyone is that the manufacturing sector of the economy, once a font of solid, steady employment to workers lacking a college education, is rapidly vanishing. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for those who don't do well in school. In the 1970s, according to a report compiled by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, nearly three-quarters of workers considered to be middle-class had not gone beyond high school. By 2010, that figure had dropped below 40 percent and has continued to shrink. Not only do highly educated people make more money than less educated ones, but the income gap between those who obtain a high school degree and those who get a college degree is growing larger every year. The Great Recession hammered that lesson home. Following the economic collapse of 2008, hundreds of thousands of people found themselves, abruptly, without a job. But not everyone suffered equally. In the second half of 2010, as the nation slowly emerged from the doldrums, the National Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the jobless rate for college graduates under the age of twenty-five was 8 percent. For high school graduates under age twenty-five who did not enroll in college, the jobless rate was a whopping 24.5 percent. These days, parents understand that finding or improving schools so that their children can be successful is the only sure ticket to anchoring them in the middle class.

Many of these same parents have also grown less trusting of educational professionals. In middle-class communities, that's partially a result of our increased levels of education. Back in our grandparents' day, the principal of our local school might well be one of the most educated individuals in the entire community, along with the town doctor, the local attorney, and the judge. The principal's word was sacrosanct. Today, parents who attend Curriculum Night in a suburban town may have as many advanced degrees hanging on the walls of their home office as the principal and superintendent who are addressing the crowd.

The growing fissure between parents and schools is also partially a result of the so-called accountability movement, which has tarnished our warm feelings about the superiority of the American education system. Since the Department of Education was founded in 1979, the federal government has been keeping close tabs on students' achievement levels. In the last twenty years, a unique combination of social justice types (concerned about the low achievement of poor kids) and fiscal conservatives (fretting about wasted tax dollars) have come together to force federal, state, and local governments, school districts, and schools into keeping closer tabs on how much kids are learning and how much it costs. In the last ten years, all that data—and comparative data from around the world—has coalesced into a sobering portrait. While some schools do a remarkable job and many more are adequate, a great number of kids—about a fifth in middle-class communities and up to half in poor ones—are not getting the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in life. And as Thomas L. Friedman has pointed out, our children will compete for jobs in a global economy.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, spending for public schools has risen from $5,639 per...