I’ve been trying to get this post out for a month and finally have decided that I’ll break it up into mini-posts in order to publish anything at all. Yes, I finished my thesis and packed my house, but my mom was here to help with the kids during that time. Now that thesis is done, mom is back in California, and it’s just me and kids and house-selling. Mostly the kids part is what takes up my time and energy. But they’re so cute! Here’s a pic of me and baby napping on an air mattress during a trip to my brothers’ house.
We went on a house hunting trip to Charlotte, NC, where we’re moving at the end of the summer. When my spouse was in high school there, Charlotte public schools were still integrated. But in 2001, mandatory busing was ruled down, and now Charlotte schools are again segregated neighborhood schools (because housing is segregated/there are segregated neighborhoods): here’s the article summing this up. As we looked at houses, we also looked at what schools they were zoned into, and the makeup of those schools. I was amazed looking at greatschools.com how very close to 100% black and 100% white schools there are. Public schooling is really important to us (we both went to public schools, and ideologically we believe in them), but when we consider school zones when choosing a house, are we being racist? By which I mean, are we perpetuating structural inequalities based on race? I think so!
We read the NYT Magazine article a few years ago about choosing a school in a segregated city, and the following quote is from a follow-up NPR interview:
“It is important to understand that the inequality we see, school segregation, is both structural, it is systemic, but it’s also upheld by individual choices,” she says. “As long as individual parents continue to make choices that only benefit their own children … we’re not going to see a change.”
There’s a new, controversial book out called Dream Hoarders, which has as a thesis that the top 20% of Americans by income “hoard” resources etc. for their children and hence hurt the American Dream of upward mobility for anyone. They also made a cute little game explaining it, here. And here’s an excerpt from the book if you want more.
An excerpt from the excerpt:
There is clear danger of a vicious cycle developing here. As inequality between the upper middle class and the rest grows, parents will become more determined to ensure their children stay near the top. We will work hard to put a “glass floor” under them, to prevent them from falling down the chutes. Inequality and immobility thus become self-reinforcing.
Downward mobility is not a wildly popular idea, to say the least. But it is a stubborn mathematical fact that, at any given time, the top fifth of the income distribution can accommodate only 20 percent of the population. Relative intergenerational mobility is necessarily a zero-sum game. For one person to move up the ladder, somebody else must move down. Sometimes that will have to be one of our own children. Otherwise the glass floor protecting affluent kids from falling acts also as a glass ceiling, blocking upward mobility for those born on a lower rung of the ladder. The problem we face is not just class separation, but class perpetuation.
So so far we have two different but very related topics that are affected by my individual choice of where to buy a house and send my kids to school: perpetuating class inequality, and perpetuating racial segregation. When it comes down to it, of course we try to choose the “best” fit for our kids, but we need to really explore and come to terms with what we mean by “best.” Do we mean best test scores? Because those correlate with family income. Do we mean best teachers? How do we put a metric on teachers? How do we put a metric on schools at all?
In this series I’ll write posts about how we address the two topics (sneak peak: we will do so by trying to mitigate our effects as gentrifiers in the neighborhoods we choose). And I’ll post pictures of my kids!
Baking and Math 
It’s very impressive that you are thinking about these things. There are no easy answers. Of course there will always (statistically) be a top 20% and I can’t imagine any parent wishing their child would fall out of it just to allow someone else to achieve entry. The solution, to me, is to lessen the great disparity between those levels of income. We’ve all seen the stats on the growing gulf between the salaries of CEOs and workers. We are creating a disillusioned and frustrated middle class because the values of working hard and being responsible are undermined by a system that rewards the elites just because they have achieved power and can create the laws and systems that benefit themselves. I admire your commitment to public schools but in an area as racially divided as you describe, finding a progressive, diverse, and inclusive private school might be the better option for your kids.
Thanks for the comment, Jeanne. I should’ve been more clear and said that there exist 100% black/white schools, but there are also more integrated schools too. I think Dream Hoarders is trying to shift the blame of inequality from the 1%/CEOs to the middle managers/20%, maybe because we’re all so disillusioned about what we can do about the growing inequality, and so the idea that we can do *anything*, even as simple as sending our kids to a not as “good” public school, appeals to those of us who are tired of politics but want some kind of change