How School Choice Forms Our Children
Considering how a diverse school community impacts who our kids are becoming, and why GreatSchools rankings should not be our only criteria in choosing an elementary school
If asked what the purpose of education is, what would you say? I grew up understanding it as academic achievement. Stellar test scores and grades. There’s nothing wrong with this being one of the goals of education. But might there be more?
If you ask me now what I believe the purpose of education is, my answer is far more nuanced. It is influenced by my personal experiences through school, as well as the initially difficult choice my husband and I made for our children to attend a “5 out of 10” neighborhood elementary school. I have come to believe that who we encounter in the course of our educational journey is as important as what we’re learning. Learning how to learn matters. Developing curiosity and loving to learn matter. Character development and relationships matter. A lot.
As we enter the time of year where parents make school choice decisions, I am re-posting an article written six years ago. It details our wrestle around where to place our firstborn for Kindergarten, and learnings about what really goes into GreatSchools ratings. Our first kid is now in middle school, and our second is finishing her last year at that same elementary. I still see everything I wrote in the article, and have many more reflections since. If anything, our hypothesis is only stronger that there may be great learning opportunities in a neighborhood school that reach far beyond academics, gained from diverse experiences and relationships that help form our kids to be lifelong learners and intentional contributors to this world.
Our neighborhood elementary school is the kind (on paper) that most of our peers would probably write off. We almost did.
The population of the school reflects the demographics of our diverse city, thanks to an eclectic mix of stable single-family homes and multi-family housing in the neighborhood. It was recently designated a Title 1 school, meaning at least 40% of students come from low-income families. Right in the heart of Silicon Valley. It is not a perfect school, but the mediocre-looking “5 out of 10” rating it receives on GreatSchools does not come close to representing the caring, intentional teachers and administration who have invested in our kids over the last eight years. It doesn’t give color to the meaningful friendships they have made, friendships that have extended to us as parents, and I’m fairly confident will be lifelong. Relationships with people who have played (and continue to play) a significant part in who they are becoming.
Being in class with students from many different ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds comes with challenges, but it’s given our kids a lot of opportunities to learn to relate with others in important, formative ways. To share a story — one of our kids was put in a rough headlock early on, severely enough that we were called in to talk about it with the teacher, and then the principal at the time. While originally quite upset, we learned that the headlock kid comes from a broken family, and would spend his weekends unsupervised, wrestling with cousins. He was practicing on Monday what he had learned over the weekend, and didn’t have the home environment to learn the boundaries for it. (Ironically, our guess is a headlock was his way of trying to initiate relationship). It changed our perspective… and our kid’s as well. We had some really important talks about broken families and what that means for this classmate. They didn’t become best friends, or even really friends, but had many redeeming interactions over the years. Significantly, our kid knew to tell me about these positive moments when they happened.
When you’ve run around on the playground with someone since you were five, you understand that you’re not as different as the world might lead you to think. You don’t excuse bad actions, but you also (hopefully) have more empathy, and understand that underneath the action is a human. That redemption is possible. It’s actually the gospel… that we’re all broken in our own ways, and in need of true hope.
An additional aspect to consider is the impact of school choice on the mental health of our children. It is touched on in the original article below, but recent public discourse around technology’s impact on the next generation is worth paying attention to. Not only do we have an objectively Anxious Generation, I’ve seen the argument made many different ways that kids need community to thrive, and the loss of free play in neighborhoods (e.g. on playgrounds after school and on weekends), has more far-reaching negative societal impacts than we might think.
In his recent work, Malcolm Gladwell also argues there is objective risk to a lack of diversity in schools. That sequestering our children into monoculture environments is not good for society, nor for the kids. He cites sociologist Anna Mueller’s study on “Poplar Grove,” a high-achieving, high-income community where a series of youth suicide clusters shattered the idyllic town’s facade. The pressure to succeed in that environment had pent up and exploded out sideways. “Parents moved to that community because they thought they were leaving…social problems behind, and instead they created an even bigger one.” (Knowledge at Wharton)
Every family and child is different. My hope is not to prescribe a singular path, but to encourage like-minded friends to keep an open curiosity around what elementary school is for, and how school choice might be about more than test scores. Character formation, leadership development, empathy, loving to learn - these are all factors too, just to name a few.
If you’re making a housing decision, please don’t write off certain neighborhoods because of GreatSchools ratings or what you see online. Visit the school grounds on weekends or after school, talk to families in the neighborhood about what it’s like. If you pray, ask God for direction and a sense of place. If your kid is nearing school age, open-mindedly consider the school in your neighborhood, even if it doesn’t seem that great on paper. Visit often to play and make friends. Relationships can make any place beautiful. It’s worth the wrestle.
How GreatSchools Rankings Encourage Neighborhood Segregation
My family’s struggle to measure school quality by more than just a number
By: Cindy Lo Collister [Originally published in The Bold Italic on May 29, 2019]
The day we committed to enrolling our firstborn in a “5 out of 10” public elementary school in California, I walked probably a hundred laps around its grounds. Thinking and praying, with my eyes peering through the metal fence at the kids playing in the yard, I looked for some sign that we had made the right decision, consumed by the battle my tiger-mom instincts were waging with my idealistic side.
I weighed the warm tour we had with the thoughtful principal against the mediocre test scores we saw online. I feared that the decision my husband and I made for me to leave full-time corporate work and start a faith-based nonprofit together in Silicon Valley was somehow going to disadvantage and doom our kids to mediocrity. Would they thrive if we could not afford a home in a “10 out of 10” school’s neighborhood?
I am an American-born child of Taiwanese immigrants, and my amazing, hardworking, practical parents sacrificed everything they could to get my brother and me into the “best” schools. Without the internet or native social connections, they made school decisions strictly on the basis of numbers — the ones with the best test scores. And on paper, their method worked — we both went to prestigious universities, had access to great jobs and gained the advantage of deep social networks.
But we also grew up as the token Asian minority in mostly white public schools in upstate New York in the ’90s (the experience of which could fill a totally different article).
As I’ve faced the school decision for my own family in the Bay Area — where school ratings vary wildly — I’ve wrestled with questions like, What actually defines a “great school” in this multicultural, quickly changing world? How much of a child’s future is dependent on the school, and how much of it has to do with what we pass on to them as parents? And to what end do those of us with advantages silo ourselves off to replicate them for our offspring alone — or are there choices we can make that will not only benefit our kids but also naturally help others alongside them? Is there more to life than this? (For real, though.)
As our firstborn approached kindergarten age, we visited several public elementary schools in the area we wanted to live in and resolutely but nervously settled into a home that is within walking distance from the neighborhood school we ultimately landed in.
It didn’t take long for us to grow a deep appreciation for our “5 out of 10” school, which has a beautifully diverse school population — an actual cross-section of the city we live in, both ethnically and socioeconomically.
I couldn’t believe it when we saw our son’s class for the first time: Japanese, Bosnian, Israeli, Mexican, African American, British, Chinese, Indian, Caucasian, Hapa children…all becoming friends. When they studied Martin Luther King Jr., my son came home from school and shared over dinner that MLK had a dream, that kids of all skin colors would drink from the same water fountain…and then in the same breath he wondered, Why wouldn’t they?
Naturally, this diversity also brings challenges. More than one-third of the school qualifies for reduced-price lunch, and about half speak another language at home. Every kindergarten teacher has one group of kids who went to preschool and know how to read, and another group that must first learn to speak English. There is also diversity in the ESL population — some parents require translators at parent-teacher conferences; others speak English fluently.
As for befriending fellow parents, some I naturally click with, and others I have to work hard to have conversations and relationships with because we just don’t have a ton in common — language or otherwise. But that in and of itself has been both a challenging and rewarding experience. I’ve experienced very little of the competitive banter I hear from other parents in our area — comparisons about activities or after-school achievements.
I fell in love with my son’s kindergarten class from volunteering on field trips — this sweet, not entitled, incredibly different group of kids. Bringing in regular, not-so-special white cheddar popcorn for a birthday felt so exciting, it was like I’d brought a carnival. When we went to Happy Hollow Park & Zoo on a field trip, some of the kids had never been there, while others had been half a dozen times. Watching classmates excitedly show one another the animals and rides for the first time was magical.
Yet it is this unique diversity that is the underlying reason why GreatSchools has decided our school is not as worthy of a good rating. Let me explain.
GreatSchools is a national organization that aims to provide parents with information about schools and education. They have a proprietary school-ranking algorithm that weighs test scores alongside demographic and socioeconomic data to determine a single-number rating for each school. Widely used real estate engines such as Redfin and Zillow pull these GreatSchools numbers into their search results, which has given GreatSchools incredible influence and clout in housing decisions. I love how this fellow parent writes that any “good” school ratings of seven and above are colored green, like “go,” but any under a six are colored yellow or dark orange, warning you to “stop” and “stay away.”
When I dug into why GreatSchools dropped my son’s school score from a “7 out of 10” to a “5 out of 10” under its new rating system, I learned it was because of the new “equity rating,” which now counts for 35 percent of the overall score. Both equity and academic-progress ratings were implemented by GreatSchools in 2017 in an attempt to consider socioeconomic factors, such as ethnicity and household income, alongside test scores in a school’s total ranking.
While this algorithm sounds like a great idea on paper, the reality ends up backfiring on schools like ours. Different segments within our incredibly diverse school perform significantly differently on testing, and therefore GreatSchools has deemed the school to be faring very poorly in helping all children succeed. To some degree, I understand the concept — you want a school that lifts all children up. But putting that into one number ignores contextual nuances and punishes many truly diverse schools, resulting in big implications with regard to school choice.
I sent GreatSchools an email letting them know I didn’t think their new rating system was a fair representation of the heart and quality of our neighborhood school — the only one in our district that actually looks like our entire city, not just a segregated area of it.
Wouldn’t progress be a much better metric of the school’s performance in helping kids from different backgrounds along?
Sure, they said, and progress does count for 8 percent of the overall score, but California doesn’t collect student-growth data. OK, that’s fair — then please tell me, how do kids of similar demographics fare at our neighboring “9 out of 10” schools in the same district, who have the same curriculum and the same superintendent, and whose teachers all have the same training? Apparently, the neighboring school doesn’t have enough of the “lower-scoring demographic” for the data to be relevant. Basically, the data is “suppressed when the numbers are exceedingly small and could lead to identifying those students.”
So let me get this straight. You’re telling me that when there isn’t a significant enough number of a traditionally disadvantaged population, the equity ranking basically doesn’t even count?
So if a school is homogenous in terms of traditionally advantaged populations, it will have a great “equity rating” because the token diversity isn’t statistically significant. But if the school is actually diverse, with different demographics represented in substantial proportions, the school will get dinged by the equity rating, and its overall rating will drop. How does that make any sense?
On top of that, the impact of this logic will only be to discourage parents with more resources from even considering a school that has more traditionally disadvantaged kids. It encourages segregation and dooms the cycle to perpetuate.
I went to see our school principal and confessed that I had accidentally picked a fight with GreatSchools on the school’s behalf. He laughed and said he doesn’t normally give GreatSchools much thought, regarding discussion focused on test scores as generally distracting from what actually defines a good school. But he also acknowledged that he’s getting a lot more questions about GreatSchools rankings, since that is what everyone is looking at these days with regard to real estate, and it might need to be dealt with.
He shared more data with me that day that further helped me understand how even less relevant the numbers are for our school. GreatSchools test scores are based on standardized exams taken by third-to-fifth-graders. Our school happens to have far more K-to-second-graders than third-to-fifth-graders, and as is the case with much of Silicon Valley, where affordable housing is in crisis, relatively transient. Therefore the GreatSchools data represents maybe one-third of the school’s students, a portion of whom didn’t even attend K through second grade at our school.
I attempted different routes for communication to escalate the concern to GreatSchools, convinced that — at least in our area — their methodology was actually having a reverse impact on their stated mission to give every child “access to a school that serves them well and gives them the high-quality education they deserve.”
Eventually, to get me off their case, they said they would “share my concerns with the product team,” and the conversation trailed off. That was over a year ago. I kind of gave up, other than having the occasional conversation with a friend. Until I saw this article in my newsfeed on how school ratings are encouraging further neighborhood segregation.
A new study by Duke professor Sharique Hasan and Anuj Kumar of the University of Florida looks at economic and demographic shifts following the emergence of GreatSchools in 1998. The findings are stark. The aim of GreatSchools is to “help parents — especially low-income parents—make informed decisions on where to enroll their children. But the authors find that the information has had the unintended effect of making highly rated schools an exclusive destination for comparatively advantaged families.” Hasan and Kumar write that “across a range of specifications, we find that access to school performance ratings appeared to accelerate, rather than reduce, economic divergence across ZIP codes in the US.”
Basically, GreatSchools is causing the advantaged to form silos in increasing numbers—to further become what Matthew Stewart calls in his Atlantic article “the new American aristocracy.” And this can’t ultimately be good for even the most advantaged kids.
In many ways, parenting feels like a never-ending series of decisions that we hope stem from our most deeply held values. If we believe that character, perseverance and the ability to befriend all kinds of people in this world are valuable and increasingly important skills, could it be possible that real-world diversity in their school (even if it comes with lower overall test scores) is actually a really good option for our kids, advantaged or not?
I have a good friend with a son the same age as my own, and we share candidly with one another on this topic. After a year of transitional kindergarten at their neighborhood public school, her in-laws paid for their gifted son to go to a prestigious Silicon Valley private school for kindergarten. He struggled emotionally that year—it was really hard. On a coffee date in the midst of it, she asked questions about what my son was experiencing in kindergarten, curious to hear about how the teacher was managing the preschool/no-preschool gap.
Every time my son finished his work first, his teacher told him to help two friends with their work before he could go play. His teacher’s strategy to overcome the gap was to encourage peer support — she valued empathy highly and encouraged character development. It’s no magic bullet, but we did see positive growth in our son and other kids throughout the year, many of whom I got a chance to personally know. My friend reflected thoughtfully that these character concepts were the exact qualities the private school was trying to teach, but without the environment in which to develop them naturally. (For many reasons, they ended up moving their son back to their neighborhood public school the next year, skipping him ahead a grade to manage academic boredom, and he is thriving — a hilarious, empathetic kid.)
Are there aspects of our neighborhood school that are lacking? Of course. I wish there were more targeted teaching in math, for example. The homework seems too easy. We don’t have much of a creative-arts program or as many extracurricular options as our neighboring schools do (fairly easy to solve if more resourced parents join us, by the way). In no way do I feel like an expert or someone who has this all figured out — it can still be a struggle. But the more I talk to other parents, the more I realize that there is no perfect school. My kids’ pediatrician, who has since become a dear friend, shares how she can basically predict where a patient goes to school when they come in with stress and anxiety. Would I rather my kid love school and learning than be stressed out of his mind in elementary school? Yes. Definitely.
Everyone is trying to figure out what a good education looks like in an economy in which information is at our fingertips and innovation is the premium. Where character and emotional intelligence are arguably far more important than how many grade levels we are ahead in our math skills. If the priorities are shifting, does this mean that how we see a “great school” might need to change too?
So if your child is in preschool and you’re looking for the right public school for your family, please don’t rule out schools on the basis of the GreatSchools number. Have an open mind. Look at the reviews. Look at the demographics. Look at the test scores with a grain of salt, and zoom in on the more detailed view by demographics and socioeconomic status. Email the principal, and ask for a tour. If you have social connections in the area, ask around for friends of friends whose kids go to the schools. Ask what kind of parent community they have. Take your child to play at the school playground on weekends, and you might just meet a friend. We did.
If you’re like me and you disagree with how GreatSchools rates your neighborhood school, you can write a positive review. You can encourage all your friends to write reviews. Talk to your school’s administration about it so they know you care. And if you’re feeling up for it, let GreatSchools know you disagree with their rating logic too.
Most of us would agree in theory that every child has potential and deserves a chance, but when it comes to involving our own child, it can get tough to jump in. There’s always a reason to believe our child is the exception. I think it’s healthy to believe our children are unique — because they are! It is our great privilege as parents to know them, speak life into them and fight for them.
Can they thrive and succeed even if we don’t put them in a private elementary school or a “highly ranked” public one (according to GreatSchools)? In this day and age, could there be great learning opportunities at school that are beyond academics, gained from diverse experiences and relationships that may just help them make a great difference in this world?
My hypothesis is yes.
There are many moments that could bring me to tears - one of the most meaningful is simply watching the girls play freely in a park.
It always takes me back to my childhood—digging in the dirt with neighborhood friends, not having to worry about dinner time, homework, or piano practice. Those were the best days. :)
We face this same issue in Singapore. Here, there is that same temptation (or rather, anxious push) to send your kids to as many enrichment classes/tutoring as possible to make sure "they can keep up" and "not lose their self-confidence". (It's hardly ever pitched as "getting ahead" anymore!) Other than brand-name schools, we also have brand-name tutoring centers, some of which are multi-million dollar businesses.
I don't think these classes are all bad; in fact I think some of them do a good job of encouraging curiosity and helping the children grow in different ways. But invariably many of the children in these classes tend to be from the same socio-economic class as well...
We live in a gentrified neighborhood, where there is a diverse mix of middle-upper income and poorer families, as well as many poor elderly living alone in their flats. There is great opportunity for community service and learning about diversity. But yet it is not something that many (us included) naturally gravitate to.