I had a conversation with a congregational search committee who suggested that, were I to move my family to their location, the generational outcomes for my children would be different. That I would be giving my kids a particular gift by placing them within the benefits structure of a specific zip code, and correspondingly, by removing these children from a different location.* I don’t think I’m who they were looking for and I told them so, but I was, to be frank, incensed and I have been thinking about why.
Schools were the only factor explicitly mentioned.
Note, however, that an assertion of “better for your kids, and for their future” is not merely a statement about the quality of a particular set of schools, but one about the inequality that exists between these schools and the ones that my children might otherwise attend.** I have, as we know, been researching the history of what we have built here in this country, and thus it’s perhaps not quite fair, and yet also not unreasonable, that under the socially-sanctioned invitation to consider my children, what I actually heard was something deeper. Something along the lines of, We made this system, we game this system, and if you play your cards right, we’ll let your kids into the club.*** And I was angry—I am angry still, if I’m honest— not because what was suggested regarding differential outcomes is false, but because it probably isn’t.
I’ve been trying to keep my anger back-of-house on this issue and in this essay. Anger, for starters, is not a basis on which class conversation, or any conversation, is allowed to be held in an upper or upper-middle class framework. I also worry about hurting the feelings of people I care about, and I wonder how resilient relationship can be in a power framework that makes equivalent rich people’s feelings and poor people’s survival. Both things are then equivalently dismissed as trivial.
This is a lie on three counts- feelings and survival belong, of course, to materially different orders of magnitude. And yet, feelings do matter. Relationships matter; our ties to others are not, for humans, fully separable from survival. And survival, of course, merits much more of our attention, as does surviving well, and this includes (and where class is concerned, it perhaps includes particularly) the question of other people’s survival.
A zip code matters a lot, and not, as we are inclined to think, in ways tied only to private ownership. A zip code matters tremendously for accessing key pieces of public benefit. Neighborhood delivers access to specific grocery stores, and with them, to a greater or lesser offering of things like high-quality produce. Your neighborhood matters for how you will get places, and whether the transportation you have access to will be public and affordable, whether it will be convenient and safe. Zip codes affect health in ways ranging from number, kind, and availability of medical providers to what you might be exposed to when you breathe or drink your tap water. And, of course, zip codes act as an on/off switch for access to what we consider to be quality schooling.
In considering this second piece about segregating school boundaries, things got more complicated. First, I realized that there is an inherent conflict here, and that I am complicit in telling this story in ways that lean toward pitfalls on both sides. Is what’s being offered in New Bedford, schooling wise, substandard? How do we know this? Are we sure? If we don’t know it, why do we think or suspect it? And who and what do these beliefs and attitudes serve?
These are tough questions to answer. Many “school quality rankings” websites, along with the federal government through No Child Left Behind, reduce the analysis essentially to annual standardized test scores in reading and math. With a bit of effort, we could also consider graduation rates, SAT scores, per-pupil spending. With a lot of work and some help from data visualization tools like Raj Chetty’s Atlas of Opportunity, we could consider college attendance, college graduation, employment rates, mean salaries 5 and 10 years out of school.
And if we were interested in taking a still more holistic look, we could dream up better questions and collect or fight for some additional data. What do students who attend this school dream of? Who encourages them in those dreams, and how? How are families supported as part of the school community? Do school policies take into account what we know about teen bodies and teen brains? When problems arise among students, or between a student and a teacher, or in the relationship a student has with her work, who helps, and how? How is the air students breathe? How fresh and appealing is the food they are invited to eat? Is there consistent access to clean water (and if you think this last question is unnecessary ask families in my town how the last month has gone for them. Or, you could ask families in Flint, Michigan)?
How do we know if a school is substandard? And if, on the other hand, New Bedford schools are actually fine and functioning, if they actually have all the tools, talent, and resources needed to succeed, why do we gatekeep the boundaries of surrounding school districts so aggressively? And why do we assert that we need to?
Things I discovered, diving into the Opportunity Atlas: New Bedford itself is not a monolith- far from it. The city has wealthy areas, poor areas, and areas in between, and outcomes across a variety of metrics are similarly distributed. Meanwhile, the neighboring town of Fairhaven, ever content to rest on its laurels (which seem primarily to be having a collection of hard to maintain buildings and being, since 1812, Not-New-Bedford), is getting gamed, hard, along its border with Mattapoisett. This border is not just a town line, but a county one, and dollars and resources are both concentrated in and flowing toward Plymouth county to the exclusion of its Bristol county neighbors. We should attend to differential outcomes here, as well. Zip codes matter.
And this second piece on schooling is also complicated because its impacts, for me, are very, very personal. And that’s not only fraught, it’s exhausting. Because frankly, you already know. I can show you data- I did pull it- about where the United States ranks in terms of countries, and there are many, that guarantee free universal public education. I can share statistics that demonstrate what generational privilege means in terms of access to things like not only a PhD, but a potentially viable path to a tenure-track job in the professoriate, and the theorizing that some scholars are doing about whose path is blocked, often cut off before it even starts, by the reproduction of generational privilege in other sectors. I can tell you what EdBuild discovered, which is that our public schools matter tremendously as a potential building block of equity, democracy, and social change, and that the quality differentials that seem intractable are in fact very fixable. If we wanted to.
If we wanted to. If we so chose.
But we do not choose, and for that reason I’m not sure that more statistics is the needed conversational move. We are a people deeply invested in setting up nested networks of privilege, and in gatekeeping those, and it’s not so much that the gates are baked into our social structures as that the commitments to having them are.
And that has costs, which includes the denial of opportunity to most kids, and also means the denial of continuity of community for the lucky few. Zip codes matter. And we’ve been talking about zip codes serving as basket of plenty or as places of impoverishment, but there is something else that we seem, somehow, to forget amid these conversations: the first and last thing a zip code means is home.
And so, though the details are all different, there is no kid who comes from the sticks, no kid who “made it,” no kid who was pushed to leave who couldn’t understand this essay from Claire Vaye Watkins. She is the patron saint of survivors of hardscrabble Western American childhoods who find ourselves somehow positioned on the east coast and provisionally ensconced in its power structures.
And I understand, though I’m sure that I project also, the life choices that Watkins made next. Hear me, or I will burn this country club to the ground. We don’t do this, actually, no one does this; we just dream of it, and then we torch the parts of our own lives that led us here.
Zip codes matter. And behind those numbers are places. Families. Communities. Kids who are either taken for collateral damage, or who are raised with the urgent last word of place made disposable: leave. Kids for whom there is either no way out or no way back; what you have to become to integrate anywhere else simply changes you too much.
And I’ll tell you also: I recently got a different kind of call, the one that hurts to imagine, the one I alternately fantasized about and feared. The invitation to come home.
As it turns out, “these schools would be better for your kids” isn’t the only offer going.
Honestly, I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t have to.
I don’t think I’m who you’re looking for, I told them.
And it was, it is, it has become, the truth.
j
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*It feels ethically important to note in this case that, this conversation and its inferences aside, it’s not actually my kids who are being meaningfully disadvantaged or forcibly shut out. Opting to be curious, I looked at what it would take in this current housing market to intentionally land my own children within the bounds of this school district and whatever advantages it confers. My conclusion is that we could move there by choice and without the cloak-and-dagger of any particular congregational search; we would have to hold some assets differently, and our kids would be among the lower end of the economic spectrum of the town, but it’s doable. It’s only my own common sense, or arguably, my lack thereof, that prevents this sort of decision on our part. I don’t know whether acknowledging this is winning the argument or losing it, but people with resources in fact have choices and are constantly encouraged to leverage them in the direction of self-segregation, and this is both driver and product of the kind of inequality across town lines we’re discussing here.
**My children, your children, some people’s children
***It’s interesting how this framework sounds unkind and thus unrealistic, and also is precisely the game, and has been, at least according to the New Yorker, forever. Perhaps the unkind thing is discussing it?