Going Public

A couple of weeks ago we took Simon up to the Henry Art Gallery. It had been a while since we last visited this marvelous place -- plus we'd gotten word through the museology grapevine that there'd be some intriguing goings-on in the galleries that weekend involving string, conversation, and intimate apparel.

Before we even got inside the museum we encountered the first "experiment in participatory design": a couple of museology students camped out in front of a clothesline, holding out a basket full of cut-out paper undergarments. "Air Your Dirty Laundry!" they entreated us. By which they meant: think of a secret you've never shared with anyone, write it on a paper bra or sock, and pin it up on the line for everyone to see. The three of us stood there for a while,  mentally sorting through our internal laundry piles in search of something suitable for public consumption.

"You know," we finally concluded, "we're going to have to think about this. Can we hit you on our way out?"

"Sure!" said the museologists, looking only slightly crestfallen. "Take your time!"

So we walked into the museum and made our way down to the Stroum Gallery, where we encountered the latest incarnation of an ever-evolving show called Vortexhibition Polyphonica, along with  two more participatory design experiments.

"Alphabet Soup with Xavier" consisted of a chair, two sheet-metal word balloons on posts, a basket of magnetic letters, and a silver mannequin leaning casually against the wall. Visitors were invited to spell out the next phrase in an ongoing conversation, which was documented and uploaded to Flickr: can you spot us?

For "Stringing Connections," the students had created a detailed tabletop map of the gallery, complete with mini versions of all the art. They asked us to connect any two works of art with a length of yarn on the map, then label the string with a paper tag explaining the connection we saw between the two pieces. The map was criss-crossed with dozens of yarn connections already. Simon added a green line between the Xavier installation and a beeswax sculpture in the shape of a victrola trumpet ("Candle," by Christian Marclay). He labeled the connection "Silent Sound." The museologists beamed.

There were also several "Dirty Laundry" stations scattered around the gallery -- the folks out front were just the advance guard, it turned out. We were still plumbing the depths of our psyches for secrets we'd be willing to reveal, and pondering how exactly to word them. It's easy enough to confess almost anything if you're vague about it: looking at the secrets posted by previous visitors, we noted several along the lines of "It was me." But surely if you got a little more specific, the cathartic effects of the exercise would be greater? Certainly it would make more interesting reading for those who came after you. In the end I contributed two secrets to the collection: one as vague as possible, the other painfully detailed. (They were both pretty cathartic, to be honest.)

As we left the museum, on our way to hot dogs and the Oregon-UW game on the big screen at Schultzy's, I stopped at the entrance to scrawl one last confession on a paper sock and pin it to the clothesline. This one wasn't exactly a secret, but it was something I've been reluctant to admit, even to myself: After nine years of unwavering commitment to the public schools, we are considering sending our daughter to private school in order to avoid Rainier Beach High.

Sigh.

The way high school assignments work in Seattle, for those of you not steeped in SPS arcana, is this: each incoming 9th grader is automatically assigned to a neighborhood school in March, based on the family’s home address. Parents can then submit a request to transfer their child to one of three “option” schools -- Center School, Cleveland, and Nova -- if they feel their assigned school is not, as they say, "a good fit." You can put all three down, if you like, in order of preference. You can even request another neighborhood school -- if there’s room, they’ll put you there. Assignment to these other schools is determined by lottery. In April (or possibly May) you find out if your child got into one of them; if not, she stays at her neighborhood school.

Readers of the Mead Street Times will be aware that the district recently moved the line separating Franklin High School's territory from that of Rainier Beach, and that our house now lies fifteen feet on the Rainier Beach side. Back in January, when our default neighborhood school was Franklin, we toured it and decided we could probably psyche ourselves up to be somewhat optimistic about sending Josie there, if the other options don’t work out.

Rainier Beach, however, feels like a whole nother ball of wax. There just hasn't been much good news coming out of that school lately -- in 2009 only 6% of the 10th graders there passed the state tests in math, reading, and science. In 2008, the school had a 37% on-time graduation rate, and only 13% of those kids went on to a four-year college. This January, Rainier Beach qualified for one of those federal "turn-around" grants that require the school to replace its principal and half its staff, among other drastic measures. I suppose that’s a sign things might get better, but it’s not exactly what you want to hear about the school your kid is assigned to.

Most of these grim statistics may be attributable to the student population: 65% of the kids at Rainier Beach qualify for free or reduced lunches, and 91% are kids of color. This does not reflect the makeup of the neighborhood, which is extremely diverse, racially and economically. One thing I keep hearing, as I talk to various people about Josie's high school choices, is the idea that “if everyone in the Rainier Beach neighborhood actually sent their kids there, the school would be a whole lot better.”

I'm sure this is technically true, given what we know about the strong correlation between economic class and performance on standardized tests: if the neighborhood's middle-class and wealthy kids showed up at RBHS en masse, test scores would go up, and more kids would graduate on time and ready for college -- simply because more of them would walk in the door with that expectation, statistically speaking. It's possible there would be a beneficial effect for the poor kids too: fewer kids with intense needs disrupting their learning, more parents like me advocating for honors classes, more PTA fundraising for a better physics lab, etc.

But all of that is highly dependent on the en masse phenomenon, which I'm not seeing on the horizon any time soon, alas. Our daughter is a powerfully marvelous force in the world, of course -- but nobody is claiming that if we deposited her at the front door of Rainier Beach High School in September, her presence would, in and of itself, magically improve the school.

Now I know that even without a critical mass of middle-class kids at Rainier Beach with her, Josie would learn a ton of important stuff about the multi-cultural, economically diverse world she'll be living in as an adult -- how to work with people whose lives, cultures, needs, and expectations are quite different from your own, though their hopes and dreams may be similar. Josie has learned a great many such lessons in her nine years at Orca, and I'm so grateful she's had that opportunity. But I feel like right now she's really ready to be pushed and stretched and challenged academically as well. And it doesn't sound like Rainier Beach is the place where that's going to happen.

I'm well aware that isolated statistics give an incomplete picture of what's going on at Rainier Beach, or any school. And I'm conscious of the dangers of subscribing to a single story about anything as complex as a beleaguered urban high school in the most diverse zip code on the planet. This is why I have been trying mightily to schedule a tour of Rainier Beach, to get a first-hand feel for the place and some sense of the direction it may be headed. Frankly, it's been tough going. No tour dates have been posted on the school's web site (all the other schools have been offering tours since January). A little persistence earned me an appointment for a personal tour with the school counselor, but this was canceled the following week. "Call back next month to see if we have anything scheduled," was the last I heard. I'm willing to cut them a little slack -- that whole axe-the-principal-and-half-the-staff thing has to be a little overwhelming. But still, it's discouraging. It's almost like they don't really expect us to send our kid there anyway, so why bother?

At dinner the other day Bryan asked me what it would take to get us to send Josie to Rainier Beach. "What if Obama was the principal -- would that be enough?"

Now I've always bristled when Orca 5th grade parents take this kind of "give me a reason to stay" approach to our middle school. But Obama aside (and yes, Bryan, that would do it), I suppose this is a fair question to ask a parent on the brink of bailing: What would it take? An International Baccalaureate program? Immersion Chinese? Hands-on fashion design classes? I mean, if there's nothing the district could do that would keep us there (or rather, nothing they can pull off successfully in their current circumstances), maybe it's not crazy that they seem to have given up on trying to attract middle class families.

And hell, if they were doing a better job educating the poor kids of color who do go there, I might be all right with that. As it is I'm plagued by the sinking feeling that the district and the neighborhood -- all of us -- have given up on Rainier Beach, and all these "option" schools are really just meant to give people like us an escape valve, so we can slink away from a failing school by claiming that it’s simply “not a good fit.”

Despite that sinking, slinking feeling, I've been busy this month exploring the "options" Seattle Public Schools has laid out for us. This is how the game works, right? The bureaucrats set up the rules, draw the lines, determine the deadlines. And then we parents get to work decoding the fine print, scrutinizing the maps, and figuring out our best strategy for increasing the odds of getting our kids into the best possible school for them, within those seemingly arbitrary, not-entirely-stable parameters. And then, after all that hoop-jumping, someone downtown rolls the dice, and the system spits out a piece of paper with your kid's future stamped on it.

I once heard stress defined as "responsibility without control." Yup.

And then there's the guilt. Even as I struggle to navigate all of these bureaucratic mazes and lotteried uncertainties, I'm painfully aware that there are plenty of families out there who don't have the time or werewithal to jump through hoops and conduct online research and tour schools in the middle of a workday. I recently talked to one mom who told me she hates herself because she’s thinking of getting her kid re-tested for the Accelerated Progress Program (APP), hoping to keep his options open if  it turns out the school across the street can’t meet his academic needs -- even though the diverse, progressive school across the street matches her family's values much better than the APP program two miles north, where the only African American child in one class was recently booted from the program because the teacher couldn't stand the smell of her hair care product. (She got back in eventually, but not without a struggle.)

Well I say, if the district isn’t above moving the lines in the middle of the game (or hiring a guy who pockets $1.8 million and vanishes without a trace) I’m certainly not going to look down my nose at someone who gets their kid retested for APP, or  rents a house in the Central District for four years so their kid can go to Garfield. I'm the one who's been touring private schools, after all.

But more on that later.

Here's what I've learned so far about the public options:

First stop: Cleveland High School. The district's investment in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) program here has created an impressive school featuring an integrated, project-based curriculum with an intense focus on engineering and life sciences. Language Arts and Social Studies are combined with the Math and Science classes in interesting ways -- we got to see a Literature/Biology class where the kids were discussing The Lord of the Flies. There's lots of technology, long blocks of class time, and a general sense that most of the students want to be there doing the work. It wasn't perfect, by any means -- I was a little dismayed at the extent to which they seem to have standardized the idea of "project-based learning," and the school paper's front-page headline noted that half the freshman class was failing -- but it seemed like a place where a person who wanted to could get a pretty darn good education. It's too bad Josie's not really into engineering or life sciences. Maybe Simon can go there.

It seems unlikely that the district will be able to persuade Obama to take the helm at Rainier Beach. But if they could invest in an integrated, project-based arts and humanities program there, I'd definitely consider signing Josie up. Especially if they had a long-term plan for a committed flow of money going forward, so we didn't have to wonder (as Cleveland is now wondering) what's going to happen when the three-year start-up grant runs out just at the moment the district faces another $35 million budget gap.

The following week we went to the Center School open house -- and left feeling hugely relieved. This small, arts-oriented program housed at Seattle Center struck me as a fine place for Josie to spend the next four years (from what I could gather, anyway -- I unfortunately spent most of the presentation in the restroom fighting off a vicious bout of food poisoning). The principal was savvy and charming, the teachers sounded passionate about their subjects and their students, and the kids were truly inspiring. I'd still like a chance to see those teachers and students at work in the classrooms. But I left feeling fairly confident that Josie would thrive there, academically and socially.

The Nova Project also impressed me. Nova is a classic alternative school with a student-driven curriculum that is certainly not for everyone: the idea that we should learn things because they're meaningful to us, not because someone told us they're important, is one of those mind-bendingly idealistic, heartwarmingly appealing concepts that can go horribly wrong if not thoughtfully structured and carefully monitored. But it seemed like the structures are in place at Nova, and Josie is the kind of self-motivated learner who knows how to make the most of that kind of "freedom with responsibility."

We'll probably still put Franklin down as a preference over Rainier Beach. I liked the humanities focus there, and I liked what the principal had to say about meeting the needs of a range of kids (this is standard code for "not holding your academically advanced kid back even though many of her classmates are struggling to keep up"). I liked what I saw on the walls in many of the classrooms -- though the actual activity I saw in those classrooms didn't always measure up (one kid told us she loved her English teacher because she found an easy version of "Romeo and Juliet" for them to read, instead of making them slog through Shakespeare's original language.)

Academics aside, I think Josie would enjoy many of the classic American high school experiences Franklin provides (and Nova and the Center School don't): the varsity teams, the marching band, the school colors, the clubs and activities, the century-old traditions, etc. (And yes, I know I scoffed at all of that back when I was sneaking out of pep rallies at Santa Monica High School, but the fact is I can still sing all the words to "Oh, Samohi," I've got my varsity letter packed away in a keepsake box somewhere, and deep in my heart there's a piece of me that's a still a Viking.)

We have no way of knowing what the chances are that Josie will get into any of the public school options -- historically most kids who have wanted to go to Nova or the Center School have gotten in, but with the new assignment plan, there may be a great many more kids competing for those spots than there have been in the past.

And then -- to get back to our deep dark no-longer-a-secret -- Josie's got applications in at a couple of excellent prep schools, which she may or may not get into, and which we may or may not be able to afford if she does.

I'm still struggling with this: every time an admissions offer tells me the fifty-seventh amazingly wonderful thing about his or her fabulous school -- "our science students do independent research at the Burke Museum," say, or "we have three full-time guidance counselors" -- I can't help thinking, "Yeah, but shouldn't every kid get this? Does my kid really need this stuff more than the kids at Rainier Beach? What if they had $27,000 per kid to spend down there instead of $7,743? Why don't they have $27,000 to spend, again?"

I never say anything like that, of course. I get the sense that these schools exist in an entirely different universe from Rainier Beach -- and indeed, from the one Josie has inhabited at Orca these last nine years. By that I mean that they don't seem to be at all bothered by the idea that they are essentially preparing the children of privilege for a life of privilege -- giving a leg up to kids who are already on top of the world -- perpetuating and exacerbating the inequality in our already screwed-up society.

I know I have had many advantages handed to me -- not the least of which was an excellent education. I am deeply grateful to the parents who brought me up reading books and doing logic puzzles at dinner, nagged me about my homework for twelve straight years, drove me up and down the eastern seaboard looking at colleges, stood over me while I wrote my application essays, and saved up thousands of dollars for my not inconsiderable tuition at Swarthmore.

I may not always make the best possible use of my intellectual and educational gifts, but I have tried to think of them as an instrument to be wielded for the common good. Robert Kennedy (one of my favorite sons of privilege) once said, "Others see the world as it is, and say, 'Why?' I see the world as it should be and say, 'Why not?'" I have done my best to use my power and privilege as a well-educated, financially secure white person to draw attention to the maddening gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be, to imagine creative ways to make the leap across it, and to inspire myself and others to do the hard work of getting us there.

I don't see how I can turn around now and use that power and privilege to nakedly hand my advantages on to my daughter, to yank her out of the gap all those kids at Rainier Beach seem to be slipping into.

But aren't I failing her in some fundamental sense if I don't?


I don't think my parents faced this particular dilemma: my public high school seemed to be doing a fine job of preparing me for college while also giving its many disadvantaged students the same opportunity. But now -- thanks to a clusterfuck conglomerate of spineless legislators, soulless bureaucrats, brainless anti-tax nut jobs, tin-eared teachers unions, arrogant "accountability" freaks, reckless bankers, and now Silas Potter too -- here we are. It's my job as a parent to see that my kid gets what she needs, right? The question of whether the kids at Rainier Beach are getting the fabulous education they need and deserve (or even a barely adequate one) is not a responsibility I feel I can shoulder at this point. Yes, even as a privileged, well-educated, financially secure white person, I feel pretty helpless in the face of this mess.

So that's our deep dark secret, dangling on a clothesline outside the Henry in between "It was me" and "I miss weed" -- or maybe by now all those paper undergarments are safely buried in the third appendix of someone's museology thesis. Yes, we've got our finger on the eject button. And if Josie doesn't win the "option" school lottery... If there's no room at Franklin... If my visit to Rainier Beach confirms the discouraging story we've all been hearing... If, if, if she gets in... And if we can look ourselves in the mirror...

Well, we just might push it.