"The next task for education reform isn't merely helping parents identify good schools but understanding what makes schools good." That's Robert Pondiscio of the American Enterprise Institute, in a letter-to-the-editor response to a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece about education by Harvard's Roland Fryer. Pondiscio might agree that he overstated things.
Just consider real estate listings. It's routine that realtors list the school district in which the house or apartment is in. With good reason.
School districts sell apartments and houses. They’re a market signal. And they are because parents already know the good schools and districts.
Better yet, the act of identifying good schools by parents is a strong sign that their children nearly always attend good schools. More on this in a bit.
For now, it's worth spending more time on the boost a good school district lends to housing prices. Or is it the reverse? Think about it. Don't people who prosper professionally also tend to demand more of their kids in school?
To which some will roll out the line that educational and life outcomes shouldn't be an effect of one's prosperous (or not) zip code. Implied here is that since we're not all well-to-do, not all of us will have access to good school districts.
Except that conservatives have long wisely argued that there's not a direct correlation between money spent on education and educational outcomes. Fryer and Pondiscio are conservatives.
Which means they’re aware of how students in poorer school districts have also prospered. Think the kids of Vietnamese immigrant parents who arrived with nothing but ambition in the 1970s. Or for that matter the kids of immigrant Jews escaping persecution around Europe in the early part of the 20th century, and who similarly reached the U.S. with little more than ambition. Which is the point.
True to the conservative viewpoint, education isn't about money. But it is about values that are often associated with money. It's a reminder that parents once again know what makes a good school in the way that Fryer and Pondiscio almost certainly do: ambitious parents who expect a great deal of their kids.
Except that Fryer and Pondiscio might agree that conservatives are loathe to blame bad schools on parents who demand little to nothing from their kids, or unruly kids themselves. It's better politics to bash teachers, teachers' unions, and "government schools" than it is to point the finger at the real problem with underperforming schools: underperforming parents who don’t care about education, and whose kids don’t.
Which is why the focus of Fryer, Pondiscio, and conservatives more broadly on Nikole Hannah-Jones arguably misses the education point. Hannah-Jones famously created and spearheaded the odious 1619 Project, plus recently acknowledged sending her daughter Najya to an underperforming public school that "compromised" her education. Hannah-Jones is being vilified for having done so, for having compromised her daughter's future, but really?
Najya Hannah-Jones will be just fine. See how daughter AND mother saw the myriad flaws in P.S. 307, only for daughter to exit a situation inimical to learning. That she and mother knew she had to get out is the tell that she’ll be just fine.
No doubt conservatives will dine out for quite some time on what Nikole Hannah-Jones did in the first place with P.S. 307, but Vinegar Hill couldn’t make Najya Hannah-Jones stupid or bereft of ambition any more than time spent there could have ruined Fryer or Pondiscio. Being smart is a choice, not an effect of teachers.
Good values beget good educational outcomes. Caring parents don’t require education reform to find those like them.
