60 OCTOBER 2019 THE ATLANTIC
That year, when my son turned 5, attending day-
time tours and evening open houses became a sec-
ond job. We applied to eight or nine public schools.
We applied to far-fl ung schools that we’d heard took
a few kids from out of district, only to fi nd that there
was a baby boom on and the seats had already been
claimed by zoned families. At one new school that
had a promising reputation, the orientation talk was
clotted with education jargon and the toilets in the
boys’ bathroom with shit, but we would have taken a
slot if one had been off ered.
Among the schools where we went begging was
one a couple of miles from our house that admit-
ted children from several districts. This school
was economically and racially mixed by design,
with demographics that came close to matchingwhile “embracing children of all religious,
social, and ethnic backgrounds.”
The claim of democracy doesn’t negate
meritocracy, but they’re in tension. One
values equality and openness, the other
achievement and security. Neither can
answer every need. To lose sight of either
makes life poorer. The essential task is to bring
meritocracy and democracy into a relation
where they can coexist and even fl ourish.
My wife and I are products of public
schools. Whatever torments they inflicted
on our younger selves, we believed in them.
We wanted our kids to learn in classrooms
that resembled the city where we lived. We
didn’t want them to grow up entirely inside
our bubble—mostly white, highly and expen-
sively educated— where 4-year-olds who hear
21,000 words a day acquire the unearned con-
fi dence of insular advantage and feel, even
unconsciously, that they’re better than other
people’s kids.
Public schools are a public good. Our city’s
are among the most racially and economi-
cally segregated in America. The gaps in pro-
fi ciency that separate white and Asian from
black and Latino students in math and English
are immense and growing. Some advocates
argue that creating more integrated schools
would reduce those gaps. Whether or not the
data conclusively prove it, to be half-conscious
in America is to know that schools of concen-
trated poverty are likely to doom the children
who attend them. This knowledge is what
made our decision both political and fraught.
Our “zoned” elementary school, two
blocks from our house, was forever improving
on a terrible reputation, but not fast enough.
Friends had pulled their kids out after sec-
ond or third grade, so when we took the tour
we insisted, against the wishes of the school
guide, on going upstairs from the kinder garten
classrooms and seeing the upper grades, too.
Students were wandering around the rooms
without focus, the air was heavy with listless-
ness, there seemed to be little learning going
on. Each year the school was becoming a few percentage points less poor and
less black as the neighborhood gentrifi ed, but most of the white kids were
attending a “gifted and talented” school within the school, where more was
expected and more was given. The school was integrating and segregating
at the same time.
One day I was at a local playground with our son when I fell into conver-
sation with an elderly black woman who had lived in the neighborhood a
long time and understood all about our school dilemma, which was becom-
ing the only subject that interested me. She scoff ed at our “zoned” school—it
had been badly run for so long that it would need years to become passable.
I mentioned a second school, half a dozen blocks away, that was probably
available if we applied. Her expression turned to alarm. “Don’t send him
there,” she said. “That’s a failure school. That school will always be a failure
school.” It was as if an eternal curse had been laid on it, beyond anyone’s
agency or remedy. The school was mostly poor and black. We assumed it
would fail our children, because we knew it was failing other children.