THE ATLANTIC OCTOBER 2019 61
the city’s population: 38 percent white, 29 percent
black, 24 percent Latino, 7 percent Asian. That fact
alone made the school a rarity in New York. Two-
thirds of the students performed at or above grade
level on standardized tests, which made the school
one of the higher-achieving in the city (though we
later learned that there were large gaps, as much
as 50 percent, between the results for the wealthier,
white students and the poorer, Latino and black
students). And the school appeared to be a happy
place. Its pedagogical model was progressive—
“child centered”—based on learning through experi-
ence. Classes seemed loose, but real work was going
on. Hallways were covered with well-written com-
positions. Part of the playground was devoted to
a vegetable garden. This combination of diversity,
achievement, and well-being was nearly unheard-
of in New York public schools. This school squared
the hardest circle. It was a liberal white family’s
dream. The admission rate was less than 10 percent.
We got wait-listed.
The summer before our son was to enter kinder-
garten, an admin istrator to whom I’d written a letter
making the case that our family and the school were
a perfect match called with the news that our son had
gotten in off the wait list. She gave me fi ve minutes
to come up with an answer. I didn’t need four and a
half of them.
I can see now that a strain of selfi shness and van-
ity in me contaminated the decision. I lived in a cos-
seted New York of successful professionals. I had no
authentic connection— not at work, in friendships,
among neighbors— to the shared world of the city’s
very diff erent groups that our son was about to enter.
I was ready to off er him as an emissary to that world, a
token of my public-spiritedness. The same narcissistic
pride that a parent takes in a child’s excellent report
card, I now felt about sending him in a yellow school
bus to an institution whose name began with P. S.
A few parents at the private school reacted as
if we’d given away a winning lottery ticket, or even
harmed our son—such was the brittle nature of meri-
tocracy. And to be honest, in the coming years, when
we heard that sixth graders at the private school were
writing papers on The Odyssey, or when we watched
our son and his friends sweat through competitive
public-middle-school admissions, we wondered whether we’d committed
an unforgivable sin and went back over all our reasons for changing schools
until we felt better.
Before long our son took to saying, “I’m a public-school person.” When
I asked him once what that meant, he said, “It means I’m not snooty.” He
never looked back.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOL was housed in the lower fl oors of an
old brick building, fi ve stories high and a block long, next to an expressway.
A middle and high school occupied the upper fl oors. The building had the
usual grim features of any public institution in New York—steel mesh over
the lower windows, a police offi cer at the check-in
desk, scuff ed yellow walls, fl uorescent lights with
toxic PCBs, caged stairwells, ancient boilers and no
air conditioners—as if to dampen the expectations of
anyone who turned to government for a basic service.
The bamboo fl ooring and state-of-the-art science
labs of private schools pandered to the desire for a
special refuge from the city. Our son’s new school
felt utterly porous to it.
I had barely encountered an American public
school since leaving high school. That was in the late
1970s, in the Bay Area, the same year that the tax
revolt began its long evisceration of California’s stel-
lar education system. Back then, nothing was asked of
parents except that they pay their taxes and send their
children to school, and everyone I knew went to the
local public schools. Now the local public schools—at
least the one our son was about to attend—couldn’t
function without parents. Donations at our school
paid the salaries of the science teacher, the Spanish
teacher, the substitute teachers. They even paid for
furniture. Because many of the families were poor,
our PTA had a hard time meeting its annual fund-
raising goal of $100,000, and some years the prin-
cipal had to send out a message warning parents
that science or art was about to be cut. Not many
blocks away, elementary schools zoned for wealthy
neighbor hoods routinely raised $1 million— these
schools were called “private publics.” Schools in
poorer neighborhoods struggled to bring in $30,000.
This enormous gap was just one way inequality pur-
sued us into the public-school system.
We threw ourselves into the adventure of the new
school. We sent in class snacks when it was our week,
I chaperoned a fi eld trip to study pigeons in a local
park, and my wife cooked chili for an autumn fund-
raiser. The school’s sense of mission extended to a
much larger community, and so there was an appeal
for money when a fi re drove a family from a diff erent
school out of its house, and a food drive after Hur-
ricane Sandy ravaged the New York area, and a shoe
drive for Syrian refugees in Jordan. We were ready
to do just about anything to get involved. When my
wife came in one day to help out in class, she was
enlisted as a recess monitor and asked to change the
underwear of a boy she didn’t know from another
class who’d soiled himself. (Volunteerism had a limit,
and that was it.)
The private school we’d left behind had let par-
ents know they weren’t needed, except as thrilled
audiences at performances. But our son’s kinder-
garten teacher—an eccentric man near retirement
age, whose uniform was dreadlocks (he was white),
a leather apron, shorts, and sandals with socks—sent
out frequent and frankly needy SOS emails. When
his class of 28 students was studying the New York
shoreline, he enlisted me to help build a replica of
an antique cargo ship like the one docked off Lower
Manhattan—could I pick up a sheet of plywood, four
by eight by 5/8 of an inch, cut in half, along with four
appropriate hinges and two dozen plumbing pieces, if
they weren’t too expen sive? He would reimburse me.
