Playground Confidential

What do parents mean when they say a school is "good?"

I’m happy to announce a second guest post for Holly Korbey’s very popular Bell Ringer, a newsletter dedicated to the science of teaching and learning. (Previously I wrote about the obstacles to assigning and reading books in class.)

In this most recent post, I write about my experience looking for a school for my oldest son. The search — as it does for most parents in New York City — started on the playgrounds talking to other parents where I soon discovered that many had very different ideas of what a “good” school is or is not. Vibes are in, it seems, and academics are out. They hypocrisy and short-sightedness rankles me, tbh.

Head over to The Bell Ringer to read the post, along with a nice introduction from Korbey, and recaps of her other recent posts.

You can also read my essay in its entirety below.

The very first step every single parent in New York City takes when they start searching for a school for their child is to eavesdrop on conversations at the playground. Where, as luck would have it, 99% of conversations are currently about school, were just about school or will soon be about school.

This is due in large part to the nature of the city’s public school system, which is as vast and as impenetrable as an ice planet. The seemingly infinite number of schools, and the city’s density and diversity render the usual process districts use to assign kids to schools (attend the school closest to your home) unwise, while also confounding the usual logic parents use to choose schools (nice neighborhoods = good schools). Then there’s the application process, which includes 1) admissions requirements that vary from school to school and 2) a devilishly complex lottery number that is expressly designed to prevent anxious parents from deciphering it, and therefore lamenting that their kid’s number is low, but nevertheless has prompted every single parent I know to insist they understand the number enough to lament that their kid’s number is “low.” (My kid’s number is 5B1920AF-F1C6-40EC-8E9A-3E1E50CB13BB. Seems low?)

The prospect of finding a good school for your kid reduces normally put-together individuals into nervous wrecks, and at the Brooklyn playground I frequent most with my kid, I can spot when two moms have begun to tailspin when they start nervously tapping their Blundstones against the rubber tiles.

And even though I’ve worked in the public schools here for almost fifteen years and have a better understanding of the system than most parents, when it came time for me to start thinking about schools for my oldest, I took to the playgrounds on my own recon missions, too.

But a funny thing happened. I started to notice that the same few schools came up again and again, with one in particular — let’s call it the Union Street School — spoken of with an odd reverence, as if it were both a holy site and a trendy restaurant that one should be so lucky to get reservations to.

Eventually, I stopped eavesdropping and started asking parents why they liked those particular schools.

They liked the school, they’d say, because it was a good school.

What makes it a “good” school? I’d ask.

Because the principal is great, they’d say. Or because the teachers are great. Or, my friend loves it. Or, it’s very child-centered. Or — my personal favorite — it’s just a great school.

Partly because I was genuinely curious, and partly because I have a teacher’s habit of never accepting someone’s first answer, I could never resist pressing the parents just a little bit further. Invariably, the answers remained vague, and just like my former students when I’d implore them to be more specific (“The story is sad because sad stuff happens.”), the parents began to squirm a little. I was never sure if their discomfort grew out of the sudden realization that they didn’t know, actually, what they meant when they said a school was “good” or if they were simply embarrassed to be put on the spot. Either way, I knew better than to ruin a perfectly good morning at the playground. So if they hadn’t already extracted themselves from the conversation in order to “help” their kid down the slide, I’d quickly change the subject and we’d soon be boring each other with gripes about our respective kid’s sleep habits.

Every conversation about how “good” a school is is, at its foundation, actually a conversation about what the purpose of school is.

Parents who prize a school because it has robust extracurriculars have a different idea about the purpose of school than parents who like a school due to its prestige. Parents can, and do, have healthy disagreements about whether a school is “good” or not, but what struck me as odd about these conversations I was having was that not one parent ever brought up a school’s academics. Not a single one. Nothing about the curriculum. Nothing about the books students read. Nothing about instruction. And certainly never a word about the school’s test scores.

In the case of the venerated Union Street School, I first heard about it at a Christmas party when a fellow dad whose daughter went there stated rather matter of factly that the school didn’t “put much emphasis” on academics, focusing instead on creating curiosity and instilling a sense of social justice in their students. Now, this was December 2022 in deep-blue Brooklyn, mind you, where even a chortle about a Lenape land acknowledgement would guarantee you’d never be invited to a Christmas party again, and so I ignored what sounded like clear political bias and asked this dad, instead, if it wasn’t possible, maybe, to teach math well and create curiosity? (Leaving aside the specifics of whatever that statement means.)

He informed me that “there are more important things in a child’s education than tests.” Indeed there are, I remember thinking. I also remember thinking: huh? This was a well-educated man, and I could assume he was representative of other Union Street parents. Hadn’t they themselves been the beneficiaries of schools putting “much emphasis” on reading and math?

The remark rang through my head for the rest of the night. When I went home, I poked around online until I found the school’s academic data. New York City Public Schools, just like every other district in the country, is required by federal law to create a “report card” for each of its schools that must list, among other things, the school’s performance on state reading and math tests broken down by grade and sub-groups (like race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.).

To my disbelieving eyes, Union Street had no test results. None. And the dad’s haughty comment suddenly made perfect sense: the parents opted out of the reading and math tests New York State administers each year, — for all elementary school students.

I was so nonplussed by this, given the school’s wild popularity and its vaunted reputation for righteous progressivism, that thereafter whenever I met a parent whose kid went there or had gone there I asked them about it with the same lurid curiosity I might have had had I learned they’d been a former prisoner of war.

But Union Street School was far from the only surprise.

From then on, every time I heard (or overheard) a parent at a playground crowing about a school, I looked up its data. I found that a lot of the shiny schools in nice neighborhoods with slick websites that glowed with platitudes about child-centered learning and posted photos of racially diverse children urban farming, and which I suspected parents loved not only for those reasons but also because other parents who talked like them and dressed like them sent their kids there, too, were, in fact, academically middling.

Test results showed stagnation or underperformance, considering the student population. Zero pandemic recovery. Unaccountably low math scores. In some cases, the schools were leaving behind critical groups of students, like students with disabilities or English Language Learners. Alternately, I discovered a number of unheralded schools quietly doing amazing work in spite of what their student demographics might suggest.

The data was all there in the school report card on the city and state’s education websites. Plain as day for anyone to see. You didn’t need years of experience in education to understand it.

I began to share this with parents whenever the playground chats inevitably turned to the subject of schools. You know, I’d say, that school’s not as strong as its reputation suggests . . . Parents treated these revelations with a shrug, or they’d freeze me with a fake smile, as if I were an inveterate nerd trying to sit with the cool kids in the cafeteria. Before long, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’d gained the reputation as a know-it-all, quick to ruin the rah-rah about a beloved neighborhood school with a persnickety, “Well, actually. . ..”

I accepted that I’d officially become persona non grata when I found myself more often than not at the edge of the playground with the weird dad who secretly drank hard seltzers and talked about Bitcoin a lot.

None of this made any sense to me.

When I became a public school teacher well over a decade ago, it was Tea Party-adjacent parents who, worked into paroxysms by Common Core curriculum shifts and Obama Derangement Syndrome, opted their kids out of standardized tests.

But now? It’s apparently progressive parents who turn their noses up at them. Some have been seduced by the erroneous idea that the mere presence of standardized tests on a school’s calendar transforms the entire curriculum into a test prep death march. For others, the position is a virtuous one, like composting. Others, still, have quietly subscribed to the luxury belief that as long as your kid has heard his necessary 30 million words before he turns 3 and his mac ‘n cheese is Annie’s brand, he can caper his way through elementary school on nothing more than vibes. In other words, tests are for those kids— you know, the ones who go to schools with uniforms and metal detectors and phone bans.

The point of this essay is not to make fun of well-meaning parents’ gauzy ideas about school, and nor is it to point out the ideological consistency (to put it lightly) of parents who advertise their support for the latest cause with a tasteful lapel pin or hashtag but fail to see that standardized tests are a necessary mechanism to identify and correct the achievement gaps which harm the very groups those causes ostensibly exist for.

Nor is the point of this essay to remind parents that academics matter . . . even for second graders. I know most parents believe that — over 85% of Americans, in fact, say “teaching subjects like reading, writing and math” is the central purpose of school — even if the ones I have talked to on the playgrounds seem reluctant to say so.

Rather, the point of this essay is to inform parents that a belief in academics is irreconcilable with a dismissive or agnostic position toward standardized tests, and, what’s more, a dismissive or agnostic position toward standardized tests is irreconcilable with a belief in the common good.

Standardized tests are not perfect, most especially the ones administered by the states. They’re probably too long. They’re not as precise as they should be. They can be logistical headaches. The move to digitize them is questionable.

But in most cases the results from those exams tell parents if their child is on grade level in reading or math, plain and simple. This should be obvious. (Despite conventional wisdom, teachers’ grades are poor indicators of grade level proficiency for two big reasons: they include non-academic measurements, like effort and behavior, and much of the work students are assigned is below grade level. And this isn’t even taking into account the scourge of grade inflation.)

Less obvious is that positive school wide results on standardized tests (particularly when subgroups of students show growth or when there’s growth from year to year), far from being evidence that the school has turned into a Dickensian abattoir of childhood innocence dominated by drill-and-kill instruction are, instead, a reliable indicator of an equitable and supportive school culture with high expectations, good teachers, competent leadership, and evidence-based curricula filled with lots and lots of science, history, math, literature and art.

Who doesn’t want that?

And yet, there seems to be little appetite to double down on the rigors of school at precisely the time when the educational landscape in this country could not be bleaker. Student achievement at almost every level in nearly all subjects continues a decline that began over a decade ago and shows little sign of reversing. We’ve been teaching reading the wrong way for years, with catastrophic results. A once narrowing achievement gap has burst open again. Children barely read for fun anymore, report being “almost constantly” on their phones and, unsurprisingly, are miserable. Enormous numbers of students have stopped regularly attending school and we don’t have enough teachers, especially in critical areas. Trust and satisfaction with public schools is lower than it has been in a generation.

Most of the solutions to this education depression are out of parents’ individual hands, but every parent, wherever they live, can do a few very simple things, starting with questioning vibes-based elementary schools.

We should pay heed to the test results of our children’s school or the schools we’re thinking of sending our kids to.

Then, ask questions based on what we see — Why are nearly half of the 4th graders below grade level in math? Why do reading scores decline as students progress from grade to grade? Seeking answers to these questions from the school or other parents will lead to yet more questions — how much reading and writing do students do? How much time do they spend in front of screens? What is the name of the school’s math curriculum? Before long, we may just stumble across a few Potemkin villages.

Further, when we hear other parents talk about a school being “good” or “bad,” we must ask what they mean, and we must be wary of answers that elide academics. (The assumption, nearly always unspoken, that a school is “good” or “bad” by virtue of who goes there is at best naive and at worst morally repugnant.)

Asking these questions does not make you a Tiger Mom nor does it imply you don’t care about field trips or music class or any of the things that are crucial to a well-rounded and joyful school but fall outside core instruction.

These questions simply cut through the noise to address what matters most for our own kids, and for us all.

And if you burst some bubbles? You can find me at the edge of the playground.

Playground Confidential