The Education of a Public School Parent

For twenty years, education has been a prominent topic in our family’s life. During that period, our houseful of kids have attended public, private, and charter schools—we even spent a year homeschooling a child. Our view of public education has been influenced by the choices we’ve made on our children’s behalf, which is surely true of most public school parents today.  

Times have changed, of course, since our own school days, and so has the role of responsible parents. We brought home a report card every six weeks; our parents signed it and maybe gave us a quarter for every A. If you’re like my husband and me—and whether you’re urban, suburban, or rural school parents—you grapple with the new reality of change, challenge, and choice, trying to determine the best way to educate your kids so they will be informed, successful, and happy. It takes a lot of hard work and attention.

The kinds of schools, curricula, and miscellaneous options you have to choose from today can be dizzying, especially in the metro area. The vast range of choices can be both a blessing and a curse, whether during the early years when your kids are first entering the system or later, in junior and senior high, as your kids grow and mature. Some people wonder if all this choice strains our school districts’ limited resources. For us, it’s been a good thing, and, honestly, it has kept us in the system.

Though solidly middle class, our family is not a traditional one—if there is such a thing anymore. My husband and I are now fortysomethings. We have two birth children, one adopted daughter, and, over the course of the past decade, three “extra” kids who have lived with us during tough times in their lives. While our story may not be typical for one family, there’s no denying we’ve had a range of experiences. There’s not much we haven’t seen.

My husband, Bill Radosevich, who grew up on the Iron Range, is more traditional in his expectations of our kids and their education than I am. An Air Force brat who moved every few years following my father around the world, I am what I euphemistically call more “fluid” in my approach. I’m also the parent most involved in the daily demands of our children’s education. Yet we share core values. We want our kids to be lifelong learners. We want their schools to fit the type of person and learner they are. And we want them to work hard and give their best at school. (And, OK, we were just happy to see a couple of those kids graduate.)

We live in south Minneapolis, and our children have attended the city’s public schools, including Andersen, Andersen Open, Barton Open, Green Central Park, and Lyndale elementary schools, Anthony Middle School, and North, Roosevelt, and Washburn senior high schools. Two of our kids attended a Quaker school in St. Paul, and our sixteen-year-old is currently enrolled in a charter school in that city.

Like other complex systems, the Minneapolis Public Schools, where we’ve had most of our experience, is a mix of the good, the so-so, and the bad. Our children have had opportunities that my husband and I couldn’t have imagined during our school years in the sixties and seventies. They have studied aviation, peered through an electron microscope (while taking part in Microscopy Camp at the University of Minnesota), competed with the best and the brightest in citywide math competitions, and studied dance with famous visiting choreographers.

Conversely, the police have chased drug dealers through one of those elementary schools, and we had to deal with a high school teacher who flunked one of our children because the special ed staff had failed to explain that he had a learning disability requiring accommodations for his assignments. My youngest daughter was harassed as one of the few white kids on her bus and pushed down the bus steps one afternoon last spring. When I met with the summer school teacher of one of the “extra” kids who lived with us, he told me, “All she has to do is show up every day, and we’ll pass her to seventh grade.” Surprised, I asked him, “And what about her learning the multiplication tables?” He merely shrugged.

Of course, outrages and disappointments are not confined to the city. A friend in Wayzata agonized about her son’s tired, mediocre third-grade teacher. “She just wasn’t a very good teacher,” my friend explained. Another friend’s highly regarded south-suburban high school routinely has police officers and drug dogs patrolling the corridors and lockers. And just about wherever you live in the metro area, classrooms bursting to the seams with forty kids, some sitting on the floor, have become a shameful fact of life.

When I think about our family’s experience with the public schools, I can’t help but consider the bigger picture, which includes politics (school district, city, state, and federal), budget constraints, racism, economic disparities, urban versus suburban biases, the changing global economy, and future work force needs. Because all of those things are part of the mix, to one degree or another they all affect our children’s education. But it’s the kids’ everyday experiences—and their teachers, classmates, and classmates’ families—that create the lasting impressions of their school years.

My experience as a public school parent began in 1986, when my oldest daughter, whom I adopted when she was nine, was in elementary school. She attended Andersen Open and then switched to Barton Open, both in south Minneapolis. Two decades later, I still have fond memories of friendly, productive classrooms and caring teachers committed to teaching. Happily, our experience at yet another southside school, Lyndale Elementary, has carried much of the same goodness, thanks to teachers and staff who know what works and who understand their importance in children’s lives.

With so many years and so many children, I have no shortage of stories about the public schools. But our daughter Grace’s recent year at Lyndale reflects the mix of what’s good, bad, and challenging about the city’s public schools that our other children faced as well.

The Lyndale chapter began two years ago when our son Pete, then fourteen, was accepted into Washburn High School’s aviation magnet program. Pete and Grace, who was nine, had both attended the Quaker school in St. Paul. (I’ve changed the kids’ names to give them a bit of privacy.) That school had been a perfect fit for Pete. He went there from kindergarten through eighth grade, with one year out for homeschooling because of a learning disability, which the school could not deal with because it did not have the resources. But we had grown tired of the daily carpooling, and Grace wanted to attend a bigger school. Also, she was heading into fifth grade and already knew that she wanted to go to Anthony Middle School, where many of her neighborhood friends would be going, the following year. We decided to get both kids back into the Minneapolis system and went looking for a good spot for Grace.

Because choice has become central to the school selection process, we created a list of five key factors by which to gauge our children’s fit in any one of them: Will they learn the academic fundamentals? Will they develop the skills to be good citizens of the world? Will they be happy, and can they be themselves? Will they be exposed to the so-called extras, such as art, music, and sports? Will they develop the skills and discipline to learn things just because they have to? (We don’t really care if they ever actually use the Pythagorean theorem when they grow up. Life is full of arbitrary requirements, and learning to master them is essential to success.)

In our experience, no one school has perfectly and continually met all five criteria. But many of our kids’ Minneapolis schools have met most of them most of the time, which gave us confidence when seeking a new school for Grace. More specifically, in her case, we looked at another list of important factors, including a school’s teaching style, test scores, and the proportion of students who receive subsidized meals and for whom English is the second language, which would tell us how many especially needy children would be in Grace’s classroom. We talked to other parents, visited several schools, and looked to the district’s website for a gold mine of information about the district’s schools.

We narrowed our choice to four: Lake Harriet Upper, a school with a more or less traditional teaching style, good test scores, and, judging from both the statistics and a stroll down its hallways, a large proportion of kids from more affluent south Minneapolis families; Barton Open, the highly desired open school that my oldest child had attended eighteen years earlier, but that now came with an insanely early morning start time; Ramsey Fine Arts Elementary, a large K–8 school that focuses on fine arts; and Lyndale, situated only a block from our house, where nine out of ten students received a subsidized lunch and more than half spoke English as their second language.

My husband and I visited each school with Grace. To our surprise, we knew almost from the moment we stepped into its hallways that Lyndale was the school for Grace. The place was filled with love. You could see, hear, and feel it. Every morning—come rain, shine, or arctic cold—Lyndale’s teachers and staff waited on the sidewalk to greet each student, most of them by name. There was usually a hug for the younger kids. Inside, the care Lyndale’s faculty and staff had for their students was just as palpable and reciprocated by most of the kids. Academically, the adults seemed to fuel an inventiveness and creativity that seemed to meet the kids “from where they come, not from where they should be.”

Grace’s teacher, Carol Kane, was a former nun with a warm heart and twenty-one years of inner-city teaching experience. She was wise, kind, and funny—a soft-spoken taskmaster. It was nothing short of miraculous to see her classroom full of children with obvious disparities in academic ability working on an assignment or project that kept everyone engaged so they could individually succeed. Homework seemed to be crafted so kids could do it whether they had help at home or not. She placed a tremendous amount of importance on things the kids themselves could control, such as attendance and reading. There were parties and other rewards for classes with the best attendance records and for children who read the most books during the school year and summer break.
“Ms. Kane always makes kids feel proud—lots of the teachers do,” Grace told us. “That’s why all the walls in the hallways are filled with everyone’s work. If a kid isn’t good at something, Ms. Kane finds something they are good at, or she puts them with a partner so they can do a good job together. Plus, Ms. Kane always has the best treasure box, with things like Tootsie Pops, and everybody wants to work hard to get something from the treasure box.”

Everyone at Lyndale seemed engaged. The staff, ably guided by energetic principal Ossie James, worked as a team in an amazing way. My husband and I did a fair amount of volunteering at the school, and it was clear to us that practically everyone—including the art and gym teachers, the school nurse, and the front office workers—cared deeply about those kids, often going beyond the call of duty. For example, Sandy Rader, the music teacher, spent her summers working at a great camp. Each spring, she brought camp registration forms to school for her “Lyndale kids,” promising them a spot whether their families could afford it or not.

Grace learned her state capitals, catapulted forward in math, and was taught the secrets of writing a good five-part essay. There was no academic dilly-dallying; we were convinced that the knowledge and skills she learned at Lyndale would provide a solid foundation for her ascent into middle school and beyond.

Grace also learned how privileged her life is. One evening at bedtime, she was telling me about an after-school visit to a schoolmate’s apartment two blocks from our house. “Mom,” she said, “that apartment is really crowded. There’s her mom, three sisters, and one of her sisters has a baby.” She paused, then added, “But, Mom, they don’t have enough beds for everyone. How come?”

That wasn’t Grace’s first intimation that the world can be a harsh place, but it was very close to home. And more than once Grace told us that there wasn’t any food at a classmate’s house. When I’d hear that, I always said a prayer of thanks for the free breakfasts and lunches served in a seemingly stigma-free environment at school.

Carol Kane told me that the most destabilizing fact of life for the individual student, the classroom, and the school as a whole is transience. And, in fact, we watched many of Grace’s classmates come and go during that fifth-grade year. Often moms would fall behind on rent and abruptly have to move, or families would have to “move back with Grandma” in another part of town, or two single-mom families would decide to share an affordable apartment outside the school’s busing zone.

Many of Grace’s Lyndale friends were bright and industrious, but even the brightest, most industrious kids can fall behind and never catch up when they are worn out and overwhelmed by an uncertain or stressful situation at home. Changing schools in the middle of the year disrupts the continuity of their learning and disrupts both the classroom they left and the new one they join.

On our five-measure scale, Lyndale ranked high in every category for Grace. The only negative was Grace’s status as one of the school’s most affluent kids and the fact that, no matter what she did to bridge the gap between her and less fortunate kids, she often found herself segregated from most of her classmates. The sad truth was that going to the movies, enjoying a weekend at the cabin, or taking a spring break vacation was not part of most of her schoolmates’ lives. Overall, though, Lyndale proved to be a good life experience for our daughter. Everything about the year came together in a gestalt sort of way, and the whole was even greater than the sum of its parts. 
The following year, 2005, Minneapolis schools suffered tremendous budget cuts. Six Lyndale teachers were laid off or transferred to other schools as a lack of funding and the seniority-driven staffing system wreaked havoc citywide. Lyndale ends at fifth grade, so Grace moved on to middle school. But because it’s so close to our house and Grace helps out with Lyndale’s after-school sports program, we still cross paths with students and staff members who were a part of our lives that year.

Best we can tell, despite losing some of their best, most committed teachers, Ossie James and her staff are continuing to do a valiant job and Lyndale remains a beacon of hope and achievement in the heart of the city.

Despite the great aviation program that brought our son Pete to Washburn High, he had a terrible time there. The problems were mostly social. Unfortunately, as a new kid with no junior high friends from his small St. Paul school joining him, he struggled to feel welcome. Things got worse when he was bullied by football players in his phys ed and health class.

We thought the school responded poorly to our concerns. Later, when I sent an e-mail to Washburn’s principal, I never got a reply. Pete stuck it out through the end of his freshman year because he loved the aviation classes. The program’s director and lead teacher, Peter Denny, has a passion for both kids and aviation that’s infectious. He and Pete had a wonderful relationship, and he recommended Pete for an aviation-careers summer camp sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration. But for Pete, one aviation class per semester wasn’t enough. The social situation didn’t improve, and he was miserable, so he transferred to the Avalon charter school in St. Paul.           

As for our older kids, who joined our household as adolescents with troubled backgrounds—they all made it through the city’s high schools. One went on to college, one attended a technical institute and is now a journeyman plumber, and one started a family of her own at twenty-one and is now, at thirty, planning to attend college. Our summer school girl learned her multiplication tables at our kitchen table and is doing well in seventh grade at Andersen Open.

Because as a family we operate in many circles (community groups, neighborhood organizations, basketball leagues, and so forth), we share the trials and triumphs of many kids, not just our own. I watched our neighbor—a musically talented elementary school boy—stand with his mom, dad, and dog on countless cold, dark mornings, instrument case in his hand, waiting for the early bus to take him to the Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource in Crystal, an interdistrict magnet that draws students from eleven school districts. I listened to the tales of another neighborhood family whose sons have been successful—albeit with vastly different experiences and issues—in their respective schools. Dale, the older boy, is a gifted student and competitive swimmer who sailed through Southwest High’s International Baccalaureate program and went on to the University of Chicago. His brother, Justin, has learning disabilities and other mental health issues, but, with the diligent involvement of his parents, will graduate this spring from Roosevelt High and head to technical college. We know many talented kids who are thriving at South High, no doubt destined to do great things.

At the same time, we marvel at the plethora of class options offered at the big high schools attended by the children of suburban friends. One friend recalls how a teacher, on curriculum night at Hopkins High, held up a directory of the school’s courses and told the assembled parents how lucky their children were. The teacher said Hopkins students have more elective courses available to them than she had had in college.

Sure, there are frightening stories as well—about brushes with violence, widely available drugs, overcrowded classrooms, and indifferent teachers. But, to varying degrees, you find those problems everywhere—in the toniest suburbs as well as the grittiest inner-city neighborhoods, and even in elite private schools—just as you find compassionate, engaging teachers, good kids, and good families to share your children’s journey through their school years.

Our family’s public school experience has been and remains a blessed mix of the stable and unstable, optimistic and beleaguered, rich and poor, bright and not-so bright. We’re convinced, moreover, that our experience has mirrored what parents and children in all systems face. And we believe that if you stay engaged with what’s happening to your children and their schools, you can help ensure a foundation that will serve them well in a world that’s also a blessed mix.

Terre Thomas is a writer and small-business owner.