The Education of a Public School Parent

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.