The new Harlem school was a deal that had been struck between Columbia University and its northern neighbors, after the former’s eminent domain land grab for an expansion into the heart of the neighborhood. The carrot that had been dangled to our mostly Black, Hispanic, and low-income community—where nearly every public school, measured by every metric, was considered to be failing—was that Columbia would be involved in the new school’s formation and oversight, and therefore it would be a beacon of hope, light, and progressive learning that could spread to other schools in the district.
Alas, loud whistle-blowing became the disciplinary norm in its hallways and cafeteria, even though it had only two inaugural classes of fifty well-behaved, eager-to-learn kindergartners, all of whom, like my son, had won a neighborhood lottery to attend.
“What’s with all the whistles?” the parents started whispering to one another during morning drop-off. I brought up my son’s fear of the whistles with the school principal, who seemed to have gone completely rogue from Columbia’s pedagogical methods and oversight, and asked her if she might consider switching to less harsh methods of maintaining order. She looked me icily in the eyes and told me that, because of my privilege, I could not possibly understand why this specific population of children needed whistles to control them.
“Could we please try the clapping method of getting the kids to be quiet?” I said. “Even just for a day?” In all the other schools my older children had attended, this method had worked well for kids of every color, creed, and background. It had even worked to quiet their much noisier parents at back-to-school nights.
“No,” she snapped. This was, of course, her prerogative as school principal, to discipline her students the way she saw fit. I tried to see myself through her eyes, as a clueless, white annoyance. Nevertheless, it wasn’t just my son who experienced those whistles as a daily form of torture. All of his friends did, too.
“Why don’t you stick to writing books and I’ll do the principaling around here,” she said.
“Fair enough,” I said. We’d migrated fifty blocks north to Harlem (61.7 percent Black, 18.4 percent white) from the Upper West Side (7.8 percent Black, 74.6 percent white) in 2009, in order to cut down on our housing expenses and get more space for our growing family. Our little one was turning three that year. Every time I told white friends we were moving to a rental in Harlem they’d ask, “But what will you do about kindergarten for him?”
“I’ll send him to a local public school,” I said.
I am a product of public schools. I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C., during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. The day I went bra shopping for the first time in White Flint Mall, Amy Carter was doing the same two stalls down, only with the Secret Service guarding her door. Carter was the second and thus far only U.S. president since Theodore Roosevelt to send his child to the White House’s zoned local public school, and a predominantly Black one at that. White flight from urban public schools, Carter knew, had done more in the Southern Strategy wake of Brown v. Board of Education to maintain the segregation of races in the U.S. educational system and to thwart opportunities for minority advancement than any official racist policy or political attempt to maintain segregation since. How could he stand up for the principles of equality for all in which he so firmly believed if his own family was excused from them?
Like Carter, I’ve become a proponent of putting my body where my beliefs are. We can talk about much-needed education reform in U.S. public schools until we’re blue in the face, but it’s all sound and fury if our kids are exempt from attending them. Take it from me, the hypocrite.
I was as guilty as the next egalitarian-minded parent of worrying about sending my kid to a struggling public school when it came to choosing a kindergarten for my first child, the son I was driving to college. Of course, I’m not alone in my hypocrisy. Kenneth Clark, the Black social psychologist whose pioneering work on the self-esteem of Black children was crucial to swaying the Supreme Court on Brown v. BOE, moved his own family from Harlem to Westchester when his kids hit school age. Why? “My children have only one life,” he said.
So at the urging of both his preschool teacher and his bubbly summer camp counselor, the latter whose mother, it turned out, was the admissions director of a highly sought-after New York City private school, I applied and subsequently enrolled my first child in that private school, lured by a generous financial aid package; by their clean, state-of-the-art facilities; by its reputation as a place chosen by artists and writers for its progressive education (but today unaffordable to that same subset of families); by what turned out to be false rumors of the subpar education available to him at our zoned public school; by my son’s own particular educational interests and needs; and by the alleged leg up in the college admissions game he would get.
Did he get a good education with individualized attention and excellent teachers in significantly smaller classes than those in public schools? Yes. Was it demonstrably better academically than his younger siblings’ urban public school education? In some ways yes, specifically with regard to how to write clearly, think critically, and do independent research, as well as by providing adequate funding for the arts and science labs. Were the private school teachers better than those in public school? In some cases yes, in some cases no, but what my son’s private school had that his younger siblings’ public schools sometimes didn’t was consistently good teaching across the board in every class, every year.
“Why am I pink?” said my youngest, crying, when I picked him up on his first day of kindergarten at the public school in Harlem. “Everyone else is brown.” This was a bit of an exaggeration. Of the fifty children in the inaugural class at this new school, five were pink, forty-five were brown.
“You have different skin pigment than most of your classmates,” I said. “Underneath, you’re all the same.”
“Oh.”
I immediately second-guessed my response. Should I have delved deeper? Not whitewashed our history of Black pain? He was too young, I’d decided in that split second, for me to try to explain the entrenched caste system in America. To teach a five-year-old about the unfair privilege his pink pigment provided in keeping him alive and out of jail. Those lessons, I realized, needed to (and would) come soon enough. But even in his ignorance—and in my choice to keep him that way for just a little while longer—he was privileged. The parents of his classmates did not have the luxury of waiting to tell their young children hard truths. They needed to know now, for their own safety and psyche.
“Conversations about racism and discrimination will look different for each family,” UNICEF explains. “While there is no one-size-fits-all approach, the science is clear: the earlier parents start the conversation with their children the better.”
And while I obviously cannot fix our systemic problems of race or change the U.S. educational system by sending my pink child to a nearly all-Black school, I can tell you what I’ve learned from dealing with the system’s inequalities from several different data points: suburban public (me), urban private (eldest child), test-in public (middle child), traditional low-income public (youngest child), and progressive low-income public (also youngest child). And one of the least discussed issues in this Game of Schools is this: Many parents send their kids to private schools not only for the better-than-average education for their kids, but also for the ways in which being part of the school’s parent community can be of personal and professional benefit to them.
Send your kid to a well-reputed private school in a city like New York, and you can practically guarantee you’ll be sitting in tiny chairs at back-to-school nights with members of the financial and cultural elite. In my eldest’s private school, his classmates included the children of an Oscar-winning director, a world-renowned opera singer, several bestselling authors, scions of boldface families, and leaders of banks and businesses.
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nbsp; Did my son, the scholarship kid, constantly feel “poor” in his private school, and did he get a completely skewed view of what’s normal? Absolutely. He entered kindergarten in 2000, when the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio in the U.S. was 344 to 1. This was also the beginning of the single largest rise in income inequality this country has ever known. By 2019, CEOs of the U.S.’s 350 largest companies earned an average of $21.3 million a year, with Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, topping the charts at a whopping $280,621,552 a year. Meanwhile, the average worker in 2019 earned just $41,442 a year. Which means your run-of-the-mill, average CEO, earning $21.3 million a year, makes $10,240 an hour—that’s $170.67 every minute—while the average worker is struggling to make ends meet on $19.92 an hour, and that’s assuming they’re working only forty hours a week, a large and perhaps laughable assumption. Google’s Pichai (I had to check my calculations three times when I saw this number, because I couldn’t believe it was true) earned a whopping $134,914.21 every hour in 2019. By the time he made a few phone calls, sent out a few emails, and drank his first cup of coffee, he earned more than five times the annual minimum wage salary of the barista who made it.
What does the disparity between $134,914.21 an hour and a middle-class income look like on the ground? Pull up a chair, folks.
As my family struggled to keep up with ruinous rent spikes and medical bills, I watched the wealthier families in my son’s school—fund managers, bankers, business tycoons, the offspring of already well-established pockets of family wealth, and other one-percenters—go from run-of-the-mill rich to private-plane rich between the first day of kindergarten in 2000 and our children’s graduation in 2013. Families that had previously employed both a full-time nanny and a full-time housekeeper suddenly had the means for a separate nanny for each child, a laundress, a house manager, a cook, a driver, a personal assistant, a trainer, a masseuse, and god knows who else was hanging out in all of those newly renovated rooms acquired by purchasing and then breaking through to contiguous apartments, but sometimes I’d pick up my son from a playdate at an apartment twenty times the size of ours and see several household employees scurrying around doing the tasks the rest of us do on our own every night between work and sleep.
I remember, in particular, as we were heading into yet another two-week private school break, during which I’d had to scramble once again for extra childcare so I could keep working, the buffed-to-a-Botoxed-shine mother of one of my son’s classmates complaining at school drop-off about how hard it had been to pack for a spring break that would include one week in the Caribbean, another at a ski resort. “It was such a nightmare!” she said, without irony. “I had to FedEx all of our ski clothes to Gstaad.” Then there was the bar mitzvah held at the top of the Mandarin Oriental hotel, with giant Warhol-inspired paintings of the boy’s face hanging on every available wall, and a room off to the side where party planners had set up a make-your-own-skateboard station. Then there was the time, right after we moved to Harlem in 2009, when my eldest threw an end-of-year party in our new home, before which I received dozens of calls from his classmates’ white parents expressing their concerns about the safety of our Black neighborhood, which, as I pointed out to them, was statistically identical to theirs with regard to crime: specifically 0.8 crimes per 1,000 residents in our Harlem neighborhood versus 0.8 per 1,000 residents in the wealthiest blocks of the Upper East Side.
A bunch of girls from a different private school had shown up drunk to that party, one of them in such bad shape she needed immediate medical care. But when my husband and I carried her outside to rush her to the hospital, suddenly we were surrounded by two giant SUVs filled with Ron Perlman’s security detail, whose job it was to safely deliver his daughter and seven of her friends—including the dangerously drunk one—from my son’s party in Harlem to Perlman’s house in the Hamptons.
“We’ve got this,” said a bodyguard, grabbing the girl. From the other SUV emerged a well-dressed, don’t-fuck-with-me Clarice Starling–type, who rounded up the other seven girls inside with such military precision and swiftness, they didn’t have time to collect their leather jackets or cellphones. The next morning, at 8 a.m., one of Perlman’s drivers rang our doorbell, having been tasked with making the six-hour round trip journey between the Hamptons and Harlem to fetch them.
Even if I’d had the money to send my second two children to private school—which I did not, even with scholarships—I didn’t want that for them. My public school–educated daughter, it should be noted, was admitted to the same college as her private school–educated older brother, so the argument that private school offers a boost for college admissions did not hold water, at least in my family. Today, if you ask my older son if all that money we paid for his private school education was worth it, he’ll say—having watched his sister and little brother learn and thrive in public schools, without having had the added burden of being considered lesser for having less—no.
But, yes. The Harlem principal was absolutely right: Being white in a predominantly Black school in a low-income neighborhood—or anywhere in the U.S.—conferred immense privilege on us. Of course it did and still does. But the prisonlike discipline, subpar teaching, emphasis on standardized testing, and lack of safe outdoor space had become such an issue by first grade that other parents—Black and white—had started to pull their kids out and enroll them elsewhere. When I heard from one of them that a spot had opened up in a more progressive, whistle-free, playground-equipped, super diverse public elementary school farther north, in a predominantly Dominican neighborhood called Inwood (9.1 percent Black, 15.1 percent white, 72.4 percent Hispanic/Latinx), I took it.
His new public school, in which he would thrive, actively discouraged its culturally and financially diverse population of parents from allowing their children to take the statewide standardized test biased against them, which, every year, did little to actually assess student performance or intelligence in low-income neighborhoods such as ours. “Opt out,” we were told, a growing rallying cry in New York City public schools, where teachers were growing tired of teaching to a test geared toward white, middle-class children with personal experience with words such as fireplace and lawn mower, neither of which many low-income Black or Latinx kids had actually seen with their own eyes, instead of teaching children of all colors and socioeconomic backgrounds actual skills, literature, and history. The fact that our son had landed a coveted spot in a racially diverse public school that had both these principles and an empathic principal felt like a miracle.
My husband understood this, as well as his daughter’s desire to finish her last two years in her beloved high school in the Bronx. I understood that his move across the country might come to naught. And so all the theoretical talk of uprooting the family for the sake of his Silicon Valley dreams was quietly dropped.
“You sure you can’t come to Chicago with us?” I said. The sight of his tears had softened me, reawakened the love that had forged us, our kids, a life. “Delay your departure by a day or two or even drive with us and leave from O’Hare?”
“No,” he said. “I can’t. I have to go.”
Our college-bound son had planned to take a gap year between high school and college, but at the last minute—as in six days earlier—he’d had a change of heart. It had been a scramble to get him re-enrolled and assigned a dorm room; to find a hotel room near the campus for move-in day; to pay his first semester’s tuition out of an empty bank account; to enlist friends back home in New York to feed, house, and get my little one off to second grade in his new school the three mornings I’d be gone.
“You can just change your ticket,” I’d said to my husband, once the new plan had taken hold. But our finances were in such shambles that he did not want to spend the money to change his one-way ticket to San Francisco. Plus he was, by nature, averse to sudden changes in plans. Six days had not been long enough for him to get used to this new reality: His firstborn
son was leaving home.
“Okay, so…” I said. “Take care of yourself.” Our twentieth wedding anniversary had come and gone, unnoted, three days earlier.
“You, too.” My husband—no, from now on I would have to refer to him as my ex—turned away and hopped into the back of the car, with its easy-to-remember telephone number—777-7777—emblazoned across the back window. As the lucky numbers blocking the back of my no-longer husband’s head disappeared up St. Nicholas Avenue and over the horizon, I felt unlucky. And sad. And pathetic. Is this how you end a two-decade marriage? I wondered, choking back tears.
Love is not a light switch. Whatever alchemy draws two humans together in marriage cannot suddenly be extinguished as the curtain falls on that union, however troubled. Love is a dimmer, vacillating up and down between blindingly bright and barely perceptible, sometimes several times within a single hour. At the moment of my own marital implosion, I could actually feel love’s light expanding, spilling out beyond the event horizon, brighter than it had burned in years. Then again, the memory of a star is not a star. It’s an illusion of a former twinkle seen from light-years away.
My eyes bulged with pressure seeking immediate outlet, but I could not allow myself to release the floodgates yet, because then I’d have to explain my tears to our son, who’d just emerged from our front door toting two guitars and a box of linens, oblivious to what had just transpired between his parents.
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