It is no great surprise that humans care for their children over all others, but the deeply human need to care for “our children” over the children of a community or a society presents some significant challenges for policymakers and those interested in improving social, economic and educational outcomes for children who grow up in poverty. The new child tax credit passed as part of the American Rescue Plan is projected to reduce child poverty and have a positive impact on these outcomes, although it may not end up being permanent and thus might not have a significant long-term impact.
I’ve been considering these challenges over the last ten years as I’ve taught children living in poverty in East Africa, and on Chicago’s Southwest side. It is clear that children everywhere have tremendous potential, but unfortunately, many children across the world not only lack access to opportunity but also have to surmount some fundamental life challenges to achieve success whether those challenges are malnutrition or a variety of other adverse childhood experiences.
With those challenges in mind, I’ve been reading Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children, which is a really fascinating argument for children as natural learners and innovators that synthesizes Gopnik’s research on child development and her experiences as a mother and grandmother into a very readable and thoughtful perspective on parenting’s rewards, challenges, and ethical dilemmas. I’m anticipating writing more about some of its insights on teaching and learning, as well as some of the connections that might be made to artificial intelligence. As I transition from four years of public school teaching in Chicago to private school teaching in Saint Louis, I’ve been considering the impediments to a society that provides more opportunity to its least fortunate children, Gopnik writes:
The impulses that lead us to care so deeply about “our” children, even when those children aren’t actually related to us, can lead us to be indifferent to the children of others. For contemporary parents, the public school system is a dramatic example of this. I may believe that it would be better for all children if all children went to public schools, but that it would be better for my children to go to private ones.
As a graduate of public schools, and as a believer that all children deserve access to high-quality public education as a critical foundation for democracy, you might wonder why I would ever consider teaching at a private school where parents pay $30,000 a year to send their children to school. Nevertheless, I will be teaching at such a school this coming school year, educating the children of some of the most well-off families in the Saint Louis area. I took this position for a number of reasons, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at all internally conflicted about the chice.
To begin, honestly, I am curious as to what education can look like in an elite private setting. I had former students at Abaarso go to elite private schools, and saw firsthand how the opportunities at these schools helped propel my former students into elite institutions like Brown and Columbia. Although private secondary schools generally serve the wealthy, they also offer generous and life-changing scholarships to lower-income families. What do these institutions look like from the inside? How do they operate? How do their stated values align with their practices? What do teaching and learning look like? How transformative will it be to teach in an environment unconcerned with SAT practice? I am hoping to learn from the inside how the wealthiest people in the country pay to educate their children, and to use this knowledge to continue to advocate for high-quality public education for all. I’ve loved teaching in Chicago, but the bureaucracy of teaching in a large public district has been endlessly frustrating.
Additionally, I believe that all children deserve access to a high-quality education. Although I have felt called to teach low-income students as a form of service, wealthy students are just as deserving of high-quality education. And perhaps in this setting, a seat of wealth and power, my teaching can be as impactful, or more impactful, as it was in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood or in Somaliland. If my teaching is more impactful as a result of the resource-rich setting, it raises all sorts of questions around the resources put into “our children” versus the children of the poor and middle class.
The reality is that even in Chicago, the differences between the well-resourced selective enrollment public schools and the under-resourced neighborhood schools were vast. Admissions to the top selective schools are incredibly competitive, and parents do everything they can to ensure their students end up in these schools. Then, they contribute financially to these schools to ensure their students receive a world-class experience. The same can be said for the difference between a well-resourced suburban school district like Oak Brook and a poorer district like Oak Lawn. There are really fundamental differences in the quality of education received between the districts, and parents do their best to end up living in good districts. Parents want what they identify as best for the children, and the public school system’s base on local property taxes means that inequality is a core ingredient in public education.
Our system is public education is fundamentally inequitable, and the reality, as Gopnik identifies, is that for better or for worse parents are going to look out for their children. It’s a basic human impulse. The question is, how can government work to ensure that all children have access to opportunity? That’s a question for another day.