What Are Public Schools For?

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Fall is back to school season, and while kids are starting classes, adults are lamenting the abysmal state of public education in America.

Are public schools failing our kids?

Or have we forgotten their purpose?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic, Atlantic.

And with me in the studio today is Aaliyah Wong, our education editor.

Hello, Aaliyah.

Hey, Matt.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

How are you?

I'm good.

Thank you.

We are, for the moment, without my co-hosts, Jeff and Alex, but they will be back to join us in the second part of this conversation.

So,

is it actually too late to have a conversation about back to school?

No, I'm giving you a pass since it's the whole month.

We'll consider it back to school season, and it's still summer technically so yes and we are to be fair always you and i are always talking about

and like pedagogical jargon we're talking about like social emotional learning yeah great

stem steam

yeah

the every student succeeds etsa

i love all the acronyms me too

but

I recently realized that I think all of these kind of jargony debates, these fierce, fiercely argued argued policy debates, come down to one basic, big, hairy question.

What are schools for?

And in particular, what are public schools for?

I came to this realization after reading this essay by the educator and education scholar Erica Christakis in our October issue called The War on Public Schools.

And in this story, she points out that sometimes it seems like there's only one thing Americans can agree on when it comes to their public schools.

They're failing.

We've let our grades slip.

Our schools crumble.

Our teacher quality falls short.

And other nations outpace us.

American education has been losing ground to other countries for at least half a century.

You wake up every morning and you know that 46,000 kids are counting on you and that most of them are getting a really crappy education right now.

Our education delivery system in America is antiquated and it is quite frankly embarrassing.

There's no failed policy more in need of urgent change than our government-run education monopoly.

It's super interesting.

There's actually this great disconnect between how Americans feel about their local public schools and how they think about public education as a whole.

So Gallup and PDK have been polling parents for decades on how they feel about public schools.

And they've consistently found that parents actually give their kids schools high grades, like A's and B's.

But when they grade the nation's schools, they give them C's and D's.

There's a huge disconnect between what they're feeling.

We like our kids' public schools, but we think that schools in general are just gone down the two.

Right, right.

And this split has been growing over the decades.

Parents are increasingly upset with the nation's public schools, but they're increasingly confident about their own public schools.

It strikes me, though, that in all this talk about how parents rate their schools, whether schools are doing a good job,

what I'm missing is there's a lot less talk about what schools are good or bad at actually doing.

We hear a ton about school performance.

We hear a ton about failing schools or succeeding schools.

And the debate, as Erika Christakis points out, really skips past this question of what the schools are trying to do.

And she argues that to really take on what should happen in public education, we need to understand the roots of the American public school system, where it came from, and what it was originally intended to do.

I called her up the other day and we spoke about this, and she said that to understand this.

You have to really go back to the year 1642, which is when the Puritans in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Puritan elders, passed a law ensuring a public ensuring education to every child in the Commonwealth.

I mean, it it was the first of its kind in North America, but the Puritan elders assumed that this education would be provided by parents in their homes.

Now five years passed and

they realized to their astonishment that parents really weren't up to the task.

whether they were not interested, you know, the motivation for this was that the Puritans really believed that being literate was essential to read the scriptures.

And they really saw education as sort of part of being an orderly society, a hierarchical society where children would learn the rules of

being a good human being.

So in 1647, five years after they passed this pretty groundbreaking law, they realized, okay, whoops, this is not really working the way we envisioned.

So they went back and they issued a corrective.

And it has a wonderful title.

It's the Old Deluder satan act and the idea was that satan was sort of deluding people into following these awful satanic ways by remaining in ignorance so what they said was every district every community with more than 50 kids 50 families rather had to at taxpayer expense provide a teacher and for communities of more than 100 they had to provide a schoolhouse i wonder if we could lobby our secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, to call the next school reform effort the Old Deluder Satan Act.

Can we please?

Then I wouldn't ever need to use an acronym again because that name is so awesome.

So fast forward to the 21st century, Betsy DeVos is at the helm of the Education Department.

And there really isn't any doubt that every child should have access to a good public school.

The idea of universal public education, everyone agrees on that.

But that's pretty much where the consensus stops.

There's a lot of disagreement about

why every kid should get a quality public education.

What is the purpose of public schools?

And when you're talking about the purpose of public education, after 1642, the name that's usually summoned is Thomas Jefferson, who first proposed Virginia's system of public schooling.

In May 1940, the president of Harvard referred back to Jefferson's vision in a speech we published called Education for a Classless Society.

Your favorite.

Yes.

We talk about it a lot.

He wrote, quote, Jefferson deemed it essential to a well-ordered republic to annul hereditary privilege.

He believed that any boy or girl was capable of benefiting from the rudiments of education and would be made a better citizen by acquiring them.

Even free schools offer a little real opportunity to famished youngsters, though, the Harvard president reminded us.

Public education is only theoretically available to those in rags.

So, this is one way of thinking about education, that it's really a public good that we all buy into for the sake of an educated citizenry.

But there's also this vision of public schools as basically a training ground where

kids will develop the skills they need to go into the workforce and contribute to the economy.

And it's that latter view that has really contributed to this sense that education is a marketplace and that schools are commodities within this marketplace.

And that they're about training workers

for a future marketplace that companies companies are going to choose.

Right, right.

And this also sort of creates the system in which parents are effectively choosing the best schools for their kids to give them a leg up in society.

They're not thinking, oh, I want to send my kids to a school where there are kids from all backgrounds and they will develop the skills they need to just be active citizens in.

the world.

They're looking for schools that will prepare them to be thriving members of society economically.

Yeah, Erica told me something similar to this.

And I think that's a really interesting theme that runs through American education, this tension between, on the one hand, parents really wanting what's best for their individual child, and on the other hand, viewing education, public education, as part of our commonwealth, you know, and

really seeing it as a public good in the same way that you know, a strong military is a public good or clean water or a non-corrupt judiciary.

And I don't think we can really deny that the way the current economy is set up really compels parents to feel like they need to prioritize their kids' individual interests over maybe society as a whole.

They want their kids to attend good colleges, and seats at these good colleges are becoming fewer and farther between.

So, this pressure kind of filters down through the grade levels to high school, then middle school, even preschool.

So, kids or parents are thinking about these things from the minute their kid is born, if not beforehand.

And it kind of fuels this rugrat race, as some scholars would call it.

Absolutely.

I mean, I have friends who've, before they

made the decision to have kids, they decided where they were going to live because of the school district that they'd be living in.

And I think that given the economic ramifications of where someone went to school and what their education pathway looks like, I think it makes complete sense that parents would think that way about school.

Yeah, it's totally understandable.

And this is why the act of choosing a school has effectively become almost an act of shopping.

And it's in the shopping process in which they rely on what they think, at least, are objective measures, showing what the best schools are.

I've spoken with this education historian, his name is Jack Schneider, and he argues that this widespread perception that all of America's schools are failing comes back to this idea that standardized test scores are the one way we can measure school quality.

And this traces back to No Child Left Behind and a greater focus on holding schools accountable for student performance.

And standardized test scores, you know, they're a reliable and consistent means of measuring school quality, but they're hardly the best way to get a sense of how well a school is doing and how well its students are doing.

And so Jack Schneider basically argues for a more nuanced and customized way of measuring school quality.

Yeah, but even if we do get more nuanced, more customized scores for schools, we're still in this position of thinking of schools sort of as products or commodities targeted to individual kids and families rather than, say, public schools as a collective system for creating an egalitarian society.

You know, the other day I was listening to this really fantastic conversation between

about America's school system between two fantastic education reporters, Christina Rizga and Nicole Hanna-Jones.

A lot of our listeners are probably familiar with Nicole's work.

She's published eye-opening stories, including a big story in our own pages, in partnership with ProPublica, about one of the biggest forces affecting the education landscape in America.

That since 1954, since Brown versus Board of Education, America's schools have increasingly become resegregated.

In that conversation, Nicole makes this point.

Public education, by its very definition, is a socialist institution.

It is everyone pays in for everyone to get something for free.

And we all are supposed to get the same thing.

But now

we have introduced these market-based principles, and education is about competition.

And how can I vie to get my child into the best school?

And we should have choice.

But as we know, in a system of capitalism, choice means there will be winners and there will be losers.

And as we know, in a racialized system of capitalism, who the losers will almost always be.

And so we have been seduced by this notion of choice because it makes sense, right?

But it actually doesn't.

The very best instincts of public education are not about competition, but about ensuring that every child, no matter where they come from, gets a basic education that will prepare them to become citizens.

Of course, it's never actually been true.

Nicole describes Brown versus Board of Education as the most important Supreme Court decision of the 20th century, if not ever.

And she makes this electrifying case that the decision, if you've never read it, really, really needs to be read.

But what Brown was really about was citizenship and caste.

And it was understanding that

what Chief Justice Warren says is that education is probably the most important function of government.

And that a child who's deprived of a quality education has very little chance of succeeding in life, but also of reaching their full citizenship in this country.

And Brown was about undoing caste.

It was about understanding that there was a stigma and that segregation was not a benign segregation.

The segregation was designed to stigmatize black Americans.

It was designed to keep black Americans in second-class citizenship.

And integration was really about black children getting their full citizenship and then being able to become fully American as adults.

We have lost sight of that clearly.

I think we don't talk about public education in that way.

We talk about public education in terms of how are test scores at a school?

What's the curriculum?

Brown doesn't mention test scores.

Brown doesn't mention an achievement gap.

Brown is unconcerned with those things.

I think one of the biggest lessons we've learned in the decades since Brown v.

Board was that even with a really clear, straightforward judicial standard in place, the government simply cannot force parents to send their kids to school they don't want to send them to.

Parents like to feel like they have a choice, like they're opting into their own public school or private school or whatever school you have.

They can just leave a school district, they can move to the suburbs, or they can simply create their own school district, which we're seeing happen a lot.

Yeah, and in the decades since Brown v.

Board, like immediately afterwards, the government did have some success at aggressively enforcing desegregation, but

that was highly unpopular.

And in the decades, more recent decades, parents, through their choices, have taken our school systems in a different direction.

Desegregation has retrenched.

Nicole makes a version of the point that you just made about school choice, which is that the mere fact of having some choice is alluring for parents.

It's something that parents want, whether or not you even buy into test scores as a measurement of school quality.

And it can be particularly compelling for parents in low-income areas whose choices are limited by that socioeconomic fact.

I don't think all schools with low test scores are failing schools, but I have spent a lot of time in low-income schools that actually are failing their kids.

And those schools know that those kids are going to come no matter what because they don't have an option.

And then you have a charter company that will come in and they may not be producing better results, but at least the parent feels like I have a choice.

Like you're sending me glossy brochures in the mail.

You're courting me.

You're wanting me to come in.

Right.

And if you talk with proponents of these more market-based approaches to public education, school choice, if you will, they'll say it's partially about giving lower-income kids an opportunity to attend schools that they wouldn't otherwise have access to, whether it's because they live in a poor neighborhood or because they don't have parents who have the social capital and resources to find these better schools.

And that's

a big part of why proponents of school choice will say this is

a means of ensuring equality and leveling the playing field.

I mean, even Betsy DeVos in some of her speeches on American education has said that in focusing too much on the problems of education as a systemic issue, we have failed to think about the needs of individual children.

If we really want to help students, then we need to focus everything about education on individual students, funding, supporting, and investing in them, not in buildings, not in systems.

I keep thinking about this story that Nicole Hanna-Jones told during that conversation with Christina Rizka about, she told this story about her own daughter, who attends a school that's in a high poverty area, almost all black families.

There was an incident where there's a little boy in my my daughter's class.

He lives across the street in the projects.

His mother was killed.

He's being raised by a stepmother and just a lot of problems in the home.

And

so he acts out, understandably.

I mean, I have a bad day at work and my husband doesn't want me to talk to him.

So

this, you know, he lives a hard life.

And my daughter came home and she said that he had kicked her.

And And

I don't,

I don't know if white people get raised the same way, but we were taught like you couldn't hit someone, but you could defend yourself, right?

So

I had taught my daughter, never put your hands on anyone, never hit anyone.

And so when he kicked her and she comes home and I'm like, well, was a teacher there?

She was like, no.

And I was like, you know, then I had to give her the talk that you don't have to let anyone.

hit you.

And we talked about it.

And I was telling her, like, you know, it's not okay for him to ever put put his hands on you, but you have to understand that he's going through a lot and he's acting out because of things that he's going through.

And my daughter sat there and we talked about it.

And then she said, I want to give him something.

And I was like, what do you want to give him?

And she was like, he loves teddy bears and he doesn't have one.

And I want to give him one of my teddy bears.

So

I get, I get, it was a proud parenting moment, I'm not going to lie.

So she went upstairs and she picks out a teddy bear and she takes it to him to school the next day.

And she said, mom, he was so happy when I gave him that teddy bear.

And I, and I thought, that's like, that's why she's there.

Wow.

Right?

Yeah.

That lesson, a lesson about navigating a society filled with people who are different than you,

different socioeconomic situations, a lesson about altruism and empathy.

How on earth do you possibly wait a lesson like that

against a school getting great math scores or with a killer IB program?

What are public schools for?

In a moment, we're going to hear from two parents, my co-hosts, Jeffrey Goldberg and Alex Wagner.

And we're going to ask them that question.

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And we're back.

And this time, my esteemed co-hosts, Jeff and Alex, are back with us over there in New York.

Hello, Alex Wagner.

Hello, Matt and Jeff.

And hello, Jeffrey Goldberg.

Hello, Alex and Matt.

Sounds like we're reading from a really simple script.

Hello, Alex and Matt.

And we're very unsure of what each other's names are.

We have pictures taped to our screens just so we can know who we are.

Okay.

Well, Alex, of course, is

over in New York headquarters, but here in D.C., we've got me, we've got Jeff, and we've got Aaliyah still with us.

Hi, Aaliyah.

Hello.

Hi, Aaliyah.

How are those New York headquarters, by the way, Alex?

It's only the top of the line, acoustics and sound systems.

I would like to refer to it as the glass-enclosed nerve center from now on.

Yeah,

it's very much like that.

I suspect your top-of-the-line studio is actually way fancier than our top of the line studio.

It's possible.

It's possible.

Did a cat eat a lot of the foam batting off your wall?

No, but a roach might have it.

You have roaches.

Our roaches are bigger than your cats.

Let me tell you.

God love them.

Jeff and Alex.

Yes, Matt.

You both went to public schools.

Yes.

You both graduated from public high schools.

Alex, is that true?

Yes.

And it was actually quite a battle

getting the pass to attend public high school in Washington, D.C.

But yeah,

I am a product of the D.C.

public school systems elementary through high school.

What do you think was the most important thing that you got out of that education?

Well, so I actually felt really, really strongly about continuing with a public education when I went to high school.

There was a sort of break, a natural break that happened after junior high school where a lot of my friends went off to public, a private school.

And my parents assumed that I would do the same and had me visit all the very Tony Washington private schools.

And I actually applied to and got into one of them that shall not be named.

And they were pretty adamant that I had to go to this school.

Does it rhyme with Schmidwell?

It does rhyme with Schmidwell Drenz.

And

Lee and I are starting

our own school.

We're calling it Schmidwell.

So I, you know, I

maybe it was a sort of like self-radicalization, but I felt like it was really important for me to invest in the public, like to invest myself in the public school system.

And I felt like one of the most important sort of lessons I'd learn as a, or continue, as it were, as a student in the public school system was learning the stories of other people and being surrounded by people who weren't like me, especially growing up in northwest Washington, D.C., which can be a pretty homogenous place.

You know, I kept reassuring my parents, I said, trust me, I will go to a college that is just like Schmidwell-Drens, and you won't be dismayed at my higher education.

But they were concerned about my safety.

I mean, coming off of the 90s, there was a lot of violence in public schools.

There have been shootings at Wilson, which is the senior high school I eventually attended.

And they were concerned I was throwing my life away.

But I was, I thought it was really important that I understand kind of the

nature of the world as it was and made a really, it became a major, major fight in my high school, in my high school, in my house.

I eventually won out because I just said I was going to go to Wilson, even if they enrolled me at Schmidwell-Drens.

And I did.

And it was an amazing experience.

But the thing that I learned is something that Erika Kristakis points out, which is when we ask what public schools are for, yes, there are the lessons, but there is exactly what Nicole Hannah-Jones points out.

The truer, deeper, more meaningful understanding of empathy,

the fundamental

sort of deep-rooted understanding in

the mixed nature of

the world, which isn't just racially, but socioeconomically.

And

it's about understanding that that people are going to be mean and different and difficult and and learning to navigate those challenges has been hugely important to me in my adult life.

And I don't think I would have gotten that in any other place.

So that, I mean, that to me is what, I mean, I also got a good education too.

And in some classes, a great education.

But that experience and those sort of like citizenship lessons almost were why I went to public school.

That's a, you had an astonishing amount of both foresight and purpose as a high school.

Well, that's what they say about Alex Wagner, isn't it?

No,

it's not at all.

Yeah, Alex Wagner.

Very few teams think about that when deciding where they go to school.

Yeah.

Oh, I don't think so.

Is that true?

I don't feel like I ever decided.

I don't even think I did.

Yeah.

I went to school.

What about you, Jeff?

Yeah.

What about you?

Oh, I have nothing interesting to add to this.

Except that I do.

What did you get out of your post?

You went to public schools also, right?

I went to public schools K through 12.

Yeah.

What did you get out of it?

Well, I mean, I think actually

it tracks a little bit with i didn't have the opportunity to go to private school unlike you know luxurious alex over there um

i didn't even know they existed uh i went to majority african-american schools my whole life um sizable white population working class white population not many people like me at all um i i

It's actually interesting looking back,

you know, X number of years back to my high school experience, like eight years.

I mean, I've been out of high school for like eight years already.

Wow.

Yeah, I know.

You accomplished so much.

No, but in the early 80s,

this is a long time ago already.

What I remember, the education was uneven.

You know, I had great teachers and I read great books and I had crappy teachers and didn't do much.

What I remember is,

I mean, Alex puts it better than I could ever do it, but what I remember and what shaped me was the experience of being with people of all colors and creeds.

It was a New York area high school,

being with all kinds of people.

It was rougher than anything my kids have experienced.

And there's a big part of me that wishes that I had given my kids that experience.

They're getting a separate experience.

They're actually getting more of a quality education.

But

this is how I grew up.

And I think it shaped who I was.

And

I read and think obsessively about the resegregation of America.

I mean, this was a place where more or less blacks and whites got along.

We were socioeconomically very similar.

It was a lower middle class, middle class area.

Yeah, and that, and

that had a leveling effect that actually reduced.

Everybody was sort of in the same boat.

It wasn't one group was an underclass and one group was an overclass.

But

I think I, and this is going to sound presumptuous, I think I'm probably a better person because of that experience.

I'm not saying I'm a good person, but I think I understand more.

Thank you, Matt.

I think

I know more about America and I actually, because of that experience, I can articulate what I think America is and what America should be and

what the possibilities are because this was

actually,

it was before, in a way, the Balkanization of our society.

We were more united around certain issues and certain behaviors and certain interests than maybe people are now.

So I saw what the possibility of true integration.

I'm not saying it was perfect, by the way.

But interracial dating, for instance, was, if not a norm, it was not uncommon and

it did not lead to riots.

And this is, I'm talking about a fairly long time ago.

And

this is you know what i think back on it i think about the possibilities that um that i experienced then and wish that more people experienced these things now yeah that was very earnest of me wasn't that that was alex

that was like a nine unusually earnest that was a nine on the earnest scale yeah you dipped into the deep end of the earnest pool

here in radio atlantic we call that the thompson scale that's the thing yeah yeah that's that yeah

but i did not

i did not refer to jane austen and that's the top of the that's the top of the thompson scale right there but anyway

can I just also say, you know, in the 90s in DC, I was getting an Afrocentric education.

I mean, that was the standard.

It was Ghana, Mali, Mali, Songhai, and Benin.

Those were the kingdoms we studied.

We had Afrocentric, it was Chinua Achebe and Langston Hughes.

And like, you know, I remember being excited when we got to Chaucer because it seemed like refreshing and different.

Was it overdone?

Was it like

an overreaction to a previous underreaction?

I think it got a little repetitive, actually, between junior high school and high school, but I actually, I have no complaints about it.

I mean, I think if we over-corrected in that direction, it all balanced out in the end.

By the way, China, Things Fall Apart is one of the best books that I read in high school.

I thank you for reminding me to read it again.

But like any great piece of literature, it's universal also.

Yeah, absolutely.

In my high school, part of my high school literary education was a lot of post-apocalyptic Christian fiction.

And that's because I went to a Christian private school.

My parents.

In Florida, right?

Yeah, in Orlando.

My parents

coming from Guyana, where the thing to do was you send your kid to Catholic school.

The Catholic schools were the most robust part of the education infrastructure there.

So my siblings, when my parents emigrated to North America, went to Catholic school.

When we moved to Orlando, they didn't know where the good Catholic schools were.

So they figured the Christian school is close enough.

And they sent me to Christian school.

And it was a real struggle and a sacrifice for them to do it.

But they did it just because that was how they had been trained to think of school.

Did it succeed in making you an American?

I definitely became an American through my.

So what was the success of the school and what was the failure?

I feel incredibly

got you into a good college.

Absolutely.

I was able to be in my tiny, in my tiny, I graduated in the class of 40, and

knew each other's families and we stayed at each other's houses and most of us had been together for years.

And how many of those 40 were gay, Guyanese, Canadian, Harvard-bound,

future journalists?

Like 30, right?

Exactly one.

Although my best friend, one of my best friends to this day was the other gay Catholic student of color.

Really?

Yes, who came to my school in seventh grade.

Small affinity club.

So on the one hand, I could indulge almost every kind of even tiny interest that I had at this tiny place.

On the other hand, I also learned that evolution had been disproved by science.

Wow.

Well, you know, it is a.

You were ahead of the currents.

Did you believe that?

When you were taught that?

Was it something that you were convinced of or were you skeptical?

Oddly enough, because I was a Catholic in a predominantly Southern Baptist school,

one of the things that I got as a kind of outsider in that setting, because I was a gay Catholic kid of color, and for least at white Southern Baptist school, one of the things I got was this sort of skepticism about everything, about a healthy skepticism, I would say, not a cynicism, but what would ultimately, I think, be useful as a journalist, a journalistic skepticism about dogma and doctrine, what I was being taught.

And I learned to investigate a lot of different sources.

I carried the Catechism of the Catholic Church to school with me every day so that when my classmates asked asked me, why do you eat Jesus and why do you worship Mary?

I could say, here's what we actually believe and here's where that came from and here's how it relates to scripture.

So it ironically almost taught you to think critically.

Yeah.

Huh.

Interesting.

I'm sort of the example of school choice.

You all are an example of a

schools creating a citizen, of a communal public collective education.

What do you think from those vantage points are most important?

How should we as citizens and as parents think about our school systems?

I mean, the single most important thing to me is to redouble on this whole basket of issues is to

redouble our effort to make public schools excellent.

And going to the point of

the Eric Kristakis piece that we just ran in the magazine, reminding people that public schools aren't actually the hellscapes that people argue they are.

I mean, because this should be the great leveler, right?

The public schools should be the great leveler.

And the second piece of that is to redouble the effort to return to,

I mean, I was going to say an integrated reality.

We never really had, except in pockets, some kind of integrated reality in America.

But this is, I mean, and

I really believe that this is the best thing for the society.

You know, you really

actual moment-to-moment, day-to-day integration in all the quotidian stuff, sports together, being in theater together.

I always think about, and I think we've talked about this before, this great Jim Mattis line, the defense secretary, who when he was asked what does he worry about most in America right now, he says it's that we stop liking each other.

And

there's no unim and e pluribus if you don't like each other.

And I think that the public schools, along with the military, obviously, but the public schools are the place where Americans of different backgrounds and different stripes and radically different ideas can actually come together at a malleable age and actually figure out that each person brings something and together we

make the one.

The problem with private schools is that

even private schools, liberal private schools in big cities, is that while they are superficially integrated, they are integrated across one class line.

So it's, you know, in Washington, D.C., for instance, you know, the private schools are living the king dream, but it's not exactly living the king dream.

It's, you know, the, you know, the dream of one one day the children of white lobbyists and the children of black lobbyists.

On K-Street?

Yeah, you know, and it's like, all right, that's something, but it's not the real thing

that I grew up.

Maybe I'm over-idealizing.

Yeah, I just want to say, I want to say one thing about that, because I agree with you.

You know, Jeff is talking about the amalgamating function of public schools, which Erica Kristakis brings up beautifully in her essay.

But, you know, not to wax too too nostalgic about this, there was absolutely tribalism on display in my high school.

And the black kids hung out with the black kids, the Asian kids hung out with the Asian kids, the white kids hung out with the white kids for the most part.

But you cannot escape the fact that there was interracial dating, that people played on the same sports teams, that you'd be in the same classes.

And like, whether by osmosis or actual interaction, it is, I think, especially in this moment in time where we're all increasingly in hermetically sealed vaults with people of the same education, class, political beliefs, et cetera.

It is ever more important for us to be exposed to people who are really, truly, deeply different than the rest of us.

By the way,

I don't want to portray my high school experience as

an ice cream castle.

Remember that Morris Day song?

No, Morris Day.

Ice Cream Castle is by

that.

That's my out music today.

Ice Cream Castles by Morris Day.

I mean, yeah, there was tribalism.

I hung out a lot with

blacks because the Irish and Italians didn't like the Jews.

And so, I mean, the eight Jews that we had.

And so, like,

that was where I went.

So, like, it was a ugly, and there was a lot of fights and there was a lot of, and it's New York.

I understand Donald Trump in a way because we grew up miles apart and everything is ethnicized.

Everybody is the Italian, this, the Puerto Rican, that, the whatever, the whatever, including some really bad language that we don't use on our podcast.

And that, too, is an understanding of America.

I think that's one of the struggles with efforts to really pursue genuine integration is that you can't really override the sort of temptation for students to self-segregate.

And then there are

structural factors as well, like the fact that the whites are much more likely to be in the AP classes and the gifted and talented classes.

Aaron Powell, there's been a strong embrace of public schools in this conversation, but Aaliyah, a lot of parents are making different decisions about the environment that their schools, that their students are in, their children are educated in.

And what as

the those decisions are pointing us towards an increasingly resegregating school system.

Right, right.

I mean, I think

it's a paradox in a way because you can't really achieve full integration if it's left up to parents, but any efforts to kind of control parents' decisions will will only, you know, lead to backlash and they will undermine any efforts to achieve integrated schools.

I think the tragedy of America might be private schools.

I mean, I'm saying this as

a private school parent.

Do you think private schools shouldn't exist?

Probably.

I mean, you know, we can't ban private schools.

Parents have a right to educate their children the way they want.

But

put it this way.

I don't know if private schools are actually morally justifiable in this country.

The war on private schools by Jeffrey Goldberg.

Yeah, well, wait,

coming to an Atlantic cover soon,

sooner or later.

Why?

But, Jeff, how do you reconcile?

I look at Washington, D.C., where I live and where you went to school.

I'm actually arguing against

my own immediate interests, and I'm actually arguing against my own choices.

My kids go to an excellent private school.

But I do also believe in, I do believe in some level of busing.

I mean, I do believe in some level of.

I mean, I guess I'm sort of outing myself as a

throwback public school radical or something like that.

But I mean,

I believe that

we should make

mandatory efforts to mix these populations in order to achieve a more perfect union.

But, you know, easy for me to say my kids go to private school in a city where we do have neighborhood public schools.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But in the near term, and Aaliyah, I would point this question your way, one of the biggest conduits for changing our school system is how our schools are measured.

And what do you see as an education editor?

How could we move towards a system of measuring our schools that takes into account things like the values that Jeff and Alex derive from their public school experience?

Yeah, I mean, I think so this is one of the biggest challenges school districts face today.

And how do you really measure school quality in a way that's sort of consistent in apples to apples across schools?

I think

One ingredient that I think would actually be a really valuable metric is student surveys and parent surveys.

Survey data on school climate, I think that's really useful.

You would be able to somewhat yield the responses like what Nicole said with her daughter, you know, that sort of intangible benefit of learning how to be altruistic and empathetic and how to be just simply a good person.

And I think schools increasingly

are

becoming more aware that standardized test scores and simply math and reading performance is not

a valuable way to really assess schools.

But it, you know.

I would just say, speaking as a parent, I think you're ultimately going to be, and this is the problem that all parents face, parents who think about these issues, is do you want to sacrifice your children for a larger abstract cause, or do you simply looking for the best education your children can possibly find?

And parents who don't think about their children's best interests first are probably neglecting their duties as parents.

Right.

I mean, it's a tough position to be in.

There's this sort of inherent tension to what you choose for your individual child and then sort of what you sort of think about the role of education as a whole.

But it's interesting.

I mean, parents, when you ask parents who do send their kids to private schools why they decided to do so, sort of like what was their main reason, they'll say quality education.

They'll say smaller class

sizes.

They'll say individualized attention.

But it's interesting because studies have shown that

actually the school that you go to doesn't really have much of a bearing on your outcomes.

Actually,

that's true on the college level, too.

I mean, family circumstances, where you grow up, your neighborhood, that

is probably the biggest factor in determining how you're going to perform.

And if you come from a family, like your daughters, you know,

they have parents who are engaged, intellectual people.

They'll.

You're my boss.

I have to.

An earnest intellectual, very deeply earnest intellectual.

I think one of the most important questions we're asking ourselves as a nation right now, from federal policymakers to individual households, is how do we, how should we measure our schools?

The types of measurements that can help you learn whether or not a student is set up to thrive can be really unexpected.

The other day, I listened to an incredibly interesting conversation on the Nerd Farmer podcast between two Washington state teachers of the year in different years who were talking about an important indicator of student success that definitely would not show up on the ACT.

You had the anecdote about

second grade reading scores correlating to do kids feel safe in the bathroom?

That's correct, yeah.

And in our district,

that's the indicator that most aligns with success in reading is that little mark that a fourth grade student will put that says, I feel safe in the bathroom.

So kids who feel safe at school learn better at school.

Alex, I want to close this section with one more question to you, which is, how are you thinking about this decision?

It is such a good question, particularly at this time.

My husband's mother, who was raised in New York City, went to Friends Seminary, which is a Quaker school right here in New York City, not far from our house, and mentioned, you know, she's a legacy.

Her mother went there.

Many people in their family went there and said, you know, they're very interested if you would like to talk to them about sending our son there.

Now, our son is, yes, eight and a a half weeks old, but in New York City, people are crazy about what school they're going to send their kids to.

And I thought, okay, here's the choice right here on my doorstep.

Do we put this kid in Friends Seminary, which is a K through 12 school, and never worry about anything ever again as far as his education?

Or do we try and navigate the New York City public school system, at least for a while, if not for the entire time?

There are great public schools in New York City, but you have to test in to a lot of the high schools that are the best.

And I thought, I have to like, what kind of parent am I going to be?

Now, I don't think that the sacrifice required to go to like Hunter College High School is as great as the sacrifice that Nicole Hannah Jones is making sending her daughter to a school in Brooklyn that is not seen as one of the quote unquote best public schools.

But nonetheless, you know, there is this sense that, oh, am I sacrificing my kid?

And I don't know what we're going to do, to be honest.

I know what I'd like to do, but it's not my decision to make.

And we also need to know what kind of kid this baby's going to be, right?

Like some kids aren't going to fare well in the public school system and some will thrive.

So I'm going to answer your question by not answering it, but only to say, you know, I will definitely grapple with it as a moral and ethical decision as much as anything else in the coming years.

Well, thank you for that.

This is a big old conversation, and I'm sure that there's more education-themed episodes of Radio Atlantic in the future.

But now I'm going to turn turn us to our closing segment keepers.

Jeff, Aaliyah, Alex, what have you heard, read, watch, listened to, seen, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

Aaliyah, our fourth chair and guest of honor?

Well, I'm going to cheat here, and I'm actually going to mention something that you brought up just now in the conversation.

I thought it was really interesting that attending a religious school sort of had the inverse effect on sort of how you viewed the world.

And, you know, it's interesting to think about all the different paths that religious schools can produce.

Yeah,

absolutely.

Since you turned it to me, I'm going to jump the cue

and go next because my keeper is kind of a mood wrecker and I sense that there are cheerier ones ahead.

It's also basically the platonic ideal of a keeper to me because it is something that I forgot.

but was reminded of just this morning, and I want to make sure that I do not forget it again.

It comes from from this incredibly thoughtful and well done, This American Life episode, number 581, Anatomy of Doubt, that was co-reported with ProPublica and the Marshall Project.

I'll throw the link in the show notes.

I listened to the app when it aired back in February of 2016, so I had already known the basic contours of the story.

And this is sort of a spoiler, but I think it only enriches the episode to know this from the beginning.

It's about a woman the reporters call Marie, who's sexually assaulted, reports the rape to the police, and is then falsely accused by the cops, by her closest friends and relatives, by local TV newscasters, of making the whole thing up.

Again, I really don't think it harms the story at all to know from the outset that basically every detail of her initial story was corroborated.

I knew that when I listened to it again, and I have this feeling while I was listening of like, I remember this episode and I remember how this story turns out that she's vindicated and what the implications of that are.

So, do I really want to re-listen to this one?

Because I know how it turns out and it's relatively fresh.

But I have this faint memory that there's another stunning reveal right toward the end of the episode, and I can't for the life of me remember what it is.

So I keep listening through the whole episode and then I hear it.

It's 52 minutes in, and it comes from an interview that this American life producer, Robin Semion, conducted with Marie's foster mother, one of the people who didn't believe she was raped.

I imagine that people will have all sorts of reactions to what gets said in that interview, but I think it's really hard not to be troubled by it.

And I think my takeaway from it is this.

One of the biggest human blessings and one of the biggest human deficits is that our minds are constantly rationalizing our actions and our beliefs to each other all the time.

We make up, after the fact, justifications for everything that we did and everything that we believe.

It helps us process the world, but it also results in some really troubling tendencies.

My keeper.

The darkness within.

I'll say that.

Alex, how about you?

Wow.

So,

I mean, I don't know how to follow that, but I'll try.

A very famous woman came out with a memoir this month.

And no, it's not Hillary Clinton, but Alice Waters,

pioneering chef behind Chez Panisse and really the godmother of the farm-to-table movement in America.

And she has a book called Coming to My Senses, which basically talks about how she effectively stumbles into the world of cooking and restaurants and this whole sort of system of organic seasonal eating.

And the thing that I took away from the book that I want to hold with me to keep, if you will, is this unafraid attitude towards making mistakes.

When it comes to pursuits, I think in this day and age, we map everything out and we think, well, I have to know exactly how I'm going to get from A to Z and I can't make any missteps along the way.

Alice Waters and her friends had no effing idea what they were doing when they started this restaurant and it became something glorious.

And I think too often we work in very circumscribed, sanitized

ways.

And it's a reminder that like fucking up is actually maybe a pretty beautiful thing in the end, and we should do more of it.

Awesome.

Thank you, Alex.

Jeff, what is your keeper?

You're going to be very surprised to learn that it's the Mars Day and the Time song, Ice Cream Castles,

1983, 84, something around around there.

One of the last albums from the time.

People were familiar with the time.

Yes,

I don't know.

It was co-written by Prince.

Yes.

A song and

an elegiac but funky beat song about

no,

it's got some serious funk, but it's actually kind of

it's wistful yearning for a post-racial future in which white people and black people and all different

colors of people can do things together, certain things that teenagers like to do.

It's a very beautiful song.

And I saw it live like a dozen times because that's who I was back then.

I went to a lot of circumstances.

What was it?

Elegaic but funky.

That's elegaic funk.

Are you going to sing it for us?

Yeah.

No.

What's the rendition?

No, because

you know,

we are neither drunk nor high.

I'm not leaving until you know.

So

there is literally a 0.0% chance that I'm going to sing Ice Cream Castles in the Summertime by Morris Day and Prince.

It's a great song.

Aaliyah Wong, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you.

This is fun.

Alex Wagner, thank you for joining us from New York.

Thank you as always.

And Jeff, as always.

Yes, thank you.

Aaliyah, are you sure it's fun or are you just saying that because you have a bunch of senior editors?

This latter part was especially fun.

We're all ice cream castles in the summer time.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Katie Green and Kim Lau.

Thanks as always to the one and only John Batiste, creator of our theme, whose rendition of the battle hymn will play in full after these credits conclude, we want to give a special thanks to Nicole Hanna-Jones, Christina Rizga, and to Inforum at the Commonwealth Club for letting us use part of their conversation.

Thanks also to 2016 Washington State Teacher of the Year Nate Bowling for the use of the clip from his Enlightening Nerd Farmer podcast.

Be sure to give that a listen.

A special request for all of you this week.

I'm sure you have thoughts about the question of what schools are for and stories about your own school experience, and we want to hear them.

So give us a call at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your story and your contact information.

Once again, that's 202-266-7600.

As always, please look for us at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com/slash radio.

And if you like what you're hearing, please don't forget to rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

You'll find detailed show notes linked from the episode description.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

Be nice to your teachers.

We'll see you next week.

Summer time

Summertime

All

in glory

My eyes see the progress of the coming of the law.

He trapped and defended where the great rattlesnakes

had lost the faithful lighting of the terrible Swiss war

his truth is marching on

glory glory

hallelujah

glory glory high

hallelujah

Hallelujah