Reply to What does the term “good schools” mean to you?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m still trying to figure this out. For me it goes beyond the test score listed on great schools. What else makes up a good school? We are house shopping and see some with lower scores but the community loves the school, while others say they don’t want anything to do with the school because of the score. I live in Howard County.[/quote]

We struggle with this too. We have also looked at a possible move to Howard County and have heard people describe the various HC districts in similar language. We currently live in Baltimore City and are sending a first child to private school, but we have considered the public schools. In other words, we've thought seriously about schools that fall across a full range of profiles.

At the same time, my husband is seriously considering leaving a higher-paid career for teaching. It will require a total reboot of his career to teach English / writing. He is trying to figure out if it is possible to transition into teaching a private school from a non-teaching career (with some supplemental, part-time experience with teaching); he is also looking at programs that allow mid-career professionals to transition into public schools. In our area, this usually means teaching in a high-poverty school.

So from various angles, we keep dancing around this question! What really bugs me about it are the contradictions in what we value and consider "good," based partly on our life experiences in very different communities. On one hand, it is easier to learn and achieve when most the children in a class arrive ready to learn and have immediate, predictable access to support from someone who understands how the game of school works. Our current institutions are amazingly consistent at recognizing and replicating existing systems of power, at working with what they are given. As a result, in many respects "a good school" really is a place where the socio-economic profile of the student body is high. To find that, you just look up the test scores. They automatically follow one another with only small variation. On the other hand, we also value community-oriented institutions that are meeting places between different groups of people. Being seen and valued -- having a community that strives for that end, and being in a community that small enough to make it possible -- and learning how to see and value are important to us. I'll walk a long mile to find it. Test scores be damned.

On a semi-related note, there's an undercurrent in the discussion where families who lack wealth are being painted with a broad brush. It is true that poverty often means families who don't understand or value the importance of education, because it just does.not.mean.anything to them economically or personally. You really can't see this unless you have previous experience with it being a real "meal ticket." That said, please be careful not to generalize too much. If you live close to these communities and interact with them, you will also find that there are also a lot of parents who really, desperately to want school to be safe and positive. They don't have the ability to launch their kids and supplement a lot, which is also why the need and want schools to work. I've sat next to people in charter school lotteries who aren't going to be tutoring algebra, but who are white-knuckled in the hopes of having their number pulled and in the idea the charter might change things for their kid. I know people who have been destroyed but who also have succeeded come out of the backgrounds we look past. They've done a lot on their own steam, and with what resources they did have. I really worry about a picture of community that cuts these people out or never lets them get in the door.

This all has driven us practically crazy when we try to decide whether to place ourselves in private schools (high-functioning, small communities); in distressed public schools (lots of need, but lots people needed in the trenches too); in higher performing public schools (large schools, with a lot of wealth), or under-rated more diverse publics like the "5" or "6" schools in HC (which  some describe to us as a "community-oriented"  and some say they won't touch with a 10-foot pole). I would love to understand Howard County better, as well. I have no experience, but have a suspicion, that the more middling HC schools might have an interesting mixture of students. They seem demographically balanced, without one group totally overwhelming another, which is very different from what we see down in Baltimore, where pockets of extreme poverty and relative wealth seem to pool in locations. [/quote]

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