Do You Want to Send Your Child to a Good School, or a School Where You're Comfortable?

Tim over at The Q at Parkside recently posted a thoughtful piece about the many, many things he’s considering (that, essentially, all parents are probably thinking about) while trying to pick a school for his eldest child, who’s not even four years old yet.

Everyone is familiar with the panic and pressure of choosing a school in New York City, and how even getting into kindergarten can be as competitive as, or more than, getting into an Ivy league university. But as tense as the whole process appears, Tim reminds us that it’s going to be okay:

…I know no one who’s ever wanted to go to public who didn’t eventually find a public that worked for them…. I want to assure every parent out there that the very worst scenario is so much better than you’ve probably imagined, that perhaps the very best outcome is also not as great as you imagined, meaning maybe school is going to be just fine, which is probably the way it was for you, though you probably don’t remember it very well, as I don’t, though I remember various awkwardnesses along the way.

One of the things he addresses goes beyond what they’re teaching in the classroom, to who’s in the classroom. He notes that “a lot of parents I talk to, of the middle class variety, many of them white, are basically uncomfortable about integrating a very poor almost all brown-skinned demographic.” Is that something we can all get beyond at this point?

I sort of feel the very reason neighborhoods in Brooklyn get so twisted up is because we don’t integrate effectively, due mostly to fear and ignorance on all sides, and I’ve often felt that the schools and marketplace are the key to the kind of change that could really revolutionize the way we think about each other and ultimately about how we live as a people, a City, a nation. Is it really that big? Hell yeah, I think so. We’re the adults now. The values we teach our kids really DO matter that much.

As a large portion of you are in District 22, which includes incredibly diverse schools like PS 139 and PS 217, what are your thoughts on this — did some change happen that made the schools more integrated, or were they always, to some extent, the way they are now? And for those of you in Districts 15, 17, and 20, do you think there needs to be a change, and how do you think that can happen?

Be sure to check out The Q’s full post, and check back as he profiles several schools in District 17 (the first, of the Lefferts Gardens Charter School, went up today).