Weighing in on the latest school debate

This is Joseph.

It has been a while since we heard from Dean Dad. In his latest column he writes about Nikole Hannah-Jones and her concern about how sending her daughter to a school with educational challenges worked out less well then she'd hoped. 

As expected, his solution is quite pragmatic:

We wound up balancing an egalitarian sensibility with wanting our kids to get good educations by ruling out the bottom but ignoring fine-grained distinctions at the top. My sense of it was that the kids would do well at anything from a pretty good school on up, and we wound up living in pretty good school districts. We weren’t willing to make our kids martyrs to some sort of ideal, and we had no illusions about them saving otherwise-struggling schools on their own. But we didn’t want them growing up in bubbles, either. It seemed to work.

This has the virtue of being the strategy I chose with my own son. Good family support and being engaged with a school that has a decent reputation, even if their specific learning philosophy makes me a bit batty at times.

But it does raise the question of what to do about schools that are objectively failing. Matt Yglesias, who picked the same strategy as I did, has some nuance.  But he still leaves out the hard part. Schools definitely have peer effects. There are students who are challenging in a classroom. It isn't easy to know how to handle this without creating new victims. 

There is also a very big social justice issue here. Buying ones way out of a school system that is in trouble is very objectively good for the rescued kid but it raises questions of why all students aren't being rescued. 

It's a tough problem. But ignoring it isn't the solution either. Mark is out sick but I look forward to his take when he is back.