public school childrenThe Broken Compass: Parental Involvement With Children’s Educationdo not have a universally positive correlationlower
The School That No One Wanted
Phillip Troutman, of Falls Church, Virginia, has two daughters and works as an assistant professor at George Washington University. His kids elementary school student body was 83 percent socioeconomically disadvantaged when they started.
Phillip Troutman and his wife moved to an inside-the-Beltway suburb of Washington, D.C., when their daughters were ages 4 and 1. They didn’t give much thought to the reputation of the local school — it was Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the richest counties with one of best school districts in the country.
So he was surprised to learn their neighborhood school, Graham Road Elementary, was in “the economically poorest elementary school zone in the county, a Title I school
“The middle-class families didn’t understand and made assumptions about what was going on.”
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Graham Road Elementary School
Satisfied with what they had observed on their visits to the school, Troutman and his wife enrolled their daughter, becoming one of the few homeowner families in the neighborhood to do so.
Either Troutman or his wife attended almost every PTA meeting. Troutman, an avid cyclist, organized bike education and safety events, securing grant money to give hundreds of helmets to students. He also advocated for the families in negotiations with the school board when they were considering moving the school to a different site.
Their efforts certainly contributed to the school’s culture and started chipping away at its reputation as the school middle-class families should avoid. And perhaps most importantly, they acted as “evangels” for Graham Road, spreading the word that it wasn’t the scary place imagined by their neighbors who had never stepped foot in it.
“The big lesson for me,” Troutman says, reflecting on his family’s tenure at the school, “was that all this great stuff was already happening at the school, but the middle-class families didn’t understand and made assumptions about what was going on.”
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The School That Wasn’t Interested
Nick Downey of South Bend, Indiana, has three kids and works as a local TV news director. His son’s elementary school student body was 78 percent socioeconomically disadvantaged when he started.
Nick Downey and his family moved to South Bend, Indiana, halfway through his son’s kindergarten year. The boy’s previous school was solid, with an active PTA, high parental involvement, and “great” teachers. Downey says that, even though they were moving their son into a district with a worse reputation, they felt “very confident that he would have a good experience, and grow every day.”
At the new school, they found widespread behavior and classroom management problems that Downey felt sharply detracted from the learning environment. Much of the class time was dedicated to a basic “good citizen” program called CORE (Civility, Order, Respect, Excellence), which Downey feels didn’t really reach the students it targeted.
He felt that his energy would be better spent on his own kids than on a school he thought was practically hopeless.
How to Figure Out the Kind of School You’re Dealing With
“Ask if you can tour the school. If they say no, it’s either a ‘Fortress School’ or a ‘Come-If-We-Call’ school.”
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