F*ck School Choice: A Meditation on Power
by Que-Lam Huynh for UnMargin.org
You should start touring preschools now.
Said a friend, already a mom, when my partner was pregnant with our first child.
It’s never too early to think about what schools you want your kids to be in.
Said another mom friend, right after our twins were born.
How many schools have you toured?
How many schools did you apply to?
Where are your kids going?
Are the public schools any good in LA?
What are the ratings?
How many schools have you toured?
How many schools did you apply to?
Where are your kids going?
Are the public schools any good in LA?
What are the ratings?
How many schools have you toured?
How many schools did you apply to?
Where are your kids going?
Are the public schools any good in LA?
What are the ratings?
None. None. The local zoned public school. Yes. Who cares?
***
My single mom worked so many jobs, so many hours at those jobs, that I can’t remember a time when she went to a parent-teacher conference. (Or is it called a teacher-parent conference? I have no idea.)
I did my own homework and handled my own meals. I did the laundry by hand and hung it out to dry in the backyard. I got myself up early every morning and biked to school, stayed there late and then biked back home to an empty house. Often, I would only see my mom as she was coming home from work in the early morning as I left for school.
That was the deal. She kept a roof over our heads, food in the refrigerator, and clothes on our backs. I kept good grades and did whatever extracurricular activities I could find to build my résumé. I took advanced classes, ran for leadership positions, and played team sports. I didn’t know anything about college in America, but my teachers did tell me that they were looking for “well-rounded” kids.
***
Now I know that being “well-rounded” is really an economic privilege. Which is to say that it’s also often a white privilege. Which is to say that it gives you the power to decide what you want to do with your time and the kind of person you want to be, free of responsibilities, burdens, stereotypes, limitations, familial obligations, and inter-generational trauma.
***
I refuse to teach my toddlers how to read. They know how to spell though, because spelling is easy in the Viet language. Just sound it out, kids.
No math either.
Please don’t teach them how to count or recognize numbers, mom. I just want them to play and learn how to be a kind person.
They can be average, mom. It’s okay if they are not the best at everything.
***
Recently, I was helping my friend clean out his car and found myself giving him a hard time for having flash cards, in Spanish and English, for his 6-year-old son.
H, are you serious?!?
Why are you making M do flash cards?
Just let him be a kid.
Is this how you two spend your time together?
Why are you doing this?
What could you possibly be worried about? He’s a thoughtful, happy kid. Just let him be, man.
H explained that growing up, his parents were relentless. In this familial environment, a strong work ethic and high expectations were normative, regardless of what societal stereotypes said about Black people. His sister is a Berkeley-educated lawyer. He’s a successful clinical psychologist and business owner. He doesn’t know any other way of parenting.
Flash cards in the car. Flash cards while they wait for dinner to cook. Flash cards every where.
His Black friends are the same with their kids, he said. Their parents never let up on them, either.
I just don’t know how to relax on him, Q.
***
It took a few days for all of it to sink in, but I finally understood why my dear friend, a funny and brilliant Black man, couldn’t let up on his kids.
It’s for the same reason that I don’t want my mom to teach my kids how to read or write or do math while they are toddlers.
***
This system, this society, confers more power on those who already have it through their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. Which is to say that in this system, rich white people have power.
The rest of us are left to vie for scraps while fighting amongst ourselves.
Their kids get to go to private college preparatory academies paid for by generational wealth, generated by free and virtually-free labor, back-breaking work done by black and brown bodies on stolen Native land.
Generational wealth that is like blood diamonds but doesn’t think of itself as blood diamonds. Because it is white which means American which means just.
Their kids live in quiet suburbs built by redlining and racist federal loans, connected to urban areas by highways built to keep brown bodies as far away as possible, except to cook, clean, and tend to the children and gardens of course.
Their kids go to well-funded public schools with experienced teachers who have chalk for their boards and books for their classrooms. So so many books. And computers. And art classes and nutritious food and clean grounds and clean air and science and math and literature and drama and dance and music and sports and dreams our kids would never even know to dream.
H’s kids have to prove that they are actually smart. Black people aren’t expected to be smart. Kind of like when Joe Biden said that Barack Obama was “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
But I digress; that was then. They’re BBFs now.
***
All I want is for my kids to be average in accomplishments and far beyond average in kindness. Which is to say that I am secretly hoping that they won’t have to deal with the “smart Asian” stereotype. Which is to say that I am really hoping they won’t be stymied by the “quiet Asian” stereotype. Which is to say that holy shit, flash cards or not, my kids and H’s kids are both fighting stereotypes.
All of this to say that although we now have economic privilege and our kids have access to opportunities that our parents could not provide for us, neither of us really has much power.
I mean, how do you gain power when you spend all of your fuckin’ resources trying not to be a stereotype?
***
There is another layer to this story about power.
You see, many of my most “progressive” friends of all shades send their kids to charter schools and magnet schools outside of their home zone. Or they move to “better neighborhoods” with “better schools” to send their kids to.
My quiet protest is just that – quiet. I can’t bring myself to tell my black and brown friends to “just send [their] kids to the local public school” although I would not hesitate to say it to a white friend.
“School choice” seems to be the only way that these friends of color have found to enact some semblance of power in this racist, classist educational system (like here and here).
But I also know that “school choice” is a mechanism through which our schools remain utterly and shamefully segregated by race and class. I know that “school choice” is what white people say when they want their kids in a school away from our kids and our problems. “School choice” keeps the good white kids away from the “bad” black and brown kids. Unless those white kids have “progressive” white parents who want their white kids to experience “diversity”. You know, just enough “diversity” that little Sam grows up to know that his parents chose to expose him to other shades of humanity despite their overwhelming power and privilege that could have chosen otherwise. Little white child will grow up to be a big, powerful, benevolent, not racist—never racist and yet impossibly racist—white man who will probably choose the same for his children, because: diversity and inclusivity. So then, and only then, for the sake of diversity and inclusivity, would well-to-do white parents choose to send their white kids to a public school with our black and brown kids. They will get involved in the PTA and transform the poor little black and brown school into something that they molded in their image, never mind the wants and needs of the black and brown parents who can’t or won’t or don’t know to or don’t have the power to or don’t have the time to assert themselves at school.
So, it may seem like we gain a little power by choosing to send our black and brown kids to a “better” school 45 minutes away. I get that.
Problem is, “school choice” is only an option for some black and brown families when it is in the best interest of middle- and upper-class white families to have “school choice”. This is what Derrick Bell, the late critical race legal scholar, called interest convergence. In other words, social advances for people of color, be it prison reform or access to high quality education, can only arrive when those advances also benefit—actually, mostly benefit—the white majority.
Concurrently, “bad schools” can only become “good schools” with the investment of liberal white parents when it is in the liberal white families’ interest to get involved. Which is to say that bad neighborhoods get gentrified and their schools get “improved” when white parents decide that these are the best neighborhoods for their families, but never because white parents think that the injustices experienced by black and brown children and families should be remedied.
***
Frederick Douglass said that “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
We should demand better for our children. All of them. I just don’t see how “school choice” – no matter how expansive and how choice-y it is – would ever give us the collective power we are looking for. “School choice” would only ever keep us quietly and desperately fighting stereotypes that we hope our kids won’t have to contend with. And that is not real power.
In this essay, “brown” references political identity, and it includes people of varying shades with varying ethnic and national ancestry, including but not limited to Southeast Asian, South Asian, Asian, Latinx, Middle Eastern and North African, and Indigenous peoples.
Que-Lam Huynh resettled with her single mother to the U.S. at age 11 and eventually found a place that felt like “home” in Los Angeles, CA. She currently is a professor of social psychology at California State University, Northridge. She finds hope and inspiration in teaching and mentoring students, and she strives to be a worthy parent to her amazing children.