Our granddaughter Sage will be attending the private San Domenico School this coming school year after only completing 4 grades at the public Coleman Elementary School. This was a very hard decision made by her parents. In addition to the exorbitant tuition costs every year, Lauren and Daniel attended public education until college and affirm the value of learning in a “public classroom.” But they also wanted the best for their children that no one would ever question. The middle school was okay but nothing comparable to the quality of public education Lauren and Daniel received when living in Pennsylvania in the Great Valley Schools.
When my brothers and I were growing up in the Roxbury section of Boston in the early 1960s, public education was horrendous! Louise Day Hicks was the superintendent of schools and it was under federal court order to desegregate. My older brother, Philip got into Latin but eventually transferred to English High, the oldest public high school in the nation. I also got accepted into the prestigious Boston Latin School in the 7th grade but flunked out because of the reality that my elementary education was inadequate for me to comprehend the academic work. In my first year, I was taking French, Latin, physics and English.
I left Latin and returned to my neighborhood junior high, the Patrick T. Campbell. The quality of education was nothing like Latin School. We students called the school’s initials to be: “Prison Training Camp.”
By the time, my younger brother, Steven was ready for junior high, the indictment of Boston Public Schools was so egregious that private educational foundations came to aid. Steven was accepted into the ABC-A Better Chance program that believed that when you take ghetto kids out of their neighborhoods, they would have a better chance to succeed. He attended the Solebury School in Pennsylvania (?).
In a funny turn of events, perhaps being one year older or one year younger or just the luck of the draw, I finished junior high at PTC and went to Boston Technical HS. I wondered if I had the chance to attend a private, academically focused middle and high school what life might be like today. When I was accepted at Gordon College, I was required to take a speed reading class to stay up with the assignments. When the professor was lecturing, there were many times when I didn’t understand what the lecture was about. I soon became aware of the fact that I was unfamiliar with the “American canon”—a set of beliefs, histories, cultural realities that’s the context of the society in which we live. Without this context, we referred to students as “under-privileged.” It’s true that we did not have the privilege of a quality education growing up in Roxbury ghetto schools. Rather than learning, the teachers were more prison guards trying to maintain discipline. Rather than after-school extracurricular and enrichment programs, we look forward to the next afternoon street fight. Rather than discovering how the world really works, we were socially promoted to be done with.
I know that our adult children will be making some very tough decisions in the coming years since they will undoubtedly want each of our 6 grandkids to receive the very best in education that they can provide. I hope that they will have “a better chance” than I did.