When I ask other parents of preschoolers in my urban San Diego neighborhood where they’re planning to send their little ones to kindergarten, the name of our local K-5 virtually never comes up. Because of the “Choice Program” in our district, parents can apply to send their kids to almost any public school in the system. So parents in our neighborhood opt for magnet schools, charter schools or even the garden-variety public school a couple of miles away that gets better test scores than our “zone school” does. Or they skip the public options altogether and commute to schools with the words “Country Day” or “Our Lady” in their names.

Our local public elementary school is a five-minute walk from our house. It has undergone major renovations in the past year, and although it’s not much to look at from the street, the campus is tidy and attractive, with a huge sports field, a brand-new playground, a cute little library, vegetable gardens and whimsical murals and sculptures brightening up the outdoor spaces. The principal is energetic and accessible, the staff turnover is low and the parents who do send their kids there think it’s a wonderful school.

But the kids who attend our local school are not the ones I see at the parks, the summer concerts, the arts fairs and the kid-friendly restaurants in our neighborhood. The majority of the students at our local school have “choiced in” from other parts of town, where the schools have more serious problems than weak test scores. The demographics of the school don’t reflect the demographics of our neighborhood. Our neighborhood is ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, but the student body at our elementary school is not. Only one race (“Hispanic or Latino”) is “numerically significant.” Over half the students are “English language learners,” and 98.5 percent are “socioeconomically disadvantaged.” These descriptors themselves aren’t necessarily problematic, but the numbers are. Ethnic homogeneity of any flavor is not ideal, and the combination of poverty and language deficiency tends to complicate the learning environment. Thus, the educated, middle-class parents whose involvement might change the school culture, raise the test scores and improve the performance and reputation of the school instead choose to send their kids anyplace but here.

Nonetheless, I want to send my mixed-race, socioeconomically advantaged, English-proficient twin girls to our local school when the time comes.



A few months ago, I got a text message from a parent I know regarding an Internet discussion group dedicated to issues facing our local school. I checked it out immediately. Soon, a group of us parents were eating pizza together as our preschool-age kids tore through the immaculately remodeled Mission-style home of the couple who had started the chat group, discussing the radical idea that if we all sent our kids to the local school, their presence and our involvement might transform it into a school that more “people like us” — middle-class, educated, invested in the community — would want to send our kids to. Since that time, we have been meeting with staff and administrators from the school, researching the possibilities of starting a foundation to pay for enrichment programs and proselytizing to any other parents of preschoolers we can find.

I know we are not the first group of starry-eyed yuppies in an emerging neighborhood who think we can draw our struggling local school into the renaissance. In his book “The Diverse Schools Dilemma,” Michael J. Petrilli profiles schools where local parents have tried to change the culture in their neighborhood elementary by enticing middle-class parents to send their kids there. Many of these efforts have met with resistance from the schools’ administrations and their established parent cultures, and some have failed completely. But in one case, a school in Washington’s Dupont Circle, which shares many characteristics with my own neighborhood, became so popular that it was in danger of losing socioeconomic and ethnic diversity because of all the white, middle-class families who wanted their kids to attend there.

When I read that, I think there’s no reason our school couldn’t be one of the success stories. But whenever I hear myself or others use the term “school gentrification,” I cringe. It conjures images of rich folks driving the locals out of the schoolhouse and setting up a colony for their privileged children. But we are the locals here, and we are interested in improving the school not just for the sake of our own kids, but for all of the students at the school, and for our community.

Of all the skepticism I’ve encountered when talking about this movement to transform the struggling neighborhood school, the most sobering has come from my wife. As an Army brat who moved around a lot, I never noticed whether I was in a good school or a bad school, an advanced class or a basic class. I was a mediocre student and a bit of a troublemaker.

My wife, on the other hand, vividly remembers the differences between the elementary schools and the classes she attended, and fears that our kids would be bored and tempted to get into mischief if they were not challenged by the curriculum and surrounded by motivated students. She’s got some support for her misgivings. In regard to the risks of sending one’s kids to a “diverse” (as opposed to majority white, middle class) school, Mr. Petrilli writes, “There is evidence that such [white, middle-class] students learn less when they attend high-poverty schools — those where more than 50 percent of the students are poor.”

Almost 100 percent of the students at our neighborhood school are poor. My wife is not dead set against the idea of sending the kids to the local school, but she is far from convinced that it makes sense. Even if the school really has the potential to improve significantly, she’s wary about our kids being in the first cohort to shake up the existing school culture. Regardless of how much the school changes over the years, they would always be part of the first wave of guinea pigs in the grand experiment. She doesn’t think it’s fair for us to make sacrifices to our kids’ education when (assuming this whole thing isn’t a pipe dream) it will ultimately be other kids, years from now, who reap the most benefits.

The meetings our neighborhood parent group hold are, to a great extent, family-friendly dinner parties with a loose agenda. The main thing we have accomplished so far is establishing that we all like each other, our kids are great together and we want to be involved in their education. I recently had a conversation with a neighbor who sends her kids to a charter school but had attended one of our meetings out of curiosity. “I don’t want to sound like a cynic,” she said, “but you know that there’s no way all of those kids at the party are going to end up at the zone school, right?”

Yes, I do realize that. In fact, I make a point of never saying definitively that our kids will go there. And if they do, I can’t promise that we won’t yank them out and send them to the School for Sensitive Geniuses at the first sign of trouble. Even in the best case, we can expect some attrition once the distance between our expectations and the reality comes into focus. If I end up being one of the parents who bails on this movement, it might make things awkward with some of my neighbors. But, ultimately, I’m not going to let my kids go to a school that fails them.

I’m still bullish on the elementary school down the street though. Instead of thinking in terms of “sacrifices,” I’m imagining an experience in which we’ll all be connected to our neighborhood and its families through the school, which should be a hub of the community instead of a forgotten outpost that happens to be located at its center.