Education’s Economic Divide

Not long ago, I went on a search for schools in the Portland, Oregon, area that are doing something different. By different, I mean schools whose philosophies provide parents with a real choice between their neighborhood public school and something else.


My findings were both exciting and discouraging. There are lots of great choices out there, but most of them are either private schools, public alternative schools, or public schools with specialized curricula that require a lottery for attendees outside their neighborhoods. So what, you might ask, choice is choice, isn’t it? I’d argue, no. Not all choices are created equal. As a matter of fact, some of the differences between these schools practically make them no choice at all.

Let me explain:

If you’re a parent looking for a school for your child, you’ve generally got two choices: public school or private school. The most obvious difference between these schooling paths is financial. Private schools cost families money while public ones don’t.

So if you’re like me and you can’t afford to dish out thousands (or sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars each year to educate your child, then you’re stuck with public schools. I say stuck, but I’m an advocate of public schools...in theory. After all, I went to public schools, even to earn my three degrees, and I turned out all right, as they say. (I’ll argue against this platitude later.) Besides, public schools are offering students many choices nowadays that they didn’t offer when I was in school.

Charter schools, for example, are great laboratories of innovation, as are magnet schools (to which I did go for a few years in elementary school). Parents can choose to send their students to schools that emphasize the arts, science, mathematics, technology, foreign language, etc. Often times, these public schools, because of their independent nature, can keep class sizes smaller and make decisions about curriculum that “regular” public schools can’t.

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

How Do We Break Free?

If our goal is to create a new kind of school, how do we break free from the traditional ways of thinking about school? I think we have to start with a process of negation: to examine what schools currently are and then imagine the opposite of that, the negated version of reality. It’s kind of like playing a game of “What if...?” Here’s an example of what I mean:

This is Not Your Great-Grandmother’s Oven

My very first teaching job was in a brand new charter school in Fort Collins, Colorado, called Pioneer School for Expeditionary Learning. (It’s now called Polaris.) And our director there, as a way of helping people better understand why our school did things so differently, used to tell this story:


There's a tradition in his family of cutting the Thanksgiving turkey in half before cooking it. It's something his mother did, and her mother, and hers. When it came time for him to cook his own turkey, he asked his mother why they cut it in half instead of baking it whole. "That's just the way we've always done it," she said.