Writer Sandra Tsing Loh and what our choice of schools says about us
My kids are in a new school this year, a cozy little pocket of precious encircled by mature subdivisions. In the morning, I parachute in from a crustier zip code several municipalities to the east, driving past streams of moms in yoga togs trailing kids on Razors. Each accepts a greeting from the principal, who stands outside the front door every day, welcoming pupils by name. When the mothers melt back into their leafy cul-de-sacs, it’s more slowly, in small clutches of three or four, kibitzing over their hazelnut coffees.
We’ve landed somewhere between Mayberry and Wisteria Lane, but where, precisely, I don’t know. Really, the only thing that’s certain is that the journey has turned me into a raging slacker. I’ve gone from being one of the most functional parents in an urban “beat-the-odds” school to the only mom who can’t remember the week the H-name kids are supposed to bring the snack.
Take Halloween, for example. In our neighborhood, face-paint and a hoodie qualify as a disguise. This year, I was pretty pleased with myself for getting the boys to the costume party in actual costumes. Costumes painstakingly constructed by my sainted mother, who is nice enough to insist she loves doing it even though it’s obvious to us both they’d go as bathrobe banditos again if she left it to me. But still.
As we stepped into the new school, it was clear we really had changed census tracts. Elaborate kid costumes I expected, but the moms! There were so many sexy witches mincing around the haunted disco in the gym in black miniskirts and pumps you could barely see the children.
Mostly the dads stood around taking pictures of the coven on their cell phones. Me, I stood around wondering how my 1st-grader was so familiar with Beyonce’s oeuvre and whether his new friends would ever be allowed to visit our house.
Between the time I spend touring classrooms as a reporter who covers education and the time I’ve spent shopping and stressing on behalf of my own kids I’ve walked through a lot of schools and I’ve developed a few opinions. (Quelle surprise, right?)
First, get your kid the education you want them to have. Not the education some bureaucrat tells you you want, or your neighbors want, or you imagine will reflect glory on you as clever spawner of wunderkind.
Second, any parent who challenges a teacher on the fine points of math curriculum should kindly spare the rest of us his or her vast sense of entitlement and home school already. Do I know whether my child should be thinking algorithmically or algebraically? No, I don’t, which is why I pay taxes.
Third, and most to the point, we’ve become consumers of schools in precisely the same way we’re consumers of everything else: by tribe. In sizing each other up, our own parents considered someone’s synagogue or union affiliation or other marker of who their people were. We still do this — in fact, generations later, trying to talk about schools without considering race and class is like trying to take the pee out of the pool.
But those old reference points have been overlaid with the new rubric of tribe. You know, are you the Whole Foods kind or the Trader Joe’s kind? Pizza Lucé or Papa John’s? Montessori or Waldorf?
I know what you’re thinking. So what if I showed up for the Halloween party not in fishnet stockings but in a 16-year-old Volvo listing under a world-class collection of Wendy’s wrappers? What tribe doesn’t have its nomad outliers?
Plus, what utter mirth I had in store when, back home with my white-sheeted ghost and his black-box brother safely glued to their electronic babysitter, I settled in with Sandra Tsing Loh’s Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting.
As I read, I imagined Tsing Loh, acerbic NPR and Atlantic Monthly contributor, engaged in her own ritual of maternal decompression somewhere on the West Coast. This, I glean from the book, involves rum and Diet Coke, microwave popcorn dressed with Parmesan cheese and cayenne and, during the year chronicled therein, obsessive middle-of-the-night Internet trolling for standardized test scores. (Yes, the popcorn thing does have possibilities …)
Tsing Loh’s might be a household name in certain circles, but she can’t afford either a private school for her two daughters or a house in a Los Angeles neighborhood with a desirable public school. Mother on Fire is a rant about the year she spent trying to figure out what to do about this. I’ll tell you up front that she makes peace with the local public school because it won’t spoil the book. That’s because the fun to be had here is that she skewers pretty much every known tribe of modern parent.
Looking promising at first is the affordable Lutheran school whose developmental assessment her smart but not always compliant daughter flunks. (Tsing Loh charts the intersections of various sects and tuition price-points; if you’re going the parochial route for reasons not spiritual, consider the Baptists.)
Next up is a short-lived attempt to move out of Van Nuys, followed by a storm of despair her husband doesn’t share because he’s busy teaching the girls to pee standing up in the backyard, followed by an episode in which Tsing Loh accidentally drops the effenheimer during her weekly public radio broadcast.
It was 7:30 a.m. and no one complained, but at the time Janet Jackson’s nipple was terrorizing broadcasters everywhere, so the station fired her. Faster than you can say pop-culture iconoclast, Tsing Loh became an unwitting First Amendment rock star. Suddenly, Wonder Canyon, a touchy-feely, super-spendy Birkenstock school so exclusive it doesn’t even give tours was courting her. “My God!” she enthuses, “I’m so relieved not to have to explain my cultural references anymore. I am home!”
Until Wonder Canyon’s fees are revealed. Being a martyr for free speech has its downsides, not least of which it doesn’t fatten one’s wallet. And so Tsing Loh’s daughter starts kindergarten at the lumpen public school down the street, dubbed Guavatorina for its all-Latino student body. Mother digs in and — cue Celine Dion — puts her talents to work writing grants for the little school.
Like virtually everything Tsing Loh writes, Mother on Fire is a great read. Buy it right now, in hardback even. But don’t pretend it’s going to send the Boho classes flocking back to the Guavatorinas of the world. It doesn’t matter what ideological prism you use to view the issue: Concentrations of poor kids make for challenged schools, and thus for tribes no one joins by choice. Tsing Loh’s larger point is still well-taken: Returning legions of middle-class kids to urban schools and insisting our elected officials provide them a decent education just might spark a revolution.
While you’re waiting for it, there are far, far worse things you can do to get a little distance and perspective than pop yourself some popcorn, dust it with Parmesan and cayenne, and settle in with Mother on Fire.
Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis writer.
