We don’t actually have any kids, so it makes these issues a bit less personal. One of our neighbors, [tag]Brigid Shulte[/tag], has an excellent piece in the Washington Post Outlook section, “How Not to Pick a School,” about choosing public school.

We are a white, middle-class family. Our children attend our neighborhood public school, Mount Vernon Community School, two blocks from our house in Alexandria. The student body is 55 percent Hispanic, 22 percent black and 19 percent white. More than 60 percent of the children are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. More than 40 percent speak a language other than English at home. And the test scores, while passable, aren’t among the school district’s best.

It’s a school with the kind of statistics that can so unnerve some white, middle-class parents that they move to mostly white areas — or spend tens of thousands of dollars on private schools.

I’m rather fond of Mt Vernon, it’s seems like the little elementary school that could. I like the teachers and the kids I’ve met. I have this silly idea that everyone in a community should care how children are educated, but I’m just nutty that way. (Incidentally, at [tag]Alexandria[/tag]’s public high school, TC Williams, in my fantasy world, Denzel really is the football coach. Just let me have my fun, okay?).

Is it warm in here?

Many of the public school alums I know have kids in these same schools now, which leads me to wonder how much of the white paranoia stems from the rapid gentrification of the area. Make no mistake, these attitudes have existed as long as I’ve lived here, but the feeling seems to have intensified over the last five or six years. That’s only my perception and could be partially biased by the fact that I haven’t always been a stay at home mom, so I only started getting the full-on mom gossip in the last few years.

I do know that when I first moved here 15 years ago, the fear-mongering was about the Black students, now it’s focused on the Latino students. Not because the demographics have changed but I think largely because of the growing national obsession with immigration.

It’s especially sad to me because the parents are my peers. This is the Sesame Street generation – aren’t we supposed to be past this?

Shulte has covered the education beat for a long time and the whole piece is worth reading. Being a (once and hopefully future) college professor, I’m shamefully not very conversant in [tag]No Child Left Behind[/tag] and so, when talk of public school versus private comes up and the No Child stats are Alexandria schools are brandished like a weapon, I never know quite what to say or whether the speaker is even correct. Or what the data means at all, if anything. I was also woefully ignorant of the fascinating Harvard Civil Rights Project.

“Test scores are an indicator. But what are they an indicator of? The education of the parents and the wealth of the community. They’re not an indicator of how good the school is,” said Gary Orfield, an education researcher with Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project. “People move their kids from the inner suburbs to the outer suburbs on the belief that it’s going to help their test scores a lot. But being in schools with kids of different backgrounds with low test scores will have no impact on middle-class scores. And it could have a positive impact — fostering an understanding of society, being able to collaborate effectively across racial and ethnic lines. That’s the tragedy.”

I’ve gotten sidetracked from my original topic, because I just read the history of Mount Vernon Community School (also written by Schulte) and found it quite interesting. What can I say? History nerd. Plus, prone to digression. But I’m sure I had a point and I’m sure it was profound.

So, um, in closing, read Brigid Schulte’s article, it’s very interesting.

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(“Stay at home mom” is a better answer than “unemployed”, as it scares off the creepy guys at the coffee shop in a way that “married” just doesn’t do.)