West End: Not All Middle Class Parents Opting Out of Neighborhood Schools
Monday, April 01, 2019
In a March 26 article about the possible opening of a new charter school called Wangari Maathai Community School in the West End, GoLocalProv made a couple of characterizations that I would like to address. One was about “parents in the transitioning West End,” and the other was about the performance of our local elementary schools.
I am a parent living in the neighborhood where this charter school is being proposed. In fact, I co-founded West Side Play Space, mentioned three times in the article, with the school’s founder and two of its board members.
The four of us have a lot in common: we are all middle class, academically well-educated, and love our children deeply. We diverge, however, in the educational path we have chosen for our children.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIn spite of low test scores and warnings from middle class peers (with no direct experience of the city's schools), I and three other founders of West Side Play Space chose to send our children to our neighborhood school, Asa Messer Elementary.
I toured the school with all of these parents, including those now opening the charter school, when our children were four. In every classroom I visited and at every grade level, I saw excellent teaching and learning, engaged students, and a vision of promise, not failure.
That was five years ago. Today, my daughter and her friends are thriving third graders at Messer. And since then, I have learned a lot about test scores and the demographics of our school, which share characteristics with other schools in the district.
49% of children at Asa Messer this year are English Language Learners, meaning they are not fluent in English and are receiving ELL services. All of these children in grades 3 and up must take standardized math tests, even though the instructions and word problems are in English. After one year of receiving ELL services, these children must take the English Language Arts standardized tests.
Imagine arriving to a foreign country as an immigrant or refugee, and within days or months having to take math tests in a foreign language. This is not a conversation about expectations. This is a legitimate reason why you cannot ascertain the quality of a school by test scores.
Test scores do not reflect the intelligence and gifts of the students, the love and commitment of their parents, nor the quality of teaching in the building. As a primary driver of determining a school’s performance, test scores are at best a flawed metric and, at their worst, racist.
Please do not lump all parents together in this neighborhood, not even the middle class ones. We all come with different values, and, while we may share hopes for who our children will become as human beings and as citizens, we have different ideas on how to get them there.
Jessica Jennings is the parent of a 3rd grader and Vice President of the Asa Messer Elementary School PTA.
