A Public School Parent Unloads to his Private School Neighbors By Tom Waldron

In our North Baltimore world, the families are divided into two camps — private schoolers and public schoolers. I’m talking about families with some means, and, generally speaking, white families.

My first encounter with that divide took place years ago, at a Roland Park birthday party for a child who was in nursery school with our older son. The subject was schools and the recent news about a school police officer at Roland Park Elementary-Middle School being shot (non-fatally) during an encounter with a student.

I will never forget his words.

“I can’t believe Mayor Schmoke would sacrifice his children on the altar of his political ambition,” he pronounced. One of the mayor’s children at the time was attending the school. Ergo, this dad reasoned, his children were in grave risk.

I had to cringe a bit, as we were intent on sending our son to the public school, something almost unheard of in the neighborhood at the time. We really couldn’t afford private school, had no interest in moving to the county and, in any case, believed in public schools. T

The Grade Our Family Gives City Schools
This fall, we began our 15th year of involvement in the Baltimore City public schools — first at Roland Park and now, in our final year in the system, at City College. We surely made the right decision.

Over the years, our boys had teachers who brought energy and creativity to the classroom — the English teacher who hammered the boys but taught them how to really write research papers and the social studies teacher who sparred with the smarty-pants 17-year-old boys about American history and politics, to name two. Then there was the endearing Shakespeare production our son appeared in seven years ago, featuring a diverse cast with girls playing male parts and black and white kids appearing as twins.

Some people try the public schools but end up bailing for whatever reasons. And we have many friends who chose private schools; I gave up trying to figure out why, although there are plenty of good reasons to do so. To be sure, I remain envious of the facilities of Gilman or Friends, and I hear wonderful things about many of the teachers on these campuses.

But I have often silently wondered why so many people I know failed to give public schools even a try before enrolling their kids in private schools.

Is the education provided by the local top-tier private schools that much better? Since the private schools don’t release data on standardized-test results, there’s no meaningful way to measure how they stack up to public schools. (And such a comparison would be useless anyway, given the enormous chasm that separates the student bodies at most private schools vs. most public schools in this area.)

If you measure how the schools are doing by the colleges that their graduates are attending, then you can make the case that the best public schools are doing just fine.

Our older son is doing well at Tufts University, and City College had fully prepared him for college work. His classmates fanned out to a number of top schools, including Columbia, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Washington University. This past year, City sent kids to M.I.T., Swarthmore and Pomona, among others.

In some cases, I’m guessing that parents are content to write a check and be reassured that their child’s education is being taken care of. (Of course, it ain’t cheap.) The public schools don’t work that way. They are rougher around the edges and, in our experience, require attentive parents. We have also lived with crime, having known a handful of kids who have been robbed after school.

Sadly, being a public school parent all but forces you to lower your expectations about certain things. In one case, someone at North Avenue retired and for weeks, buses didn’t show up to take athletic teams to sporting events. Things only got better once The Sun reported on the problem, shaming the system to fix it. The missed games were crushing to students eager to compete. It was also the kind of snafu that would not have been tolerated even for a few days by private-school parents.

Finally, there is the question of race. When we first enrolled our older son, he was one of only a few white children in the kindergarten class. I remember wishing there were just a few more white kids, but the thought passed quickly as he settled in. At City, I was momentarily startled that the school was roughly 6 percent white when we first enrolled there. Any unease vanished quickly, and, eventually, our son was elected president of his overwhelmingly African-American class.

Today, the white enrollment in certain public schools is on the rise. One friend jokes that she is considering pulling her son out of Roland Park public school and sending him to Friends — to experience more diversity. We are grateful that our boys figured out how to be in the minority, an experience that should help them throughout their lives.

So, what does it all add up to?

First, I have come to believe fervently that money does matter. Having lived with the physical-plant problems and often-overcrowded classrooms, I have no tolerance for blowhards who say that increased spending in the public schools is a waste, that the funds are squandered on mid-level administration at North Avenue and never reach kids. Since the state significantly increased spending on the schools in the 90s, we are beginning to see real results, with higher test scores in many grades. Another bit of recent good news for city schools: enrollment actually grew slightly, after three decades of almost continuous declines. It’s no coincidence and more money is sorely needed.

Dig into the financial disclosure forms filed by private schools with the IRS and you find that elite private schools spend far more per student than the Baltimore public schools. Back-of-the-envelope calculations show that Bryn Mawr and Gilman spend roughly $25,000 and $23,000 a year on each student, compared to about $13,000 spent on each Baltimore City student. Is the money spent on those Bryn Mawr and Gilman students wasted? I couldn’t say, but I’m sure the parents and alumni who support the school think the money is well-spent.

I try not to complain too loudly about the multi-million-dollar fundraising that private schools achieve. And I’m sure the private school families were happy that the schools built expensive bridges over Northern Parkway and Roland Avenue to keep the kids safe.

As public school parents, we would be thrilled to see more police around the schools, smaller classes and roofs that don’t leak and tennis courts that aren’t rutted by cracks and weeds. It would be nice if some of the big givers who build yet more new facilities for the private schools might turn their attention to the drastic needs in many public schools.

We have been fortunate to send our kids to two of the top-performing public schools in the city. But, the good news is that many other schools are achieving great things around the city — including both charter schools and neighborhood schools in some of our poorest communities.

To have any hope of rejuvenating more of the city, we need such thriving schools in every neighborhood. Indeed, I can’t think of a higher priority for our city.

And I’ll keep being one of those crusading public school parents — but I’ll try not to ruin any birthday parties in the process.