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Send kids to best school you can afford

A couple of first-generation college grads recently wrote to “The Ethicist” advice column in The New York Times Magazine with a familiar moral quandary:

“We are struggling with choosing a public school for our son, who will enter kindergarten this year. … Do we let our neighborhood kids and our own values down by fleeing to a higher-testing public school in a richer part of the city? Or do we let our son down by sending him to the neighborhood school, which we fear will not put him on solid educational footing?”

The Ethicist responded: “You don’t owe it to all the other children in your neighborhood to give their interests the same weight as their parents do. Your special obligations are to your own child. … And what you owe is not heroic commitment, ‘turning the school around’ by your own efforts.”

Predictably, some commenters on the article were disappointed with this advice. They wondered what it would hurt to take a chance and see how it goes; maybe try to make a difference for all the kids at the school.

Trust me, it hurts.

My husband and I were that same couple, years ago. Thinking we could make a difference, we chose to put our sons into our local school — in a district whose student body was nearly 70 percent low-income and had performed so poorly for so long that it had been taken over by the state.

We believed that what we did at home — reading to our kids nightly, modeling good study habits, providing enrichment activities such as traveling and extracurricular music, swimming and martial arts classes — would easily overcome any challenges associated with attending a failing school district.

And we committed to elevating the system.

We attended parent meetings, filled out school-improvement surveys, kept in close touch with teachers, principals, administrators and the district superintendents to address issues from poor teaching to nightmarish transportation (our older son, on his first day of kindergarten, was brought home by the police because of the inept school bus system).

We complained about the junk food served every day for breakfast and lunch, we donated money for programs and scholarships. I ran (unsuccessfully) for the school board.

All that effort amounted to nothing.

Our kids sat in classes with children whose parents simply didn’t have the social capital, income, savvy or time to make a difference in what happened at school. Year after year, instead of getting better, the district — located in a community with a fair amount of middle-class families who started jumping ship for private schools after the second grade — just stayed bad.

The stories my children told after school were outrageous. Teachers who showed videos most days, out-of-control classrooms, kids tossing off insouciant one-liners like: “You didn’t actually expect me to do my homework, did you?” Middle school brought fights, gang activity and an increased police presence.

When it was time for my older son to start high school — the very school I had taught in for a year and knew prepared no more than 24 percent of its graduates to be “college ready” — we fled.

It took a move of less than half a mile to a neighborhood with significantly more expensive homes to get my sons into one of the best public high schools in our state.

Last month, however, I learned how long the effects of a poor educational environment in the early years linger.

My younger son — who benefited from a better school starting in seventh grade, but at the end of eighth eighth grade was so behind that I had to pressure his counselors not to place him in remedial freshman English classes — is underperforming compared with his high school, district and state peers in both English and math, according to the results of his latest standardized test scores. Luckily, he’s doing well in his classwork.

Good intentions and even good actions are not enough to transform a poorly performing school into one that can provide an adequate education for your kids. School systems take decades to turn around — and require a long-term investment, plus local and state political pressure to act — while our children’s formative years fly by.

It’s sad, but do not be ashamed to send your kids to the best school you can possibly afford. You’ll likely regret it if you don’t.

— Esther Cepeda (estherjcepeda@washpost.com) is a Washington Post columnist. Follow her on Twitter: @estherjcepeda.

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