Social media–or where not to have a productive discussion about schools

I’ve had the good fortune to live in the wonderful, vibrant, diverse neighborhoods of southeast Atlanta for the past 10 years since moving here from Massachusetts.  And for the past 8 of those years I’ve also had the good fortune of being a parent.  Like many parents, I’ve spent my fair share of time on playgrounds or at youth league games or at one of the many local family-friendly restaurants where talk among parents inevitably turns to schools.  Sometimes I’m a part of those conversations, other times I just happen to overhear parents talking.  While much of what’s discussed is innocuous or legitimately curious about the differences between schools, a good bit of it, unfortunately, is disparaging of one school or another, either directly or indirectly, and my perception is that the more negative talk is usually a parent’s way of feeling better about where their child is (or is not) attending school rather than trying to impart some useful knowledge.  Social media seems to have brought more of these same types of discussions from the playground to the internet with the same range in tone—from good and helpful and informative to resentful and mean-spirited and personal.

I bring this up in my blog this week because in the past few weeks ANCS has been at the center of a few such “conversations” on social media (and I suspect off of it too) and I feel compelled to use this platform to address a few things that have come up for me as a I reflect upon all of it.

First, if you find yourself giving your opinion about a school in which you’ve never stepped foot or about which you don’t really know much, just stop.  For real.  Sharing your views of a school based on what a friend told you about it, a rumor you heard, or even just based on test scores or other info you read online is to share, at best, an ill-informed opinion, and, at worst, a misinformed one.  I’ve visited many schools in the course of my career, and none of them are as bad as the worst rumors about them nor as good as the best of what the word on the street is—ANCS included.  When someone asks me for my take on one school or another, I suggest to them that if they are really interested in learning more about a school then they should go visit it, see classrooms and students in action, and decide for themselves.  Sure, it’d be quicker and easier to just hear from a few friends, but you don’t really know a school until you visit it.  And no one type of school is “better” than another, so I don’t try to substitute my judgment for what might be a different view arrived at by a different parent about what’s best for her student.

What’s also been made clear to me, specifically as it relates to ANCS’s focus on creating a more racially and economically diverse school (the subject of several of these recent conversations) is that some history and clarification appears needed.  When the founding group sought to create our elementary school—the Neighborhood Charter School—in the late 1990s and submitted the first charter petition, students in Grant Park were zoned for multiple different elementary schools (though not Parkside Elementary School, which did not yet exist) and the neighborhood had a different breakdown of racial and economic diversity than it does today.  In fact, when I was hired in 2007 as principal of the middle school that has grown out of the elementary school two years earlier, I was attracted to the school because of its diversity, having studied in graduate school about the benefits of diverse schools through the Civil Rights Project and through working at a diverse charter school in Boston.

Yet in my first few years as principal, I noticed more white, middle class families moving into the neighborhoods around our two schools, driven in part by a desire to gain admittance via the lottery and the first tier attendance zone, and the changing demographics of the school concerned me.  I reached out to the Atlanta Public Schools charter schools office to see what—if any—possibilities existed to set aside a certain number of spaces for students who qualified for free/reduced price lunch or other similar options but was told that such actions were not allowable under current charter law.

Then, between 2011 and 2013, our two schools merged to form a single, K-8 charter school (ANCS), the economy tanked reducing our funding, and APS issued an additional massive cut in funding to all the district’s charter schools that resulted in a protracted legal battle.  The effort needed to navigate all of these changes required virtually all of my and our board’s time and attention, and, quite frankly, thinking about ways to maintain or increase diversity at the school took a backseat to making sure we could actually keep the school operating.

Once we emerged from that challenging period, however, creating a racially and economically diverse school environment for students again was front and center for our school.  In the fall of 2014, we concluded a multi-year strategic planning process that had diversity and equity as a central goal.  I’ve written before about why this is a strategic focus (mainly because of the benefits to our students) and what we’ve been doing to tackle it (which you can read more of here), but, few points worth noting:

• we’ve increased our enrollment outreach, by doing door-to-door canvassing, attending resident meetings in local housing developments and neighborhood association meetings around the area, held numerous information sessions on and off-campus, among other avenues
• we expanded the school’s primary attendance zone
• we worked with the several individuals and organizations to get the legislature to allow charter schools to use weighted student enrollment lotteries and became the first school to use one
• we’ve established a diversity coordinator role on staff to help us think through outreach and support for a diverse student body
• we have visited and connected with other charter schools seeking to have diversity be a part of their core mission
• we’ve visited every single other school in the Jackson cluster to build relationships and learn how other schools support economically disadvantaged students
• we’ve worked for the past several years with a team of “diversity and equity” facilitators for teacher, board, and parent training and exploration of issues of race and class

I share some of the actions our school has taken towards tending to our diversity and equity goals not because I think we deserve a pat on the back (we don’t) but because I’ve found that most people not directly affiliated with ANCS aren’t aware of them.  Could we be going about this work differently?  Perhaps.  Will we reach our goal of serving around 50% of students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds overnight?  No, it will take time as we only admit a small number of new students each year.  Are we doing everything perfectly?  No, of course not.  There are some policies and practices in place at our schools that I know are implicitly biased.  But we are working to change those, and we are working as thoughtfully as we can.  We’re also working to overcome perceptions that hands-on, project-based learning is only “good for certain types of students”—something I’ve written out against in the past, but that I saw reinforced in a recent study about parent choices related to charter schools nationally.

So my ask of all of us who are truly invested in public education in southeast Atlanta is to move from those conversations on the playground and/or on social media to being active and engaged and involved in person, at our schools and across our schools.  I know it takes more effort and time than firing off a post on Facebook, but it’s also exponentially more effective at bringing about positive community change.  And there’re no shortage of outlets for bringing these hard conversations to the fore in more productive, solution-oriented ways: SEACS meetings, GO Teams and governing boards, PTAs, community coffees on education in southeast Atlanta, cluster advisory meetings, and the like.  I’ll be there as I try to always be, and I hope you will be too.