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DISCLAIMER: I am an Obama supporter, as many here well know.
Scene One - Saturday morning, 11 am. An urban park in Regentrified City, ringed with renovated brownstones and gut rehab condos. On one side, a dog run, on another, a playground. In between, white folks playing pick-up basketball. Around the playground twenty sets of young parents hover over McClaren and Frog strollers, watching their kids, 18-months to four years, cavort on the new plastic and wood equipment. They chat here and there with each other, secretly envious or pitying if kiddo has or hasn't hit the targets they read about on BabyCenter.com. None are worried about needles lurking in the jungle gym. They're all in their late twenties or early thirties, except three couples, who are in their early forties. There are two gay couples, both women. They're mostly symbolic analytic workers or technicians. She's a professor, close to tenure. He's a Web Sphere Architect. She's a financial analyst. He's a doctor. She's a stay-at-home Mom, but used to design databases for a major retailer. One or two own boutique stores. One guy is a trendy craftsman, making usable metal sculptures, like lamps, that sell in high end stores. She's an A&R for an indy label. They're all white. Not all the kids are, though.
The total cost for the clothing worn by the twenty children is $1200, the total cost for the clothing they're wearing is $4800. The strollers - all 20 of 'em - cost $8000. The twelve out of twenty young families that stopped into a brunch place this morning spent $540 for breakfast. Between just the clothes they're wearing right now, their strollers, and their eggs benedicts, they've spent $14,540, or almost 83% of the poverty level ($17,600) for annual income for a family of 3.
You see very few children over the age of five in our Regentrified City Park. Why?
You know why.
Scene Two - My apartment, Thursday afternoon. I finished a conference paper I was writing (yay!), and now I'm writing this. My daughter's in daycare. My wife's at work in the Loop. Wealth management, they call what she does. My daughter, two years old, has been in daycare since she was three months old, when my wife's full-pay maternity leave was up (I never saw her so happy to be going to work!). Our annual daycare expenses exceed the poverty level for a single person, annual income. What do we get in return? Free time to work and make money - more money than the cost of daycare, by far. But you need that time.
What else do we get? On the day my daughter steps into formal school for the first time, she will have spent better than four years learning the institutional structures of the school, virtually her whole life. She will understand what this room is with all these kids and desks and shapes on the wall, she will have developed mechanisms for dealing with the teacher-figure, for sitting quietly when asked, for interacting. She's in a full-on zone of proximal development already, at age two. She will be institutionally savvy; her transition into school will be almost uneventful.
Consider others who may be in her classroom. They've never been in a room like this before in their lives. Why are so many kids around? Why do I have to sit down now? Who is this person telling me what to do, and when to do it? Where's my Mommy? What do I do if I have to use the bathroom? What are these activities they're asking me to do with these other kids I don't even know? And why do all the other kids seem to know what to do? By the time that kid catches up with my daughter in institutional knowledge, they'll be in second grade, maybe third, the first round of tests will have come and gone, and they'll be tracked. Whoooosh. She’s gone. “Gifted,” maybe, and we pretend to remember that she was always so smart. It’s not the thousand books in the house or the culture of reading that was bought and paid for in universities with tens of thousands of dollars. It’s not the resources she has. It’s not the institutional savvy she’s developed that was bought and paid for with tens of thousands of dollars. Nope. She was just always so smart. And if somebody else isn’t, well, you can’t throw money at the problem, doncha know. Maybe it’s the parents of those troubled kids who are to blame…
We all have our illusions.
Scene Three – The future. A kid is looking at colleges. They’re very competitive, just like the magnet school was, and the specialized high school, and the Westinghouse competition. Luckily, Mom and Dad know a thing or two about how to read college information, where to find scholarships, all the resource literacy you need to locate the stuff that will give you an edge. For a moment, you consider all those kids from the other high school, the zoned school. Will they be applying too?
No. They probably won’t be. Not to your schools.
And for a brief moment you wonder about why. You wonder about how competitive college and jobs would be if they WERE applying. The thought has struck your parents as well from time to time. They’re good liberals, very progressive. But what if all those kids had a chance for your schools? What if all those kids had a chance for your job? Wow. It would be tougher. Much tougher – and it’s tough enough already.
You can’t throw money at the problem, you think. Dad says that from time to time. You flip open your laptop, and start revising your application essay. You can’t throw money at the problem...
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