Educational Leadership - February 2012

Lucinda Lee Katz, the Head of
School at Marin Country Day School in
northern California—a highly respected,
affluent independent school—argues
that schools should always ask whether
their spending reflects their core values:
Our core values are respect, responsi-
bility, compassion, perseverance, and
gratitude, and the board and I won’t
spend significant money on anything that
doesn’t further those values.;.;.;. While
schools typically have some statement of
core values, it’s the rigorous, disciplined,
intentional, thoughtful process of aligning
those core values with key budget deci-
sions that creates a healthy school envi-
ronment. (personal communication,
September 2011)

To reduce the competition that drives extreme spending, clusters of independent schools might band together and agree not to spend excessive sums on facilities and activities with little educational value. The National Association of Independent Schools might coordinate these kinds of agreements. One could also imagine an education advocacy group rating public and independent schools on the degree to which their expenditures are efficient and aligned with a cogent education philosophy and important values.

In addition, more wealthy schools could create partnerships to share their resources with low-income sister schools. The organization Wingspan Partnerships (http://wingspan partnerships.org) explicitly seeks to cultivate such collaborations between private and public schools. Such partnerships will advance both learning and justice not when more privileged schools simply provide “charity” or services to low-income schools but when these schools reciprocally draw on one another’s many personal, community, and cultural resources.

Too Much to Expect?
But in the end, if we want mature,
independent-minded, morally coura-
geous children, we will have to be
mature, independent-minded, morally
courageous adults. “It’s about courage
and imagination,” says Tom Olverson,
the head of the Rivers School (personal
communication, September 2011).
Whether we are parents, teachers, or
administrators, that means innovat-
ing and moving forcefully to end the
extravagance and reduce the gaps.

Education equality is at
the heart of any healthy,
just democracy.

racy. What is perhaps most distressing is that fewer and fewer Americans appear to feel shock and anguish that some of our children are left behind, stranded, always climbing uphill while other children are growing up in rari-fied, precious circumstances beyond any semblance of rational understanding.

I don’t expect most affluent parents and schools to suddenly become incensed by this inequality. But it doesn’t seem like too much to expect many to feel enough concern to opt out of the senseless opulence race and to challenge their less equity-conscious peers. And it doesn’t seem like too much to ask anyone who cares about children—all of our children—to make noise with politicians and community leaders about these trends, about the frightening degree to which we are passing on and locking in inequality, stacking the deck against certain children from the first days of their school careers. We can throw up our hands and blame others for this contagion, or we can step up and deal with it, and perhaps even heal ourselves. ;L

References

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Richard Weissbourd is a child and family psychologist on the faculty of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and School of Education, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Richard_Weissbourd@ hks.harvard.edu. He is the author of The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Trevor Dodge is a senior at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.