Private school parents are sending their kids over to Gen Pop (public school). Why? Apparently, these private school parents put on their “privilege glasses” and are seeing things through a different lens.

Jimmy and Lisa Tran are Asian-Americans who live in North Dallas and have sent their children to private school. They have experienced a revelation over the past year or so and decided that their upper-middle-class bubble will never do for their cherubs.

We now have three kids ages 7, 5 and 3. Our path was straightforward in private parochial school. The school was largely white, with two-parent households in the upper-middle-class income bracket. It was a good setting and we met a lot of families within this private ecosystem, supported school fundraisers and hosted and attended numerous birthday parties and playdates. We were comfortable, but we felt like something wasn’t right.”-Jimmy and Lisa Tran

Okay, we get this. moving right along:

All these beliefs started to change about 24 months ago. We started to engage more in local civic causes and joined Leadership Dallas and Leadership ISD. We also started to think about our values and whether we wanted to continue to perpetuate systems of privilege and class.”-Jimmy and Lisa Tran

Jimmy and Lisa believe “all children deserve an equal shot at an education and a life”. So, what did they do? They shopped around for the perfect school in the public Dallas Independent School District. They wanted their kids in public school but they didn’t want them in just any public school. They did not want to jeopardize the education of their children in this process of choosing a school where they can attend and be with “gen pop”. When they didn’t get the magnet school within the district that they wanted, they discovered the DISD Transformation and Innovation schools.

Where would our children have the greatest potential to learn grit, perseverance and the value of being scrappy and hungry?”

According to this, admission to one of DISD’s Transformation and Innovation schools is drawn by a lottery. So, basically, after all of the searching for the best school to send their kids to within the local district, this family decided on a school that determined their admissions by a lottery drawn annually, taking spots away from a “scrappy and hungry” kid whose parents could never DREAM of funding a private school education! They applied to a school that was designed by the district to combat low attendance and attract young families back in (and perhaps attract the children in these families to attend school and have some enthusiasm). Their kids, from what it sounds like, did not have social problems, family problems or attendance problems. But they applied to this school anyway. Why? Because the Trans want their kids to be more diverse. They want their kids to see how the kids on the other side of the tracks live. They want their kids to mingle with the commoners. Does any of this sound condescending and elitist to you? Because it does to me! A few of my friends and I would goof about public school parents like this. The ones that freak out about their kids not getting into the “gifted” programs with smaller classroom numbers and would fight tooth and nail to get these kids in because they desperately wanted to keep their kids out of (GASP)-

Gen pop! All those hoodlums go there! Including my own.

You see, the Trans did not want that, either. Furthermore, sticking their kids in a plain, old, aesthetically displeasing with “overgrown weeds and deferred maintenance from afar” (direct quote) generic public school “didn’t feel right” to them, either. (What? What? Did the 40 kids per teacher turn you guys off, perhaps?) They went for the magnet schools. They went for the STEM program in the public school system.

We wish the kids the best of luck and hope the public school system is a good fit. One one hand, I completely understand these parents wanting to open the minds and hearts of their children. But there are other ways of exposing children to other cultures and socio-economic backgrounds. Want them to appreciate their privileged lifestyle? Take them to a homeless shelter in the city on a Friday night. Have them hang out with and play games with kids there. Let them have conversations with these children about school. It only took one conversation with another teenage boy for my son’s eyes to be opened. Serve a meal together there as a family. Find other events outside of your “bubble” you can involve them in.

At the end of the day, these kids go back to their comfortable, low-crime, suburban ecosystem. Meanwhile, some child who has the odds stacked against him but a powerful mind did not gain a spot in the public school district’s lottery for the STEM program. Why? Because some well-off family took his spot in the name of “diversity”. Privileged, much?

Photo Credit: FlickR/Creative Commons/Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)