If the history of wars was written by the parents of those who fought, we would no doubt have a different, or at least a more complex, understanding. Parents have a unique perspective on the exploits of their children, at once wanting to let them go on their own and simultaneously trying to protect them from injustice. In a piece on the experience of negotiating the New York City school system on behalf of his children in the October issue of The Atlantic, George Packer provides a history of the efforts of his wife and himself to balance their values and the values they wish to instill in their children against the realities of a school system that parcels out opportunity along meritocratic principles that just happen to result in racial, social, and economic segregation.
The nuanced and complicated set of forces experienced by the Packer family will be familiar to most New York City parents as well as to those in other areas where similar trends manifest themselves, sometimes through organized actions within large schools systems and sometimes through networks of experiences across small school systems within limited geographic proximity.
Woven throughout Packer’s account is the experience with testing and assessment in the context of the educational careers of his children, beginning with the process of the assessment of his son (and of his wife and himself) by the staff of a pre-school to which they hoped to be admitted, continuing through high stakes testing in elementary school and the growing push back from parents and educators and wrapping up with the experience of “choosing” a middle school. This parent report on the contemporary experience of meritocracy as mediated by testing and assessment in the educational system provides an important alternative perspective that shows issues often presented as simple and straightforward by commentators all along the political spectrum to be what they truly are: complex, context-bound, and unresolved.
Be the first to comment