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Dana's avatar

Really appreciate this. My mental rejoinder to people who say “I heard this isn’t a good school” or “I hear the schools are good in (usually Park Slope)” is “Define good.” Everyone prioritizes different things for themselves and their kids but to me, perhaps the most important thing I can give my daughter (whose is white, stably housed and the child of two parents with college and post-graduate degrees, which are the greatest predictors of her future educational outcomes) is an environment where not everyone is like her, and she experiences that as normal.

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Dr Deborah Vinall's avatar

Yes! I choose a public school for my kiddo with a low Great Schools rating of 3. Because those ratings don't tell the whole picture. They tell me how the other kids are doing, not how my kid will score. The 10/10 schools filled with mostly white kids don't give my child the opportunity to learn some very important parts of what schooling should offer: the value of diversity (economic, racial); development of empathy for different lived experiences; exposure to more languages than English. He's in (public) high school now and I wouldn't change a thing.

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