If you work for schools, there’s something magical about the First Day. Like the opening night of a Broadway show or the first game of the football season, there’s anticipation and pent-up momentum that culminates behind this once a year rhythm of life for our children.
Today was the First Day of school for my own three children, each of whom is attending a new public school in NYC (we moved to NYC this summer). Yesterday, our Detroit charter school, Michigan Technical Academy in Detroit opened their First Day of the school year and last week our Newark charter school, Merit Prep, opened its First Day of the school year. In the last 48 hours I have experienced being both a “supplier” and a “consumer” of public education on its First Day. There are striking similarities and differences between my children’s NYC public schools’ First Day experience and that of the turnaround schools Matchbook Learning currently serves in Newark & Detroit.
On the surface, the populations the schools serve could not be more different. Our turnaround efforts at Matchbook Learning serve children that are overwhelmingly below the poverty line (therefore are entitled to a free breakfast and lunch) and racially in the minority. My children’s schools are diverse racially while less so economically but still more diverse than Matchbook’s charter schools.
The week before Matchbook’s First Day, we held our “Parent Nights” to welcome parents to the school, meet our school leaders and faculty and share a meal together. Free uniforms (two per child) were distributed out. Morning assemblies to establish culture, values and vision are the norm. Orderly transitions, single file lines and crisp time schedules punctuate our week.
However, my own kids’ schools will have Parent Nights the week after the First Day, no uniforms, no morning assemblies and much more of a free flow to how students descend on the schools and find their way to class.
I overheard a parent at our Matchbook charter school in Detroit drop his son off to his classroom after school had started. He bent down on one knee next to his 2nd grade son to hug him goodbye and told him “Don’t worry, you’ll make some new friends and it will be ok and I will be here to pick you up at the end of the day”. Same thing I did and said almost verbatim to my 2nd grade daughter right before school started today. Two different schools in two different parts of the country with two different demographic categories, and yet the exact same hope for our children.
The hope of public education binds us across racial, economic and social categories, linking us to a common desire and expressed hope that our children will reach their potential through a proper education. This is common for both the excellent public schools I am fortunate to send my children to and the excellent public schools we desire and intend for Matchbook’s schools to be. Same hopes. Same dreams. No difference.
What is different? In my own children’s schools, it is evident that the parents have a high degree of ownership or investment in the school. My fellow parents feel vested in the school’s history and future. The on-staff parent coordinator at each of my children’s schools along with the Head of the PTA spoke as much or more than the Schools’ Principals. There’s an articulated expectation that we parents will support the school ($50 check for supplies on First Day). There’s a sense that whatever it takes, whatever the school needs, these parents will rise up to the challenge.
In Matchbook schools, while the hopes are the same, the level of dependence and trust from parents to school administration/Matchbook is actually deeper. I cannot tell you how many parents at Matchbook’s schools grabbed me by the arm during our Parent Nights to simply say how much they need and hope this school to be successful for their son or daughter. That trust while remarkable also underlies a deep dependence that these parents we serve have on their school.
Our School Principals and Leadership teammates and I receive those arm tugs of warmth and long stares of hope from our Matchbook parents with both reverence and sadness. Reverence because I know that unlike my fellow parents at my children’s schools, these parents’ options are limited and their support mechanisms and knowledge on how to educate their children are thin outside of our school. Sadness because until these parents learn to become “owners” of our Matchbook schools, vested to the point of supporting, advocating and pressing the school forward on what they desire as a community, our work will not anchor and sustain.
Herein lies the heart of the challenge of our work. Parents of poverty hope and expect the same for their children as do middle class parents but do not typically have a voice to express and advocate for these hopes and expectations. We can and will become a voice for the voiceless but that cannot always be the case. Turnarounds become sustaining when they anchor themselves in the same kind of parental voice and advocacy that high achieving schools in middle class communities exhibit.
The truest test of Matchbook Learning’s success will not be one of just academic achievement. That is necessary but not sufficient. No, the litmus test of our efforts will need to surpass achievement and measure empowerment. One day, one First Day, I hope the only difference between the schools my children attend and the schools I serve are cosmetic because the starting hope is the same, why cannot the end result be as well?
