What makes a school "good?"

This edition’s topics include: The impact of school schedules and policies, language policing, emotion-language, the children’s books chosen for schools, among others.

There’s been a bit of a hot-take kerfuffle in the past few weeks over something written by author and scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones.

When you originate the 1619 Project, you are going to be a perpetual lightning-rod no matter what you do. So after nearly a decade of being a target of outrage, when Hannah-Jones wrote about her and her husband’s decisions for her daughter’s schooling – and admitted possible mistakes – she became a human-shaped bullseye for these same people.

The libertarian Reason and the… libertarian Cato Institute used her article as a means to make their case for school choice. The conservative National Review got in on the fun too.

As I read her article myself, “school choice” didn’t really factor into my reaction. I admit, however, that I did wonder if she had sacrificed certain potential benefits for her child to make a political point.

As a Black man who mostly attended private schools and is now the father of two Black boys , I’ve debated things like this since even before the older one was born. I believe in public schools as a concept and certainly believe they, and their teachers, are not given the support required to thrive. But, if, like Hannah-Jones, you see your own child coming home upset and see their skills stagnating, how much do your beliefs matter in comparison?

At the same time, as her article makes clear, simply placing your (Black) child in a supposedly “better” school doesn’t immediately resolve issues, and being “the only” is an isolating experience I certainly had that I very much don’t want my sons to experience.

So what do you do?

When you think of moving to a certain location, you probably look up the local school district, on a site like Niche or GreatSchools. But very few parents are teachers. And very few teachers have the time to consume scholarship.

There is a mountain of education research being published, and plenty of it can help us answer what it even means to be a “good” school.

That’s what I’m going to try to address in this, the first full edition of The Citation.

So what does the research say?

Onto Edition 01: What makes a school “good?”

Snapshot: Have We Learned Anything? (Dr. Clara Vaz Bauler)
Snapshot: The Sound of Misbehaviour (Dr. Ian Cushing)
Snapshot: Supporting Children’s Emotions and Relationships (Dr. Elizabeth K. King)
Snapshot: Strangeness in the Looking Glass (Dr. Maria Rosa Brea-Spahn and colleagues)
The Classic: Conclusion: What Does a Certificate Tell Us About Teacher Effectiveness?