The case against Joe Nocera; how people like me helped ruin the public schools.

• Author: Nocera, Joseph

How people like me helped ruin the public schools

Joseph Novera, a contributing editor of Newsweek and The Washington Monthly, is at work on a modern history of personal finance.

It's two days before Christmas, and the snow has begun to fall here in the lovely little city of Northampton, Massachusetts. I won't pretend that it's not a beautiful sight. Glancing down from my office window, scarcely a block from the center of town, I see idyllic scenes everywhere, a picture postcard of small-town New England: the snow settling on the roof of the gorgeous, rococo church that anchors downtown; the crowds (such as they are in a place whose population barely exceeds 30,000) of happy Christmas shoppers loaded down with brightly wrapped presents; the cheerful commingling of friends in the parking lot right beneath my office. Just now, my office landlord, a lawyer who also teaches philosophy at Smith College and who works across the hall, came in to wish me a Merry Christmas. He gave me a pocket calendar he has made up every year. He was in wonderful spirits, and so was I. There are days when Northampton feels like nothing so much as a modern-day Grover's Corners, and this is certainly one of those days.

I moved here with my family two and a half years ago to take a job with a magazine. I've since learned a lot about the attractions of small-town life. I live in a place where I never have to lock my car, where a "traffic jam" means having to wait for the light to change twice, where the cost of things is a good 20 percent less than it is in, say, Boston. This past Halloween, a neighboring family held its: annual preTrick-or-Treat party for the kids on the block; there must have been 60 people in the house, and everyone knew each other, and later, when we dispersed to go Trick-or-Treating, no one had to worry about whether there would be razor blades in the apples, That was another one of those times when I thought: This is nice.

And yet, and yet. I mention all this not to inspire jealousy, but to bring up the more complicated matter of personal taste. I don't deny the appeal of this life; indeed, Northampton is filled with transplanted New Yorkers who have embraced it with a vengeance. But the truth is, I've always thought of myself as a city boy. I still do. I grew up in what was then the gritty (and is now the hip) city of Providence, Rhode Island, population 150,000. Since then I've lived in Boston and Washington, Austin, Texas and Paris, France. I enjoy spending time in cities other people abhor, like Houston or Los Angeles. For reasons I can't quite explain, I am drawn to cities, finding them both comfortable and energizing. Northampton, on the other hand, always makes me feel a little edgy, a touch unfulfilled, In particular, the pace of small-tOWD life bothers me. I never feel as if I am at the center of things, the way I do in a city.

So why am I here? It's not the job: I no longer do much work for the magazine that brought me to Northampton, nor is my wife employed in the local economy. And while I can toss off a half-dozen persuasive reasons for living here-how I've made good friends that I don't want to leave behind; how I don't think it's fair to my children to keep moving them from place to place; how I could never afford a similar house in a big city-I know in my heart of hearts that these are only partial explanations. There is another reason, one that looms larger in my mind than any other, one that I always feel a bit ashamed to admit to. I am talking about The Schools.

'Awfully obvious'

The public schools here are quite good-not the best in the region, perhaps (that distinction belongs to nearby Amherst), but good nonetheless, One can argue forever as to why this is so; my own belief is that places like Northampton and Amherst, little cities with populations between 30,000 and 50,000, are the perfect size for good school systems. They are large enough to have the critical mass and money needed for decent facilities, but small enough so that there is very little bureaucratic (or union) rigmarole standing between teachers and students, Also, teachers still have status and respect in a small town-including Yuppified small towns like mine-that they don't have in larger places.

Most important, there is a large group of white middle-class parents deeply involved in the public school system. One of the givens about American public education is that parental involvement-parental vigilance might be a more accurate description-is one of the two or three critical factors that determine whether a school system will be good or bad. Historically, that vigilance is provided by the educated class: predominately white, overwhelmingly middle class people who know how to "fight City Hall" and aren't afraid to do so. Not coincidentally, they are also the people most inclined to vote. Most cities have one PTA-type organization; Northampton has two, one geared towards fundraising activities and another that acts as a tenacious, if ad hoc, inspector general, with the self-styled mission of keeping the school system's feet to the fire.

The result is that when my oldest child was ready to enter kindergarten this past September, I had no qualms about sending her to public school. I now fully expect that she'll stay in the public school system, as will my other children as they grow older. It would be hard to overstate my relief when I first realized that this was going to be possible. For one thing, my wife and I were suddenly spared a daunting financial burden, But since I was also anxious for my children to get a taste of the small-d democratic experience that the public schools provide, it was satisfying to know that their education would not suffer for that experience.

That sense of relief has done something else to me, though: it's planted me here as firmly as any job might have. Perhaps more firmly, since these days parents are more likely to shift jobs than shift their kids into a different, untried school system. A decent public school today is something to be treasured, and if you've found one for your kids, you don't abandon it lightly.

So over the past year or so, as I've daydreamed about moving to a big city, I've gradually come to the conclusion that I just can't do it. Not anytime soon, anyway. And the reason is The Schools. The thought of what it would cost to send my children to a private elementary school is sobering enough. But then when I think about the other option-sending them to public school-I shudder. I can't imagine sending my children to a big city public school system.

Look at them, for God's sake: Boston is a shambles, wrecked by the busing tragedies of the 1970s. In Boston, 40 percent of the kids who enter ninth grade...