3

“We’re Not a Racial School”

Being a Private School Kid

It is a midfall afternoon, brisk enough for sweatshirts but not cold enough for gloves. I am driving Chris (11) home from Saint Anne’s elementary and middle school and his little brother, Oliver (5), home from Montessori school. We stop at a red light about a mile from the boys’ house. As we wait for the long light to change, I try to think of a way to distract the restless boys from horsing around, poking and kicking each other in the backseat. I look to my right, and on the sidewalk I see a group of high-school-aged girls, running in a big cluster, a few girls chugging along from behind, losing ground from the rest of the group as they struggle to keep up. Two tall, white, blond girls lead the pack, laughing and jogging, their cheeks pink in the brisk air. As a distraction technique, I randomly say to the boys, “Hey look! It is the Wheaton Hills cross-country team!” The boys stop jabbing each other for a moment and look where I am pointing.

Chris takes one look and then says, “That doesn’t look like the Wheaton Hills team to me!”

Genuinely confused, I ask him, “What do you mean?”

“Maggie, they are all white!” he says. “Those girls probably go to Shelbourne.”

I look closer at their T-shirts and notice that indeed one of the girls is wearing a T-shirt with “Shelbourne Academy” printed in block letters across the front. “You’re right!” I tell him. “Look at that girl’s shirt!”

Chris looks and says with disdain in his voice, “Those girls are all so rich and snobby and think they are better than everyone else. I can’t wait to go to Wheaton Hills for high school and get away from private school kids.”

Oliver slides down in his booster seat, stretches his leg across the backseat, and kicks Chris in the shin.

* * *

Country Day. Gifted and Talented. Parochial. Waldorf. Montessori. Progressive. The Petersfield metropolitan area is filled with private school options for families with the resources to access them. Chris is a “private school kid.” Like many of his peers in Wheaton Hills, he knows that his parents intend to send him to public school when he reaches the ninth grade. Unlike many of his peers, though, Chris is critical of his own status as a “private school kid.” He tells me on numerous occasions how disgusted he is by his classmates’ performances of affluence and their sense of superiority. Despite growing up in a family with upper-middle-class wealth himself, Chris rejects the sense of entitlement and privilege that he says he notices in the other kids at his school or that he believes the cross-country girls represent.1 In Chris’s words, “Those kids and their parents are just so out of touch with reality. It is pathetic. Like, ‘Oh, look at me and my Hummer.’ Who drives a Hummer? That is so environmentally irresponsible! I mean, you do not need a Hummer.” Chris is frustrated by how the kids at his school “think they are sooo much better than other people” because they attend a school that Chris would, quite frankly, like to escape. And Chris, like all of the kids in this study, understands that to be “a private school kid” also means to be affluent and white.

Scholars have examined extensively the processes through which parents make school choice decisions, the motivations that undergird their choices, and how these choices lead to increasing levels of racial segregation. Less is understood about how these choices “influence children’s perceptions of opportunities and of their places in the world.”2 As the sociologists Kimberly Goyette and Annette Lareau write, it “may be hard to measure in empirical research” the effects of neighborhoods and schools on kids’ perceptions of their place in the world, but these effects are “no less important than the measurable effects of test scores, or of college attendance or selectivity.”3 How does “being a private school kid” shape kids’ ideas about race and privilege? In this chapter, I explore how white kids receive, interpret, and produce ideas about race as a result of the private school they attend—ideas about race that inform kids’ views of who belongs and who does not, who is smart and who is not, and who is special and who is not. I also document how parents’ racial common sense, or racial ideological positions, shape these private school choices in the first place.

“My School Is Not for Everyone:” Being a Gifted and Talented Kid

Unlike Chris, Aaron Hayes loves his private gifted school. He shares his teacher with only 10 other students. He has good relationships with his classmates, he feels “at home” when he walks into the building, and his sixth-grade classes are challenging and exciting. He boasts about how much homework he has and talks in detail about his current global politics unit in social studies. His face lights up as he speaks, and he passionately shares his perspectives on current events and reveres his teachers. He is proud of how hard he and his peers work at his school, and he is proud that everyone at his school is designated as “gifted.”

Aaron feels very fortunate to be able to attend his private school. “There’s a lot more opportunity for people to do what they love at my school,” he tells me. “The public schools are a lot more loose: less rules and just, you know, everyone kind of plays along.” He tells me how when the teacher does not know the answer to a student’s question, the kids gather around her desk, researching the topic on her computer as a group. From Aaron’s perspective, the public schools in Petersfield do not help students think as critically or as creatively as his school does. He mentions how he has heard they have “a lot of tests” at the public schools and how he prefers to “really study stuff to learn it” rather than “fill in bubble sheets” about it. He also says that the kids who go to public school “misbehave a lot” and “do not care about school” the way he does, but he qualifies his comments by admitting that he has “never been inside a public school”—this is just what he has “heard from friends.” When I ask him about the racial composition of his private school, he says, “It is diverse. There’s not really a black or African American population, but there are quite a few Indian people. And mainly white people.” For Aaron and many of his peers, the presence of any person of color in a classroom or on a sports team or in an extracurricular activity makes it a “diverse” space.4 And like many of his peers, Aaron tells me that while white kids attend “a mix” of schools, black kids almost never attend private school. Elite private schools are understood to be places where white kids such as they go to school, and their perceptions map closely onto reality.5

Really Smart or Really Privileged?

“I didn’t honestly ever physically go to visit Pairing B,” Aaron’s mom tells me. “I just sort of had the sense that my kids would be bored there.… It was the right decision. We made a decision for Aaron’s education based on … his ability and what he needed to be getting from his school.” She goes on to tell me that “the community of students” at the public schools “was going to be such that [teachers] wouldn’t have the time or the resources to really give [Aaron] what he needed, because they were spending time on, you know, just getting everybody the basics for the other kids.” As an afterthought, she also adds, “And I mean, all the, you know, everything you sort of pick up from other people over time, that was not going to get [my kids] what they want in life.”

The Hayeses always knew that their children would go to private school. They firmly believe that Aaron is too smart to attend public school, but they also do not want him to be around what his father refers to as “the less opportunity kids” or the kids who will not help his son “get what he wants in life,” which represents a clear inconsistency in their argument of why they opted out of public school. Is it that Aaron is too smart for public school, or is it that he is too privileged to go to school with “less opportunity kids”? The Hayeses waver back and forth between these two positions in their comments. Mr. Hayes explains, “In elementary school, Aaron was at a place intelligence-wise where I think going to Pairing B, just because of the opportunities he had and most importantly just because of who he is on top of that,… he was going into a system that because of the lower-income, less opportunity kids, there would be a lot of remedial ABC kind of stuff, and … we figured he’d be completely bored out of his mind.” The “less opportunity kids” in this context is a racially coded way of saying “black and Latino kids from poor neighborhoods.” Opting out of public school allowed the Hayeses to avoid needy, low-income, remedial students—“less opportunity” students of color—who, they felt, would take resources away from their child. But they were able to explain their choice in terms that appear fair and reasonable: their child is really smart. In this way, the Hayeses attempt to justify their avoidance of the public schools by claiming that they are simply doing what is best for their child, as any “good” parent would and should do.

I clearly strike a nerve when I start asking these parents about school choice. The defensiveness of many parents is perhaps understandable given the local context in which these parents are raising their private school kids. Many members of the affluent community in Petersfield at large, and particularly those who live across the city in Evergreen, have absolutely no patience for parents who opt in to private schooling. They look down at those who choose private school and believe that the institution as a whole reproduces inequities that parents ought to reject rather than accept. For example, as Conor (11, Evergreen) puts it, “My parents thought that private schools were just wrong. I had the chance to go to a private school, but I—they didn’t want me to. They’d rather have me go to public school.… I don’t think that people with more money should get a better education.… People that don’t have money should get that opportunity [too]. It’s not fair.” Parents such as those of Conor and other children believe that they must act in ways that correspond with their political views and perspectives on the importance of maintaining and supporting public education.6

The Hayeses though, like many parents in Wheaton Hills, believe that giving their child the best education is more important than any social justice ideals, no matter how “liberal” or “progressive” they might understand themselves to be. “My kid is not a guinea pig” is a very common phrase among private school parents in Wheaton Hills—and one that I hear used in the same conversation in which a parent explains to me how progressive he is, how much he loves Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and how we, as a society, need to fix institutional racism. As Mrs. Hayes puts it to me, “I know someone … [who once] said to me, ‘You’re just the kind of parent we need in public schools.’ And my reaction was, ‘Yeah, but I’m not doing this for the public schools. That may be true, but I’m doing this for my kids, and I’ve got to do what I think is best for my kids and where they’ll get the best education for what they need. And given everything I see about my kids, they need more than what the public schools are going to give.’ ” The goals that the Hayeses have for their children include a prestigious college experience, a stimulating career, and the capacity to pursue a good life—goals that are likely shared by many parents, regardless of race or class. Yet, unlike the majority of parents raising children in a stratified society such as the United States, the Hayeses have the resources to provide a top-notch academic experience for their children starting even before first grade. They believe that their child needs and deserves more than other children “because of who he is.” This is the message that Aaron hears and interprets on a regular basis.

“The expectation is that I will attend college,” Aaron tells me—hopefully an Ivy League school, he adds—but before that, he has to face the reality that he will go to public high school in ninth grade. He is concerned about this transition, even though it is still a few years down the road. I ask him why, and he says, “I think that if I did stay in a private school, I think that I would probably be more prepared for college.” Aaron is not fearful of public school kids or worried about gangs or drugs, topics that other private school kids associate with black and Latinx public school kids. In fact, Aaron tells me that he is looking forward to going to school with kids who are different from him. But, nevertheless, he is not sure if the classes will be hard enough or if he will be competitive enough when it comes to college admissions in comparison to kids at private high schools across the country.7

Securing Advantages under the Veneer of Fairness

The Hayeses’ decision about Aaron transitioning to public school in the ninth grade is not one made at the last minute. They mapped out his education plan and secured that plan when he was only in elementary school and attending the private gifted school. These efforts included joining with other similarly minded parents to advocate for more Advanced Placement courses at the public high school—courses for which many universities will award students college credit hours. This group of parents worked to protect resources for their children long before they would even be able to access them. A powerful and well-funded legal challenge was presented as the school district considered “allocating more resources to the students at the bottom rather than students at the top,” as one parent described to me, or “breaking the laws about special ed and not supporting gifted programing,” as another parent put it.

Wheaton Hills High School has what scholars refer to as a large racial achievement gap—during the time of this research, almost 95% of white students graduated in four years at this school, compared to not even 60% of black students. In the context of this disparity, a fight emerged over limited resources. As many people on the periphery told me, this fight pitted affluent, white, gifted parents against parents and advocates of children of color in “really unfortunate ways.” While the gifted parents had long since won the legal case by the time of my data collection, the memory of this case was fresh in the minds of the parents I interviewed. Mr. Hayes shares his perspective: “A lot of the opposition to [supporting gifted students] is because of this whole achievement gap thing [rolling his eyes], and people think that tracking is going to abandon people on the lower end, basically, minorities, which I think is appalling, because it implies that there’s no such thing as a gifted minority student, and that’s not true.” There are certainly gifted minority students, but most of the students who are tracked into AP classes in Wheaton Hills are white. The parents of these white gifted students, however, as well as others in the study, do not see their actions or these programs as racially inflected because they perceive these resources to be “for everyone,” including gifted minority students. They do not see how their own actions regarding private school choice have the effect of perpetuating racial segregation, and they explain away their effort to maintain their child’s advantage by justifying their decisions as being “best” for their child. Justifying avoidance of these public elementary and middle schools under a guise of fairness, these parents make decisions that maintain advantage for their own kids that simultaneously have the effect of perpetuating racial inequality.

Ironically, many of these parents told me, “We want diversity in the gifted classroom!” but did not see themselves as responsible for turning that statement into reality. In essence, these parents want diversity at the same time that they choose to opt out of diverse spaces. They are not alone. According to the education scholars Allison Roda and Amy Stuart Wells, other similarly positioned advantaged white parents claim to want diverse classrooms for their children but still deliberately choose racially homogeneous gifted and talented spaces.8 Certainly, parents such as the Hayeses make these choices in what Roda describes as “a constrained and stratified school choice environment” as well as within a particular political economy that encourages these kinds of behaviors.9 But the consequences of these choices ultimately secure educational advantages for kids such as Aaron now and into the future.

The debate around gifted programing has close ties to similar debates around the process of “tracking” and within-school segregation in high schools across the country. As the education scholar Jeannie Oakes explains, “tracking” has roots in early 20th-century social Darwinism, which justified differentiated education on the assumption that different kinds of people (i.e., African Americans, new immigrants, the impoverished) were biologically, morally, and intellectually inferior to white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants.10 Tracking is the process “whereby students are divided into categories so that they can be assigned in groups to various kinds of classes.… However it’s done, tracking, in essence, is sorting—a sorting of students that has certain predictable outcomes.”11 Despite popular assumptions that tracking is the best model of education, research shows how tracking reinforces privileges and disadvantages and has tenuous educational benefits.12 Both gifted and talented debates and tracking debates share underlying assumptions about who deserves what: should students who have been socially constructed as “advanced,” often through subjective processes that have been cited as highly susceptible to racial bias, receive more school resources than those who are not constructed as “advanced”?

Overall, Mr. Hayes does not see himself as advocating for white advantages. Instead, he views this entire process as race neutral, and if any racial patterns do emerge, they are unintentional. Mr. Hayes tells me that he thinks teachers in elementary schools need to do a better job determining who is gifted and that if the teachers were better, there would be more black students in the gifted classes—a potential scenario that he embraces but does not see himself or his children as playing a role in achieving. Indeed, studies have been conducted on precisely this topic of teachers’ perceptions of who is gifted. Research finds that white kids with glasses are more likely to be presumed to be gifted than black kids are,13 while other research shows that “high-achieving English students [are] more likely to be nominated by teachers for advanced work in the subject if they had high intrinsic motivation to read, if they were female, and if they were not black.”14 Similarly, the sociologists Amanda Lewis and Michelle Manno discuss the ways in which determinations of students’ behavioral problems, or “soft” special education designations, are often shaped by race, decisions that not only put minority students in lower tracks or label them as having behavioral problems but also put white students in higher tracks or label them as gifted and talented.15 Mr. Hayes’s views that these patterns are largely due to teachers’ inability to designate children properly are part of how he justifies avoidance of public schools for his own children, as well as how he justifies advocating for the advantages that he does for his own kid. To him, it is not about giving the white kids educational advantages; rather, it is about giving his kid what his kid deserves.

For Mrs. Hayes, the question of “diversity” in gifted environments is not her problem. “I advocate for my child because that is the job of a mother.… Why don’t other mothers do that too?” she poses to me. Rather than questioning the role that teachers or administrators play in these patterns or the role that privileged parents such as she play, Mrs. Hayes instead questions the mothering of “others,” suggesting that they are not doing their job in advocating for their child. In doing so, she draws on the readily available racist mythology of the “dysfunctional” or “pathological” black family that is pervasive in American culture.16 As the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts writes, “Images of black maternal unfitness have been around so long that many Americans don’t even notice them. They are reincarnated so persistently and disseminated so thoroughly that they become part of the unconscious psyche, part of the assumed meaning of blackness.”17 This seems to be reflected in Mrs. Hayes’s remarks about black mothers supposedly failing their children.

Chris’s mom, Gail, helps to articulate this aspect of education in Wheaton Hills in a different way:

I feel like for families that have embraced public high school here, one way that’s happened is, they’ve created these gifted programs, and it becomes a way to segregate within an otherwise-integrated school. Because if you look at the numbers, it’s mostly white kids, and, you know, there’s an affluence. Because these are the parents who are going to go and say, “My kid is really bright. Test them. And if they don’t qualify, test them again until they do.” Meanwhile, we have an enormous racial achievement gap that none of these parents want to address. Because they feel like it isn’t their problem. This really frustrates me.

As a person in a position of privilege herself, Gail is frustrated by the choices of her fellow privileged parents, such as the Hayeses, as well as the tactics they use to place their children in these coveted programs. She understands this behavior as a strategy fellow parents use to demonstrate support for racially integrated public education while simultaneously demanding segregated, elite spaces for their own children within the walls of the high school. This is similar to what Roda found in her study of New York City parents as they use their privilege to maintain educational advantages within the public schools through “the social construction of giftedness.” Roda discusses how going through the process of having one’s child tested in and of itself is indicative of being a good parent because “being a good parent” to many affluent people means to “give your child every advantage.”18 “That’s what you do,” Roda’s participants tell her.19 And “what you do” in Wheaton Hills inherently contradicts the abstract values that many of the parents here simultaneously hold.

As the sociologists Tyrone Forman and Amanda Lewis write, “It is a mistake to view … expressions of lack of care for or disinterest in the social circumstances of ethnoracial minorities as benign, because prejudice is increasingly ‘expressed in a failure to help rather than in a conscious desire to hurt.’ ”20 And this seems to be the case for parents such as the Hayeses. They are faced with a conflict between their abstract values of fairness and their own personal interests of securing for their own child the best education possible. This contradiction is resolved through this process of justifying avoidance and drawing on a veneer of fairness: advantages and opportunities are secured and hoarded for affluent, white kids, while these actions are portrayed as being about what is fair and “what my child deserves.”21

Being a Gifted Kid

“It makes me realize how special I am to have these opportunities,” Aaron tells me, reflecting on all that his parents have done for him. “My school puts quite a challenge on the kids. Like they really pile them [with work], so I think, definitely I’m getting more in a shorter amount of time than if I went to a public school.” It is for this reason that he tells me he wishes he could stay in private school instead of attending Wheaton Hills High. “It’s just a better education,” he tells me. On the one hand, Aaron’s comment, “It makes me realize how special I am to have these opportunities,” reflects some degree of his understanding about social stratification. Aaron knows that his race and class privileges help him succeed in ways that are inherently unfair. Aaron tells me that it is not fair that different kids get different educations, drawing on both race and class in his response: “Well, a lot of the time, it seems to me like money is a big factor.… Like blacks, just, you know, they don’t have as high income for some reason, so they don’t have as much money to send their kids to better schools. So they just send them to, sometimes, the bare minimum, so it’s not really fair. Because everyone should kind of get the same education, but sometimes it’s just not possible for that to happen.” Aaron is critical in the abstract: the world ought to be fair. But Aaron simultaneously embraces his privileges and hopes that his parents will miraculously change their minds about leaving private school. As a special student, Aaron believes that he should attend a “better” school than almost all other kids. Underlying this contradiction between abstract values and personal interest is of course the race and class composition of these schools. As everyone in the community knows, the public schools are “more diverse.” While Aaron does not outright tell me that he does not want to go to school with black and brown kids, he does tell me that going to school with “other kids” will present undesirable challenges to his educational achievement and threaten his future potential at success. “My school is not for everyone,” he tells me. He is right, of course. His school is not for everyone, and the parents at this school want to keep it that way, as this is precisely why they pay lots of money to send their child to this school. For instance, some call for more rigid admission standards: “They’ve decided that kids can be gifted in one of like five different areas or something.… It wasn’t just academic. It was like the arts and leadership and things like that, which is not really what gifted is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be about intelligence.” Aaron’s mom is frustrated because she thinks that the public school is attempting to expand the gifted program for the sake of inclusion alone, meaning getting more kids of color into these classes in an effort to reduce the racial achievement gap, at a cost to her own child.

The Hayes parents have constructed this component of Aaron’s racial context of childhood through strategies of what I call justified avoidance, or strategies of vehemently claiming not to be racist while simultaneously acting in ways that secure advantages for their own child. Having a gifted child makes avoidance of public schools about the specialness of kids rather than their whiteness. And, as the sociologist Karolyn Tyson finds in her research, these kinds of racialized tracking processes “influence students’ perceptions of the link between race and achievement, their self-perceptions of ability, how they view one another, and where they think they and others belong.”22 In this case, the whiteness of gifted programs, such as the school Aaron attends, reinforces racial stereotypes about achievement for the students themselves.

Aaron is growing up in the particular racial context designed for him by his parents, and he and his private school peers form answers to questions about race that emerge over time as they interpret their social world. Together, they think about where they fit in that world and where others fit. Of course, their private school status is not the only factor shaping their racial views, but certainly it plays a major role in this local context. It is this status, for instance, that informs their view that they are special and more deserving of resources than other kids around them are.

Beyond Academic Excellence

Not all parents make their decision as the Hayeses did. Some parents, if even only once, give the public schools a try. Mrs. Anderson, for instance, explains to me the range of school options she and her husband explored for their three children, Emily (13), Rachel (12), and Simon (11), over the years, starting in pre-K: “I took my eldest daughter to pre-K. It was the pre-K meeting actually, and it was, like, crazy. It was loud. Kids were climbing the walls. All the little siblings were there. It was mostly nonwhite. And she wouldn’t go off with the reading lady.” Mrs. Anderson does not shy away from making racially explicit observations about the public school environment, and she does not shy away from her own decision to avoid the schools filled with “loud” kids. She justifies her decision by drawing on the emotional well-being of her kids. Deciding that the public pre-K option was not going to work on the basis of this initial meeting, she moved her daughter, and later her other two children, to a progressive, private school in town. For a while, she and her family loved this school and were highly involved. “We gave a lot of money,” she adds. But, over time, she decided the progressive school also was not right for her children. “There were some very good years, very nurturing years there, but it was mixed with some classrooms being out of control. My kids started getting migraines because it was a stressful environment.… Like, so anyways, so [my kids] ended up at the gifted school.” While Mrs. Anderson has left the public system, unlike the Hayeses, she is critical of her decision to opt in to the gifted school. She shares some sentiments with parents such as Gail, and she is less convinced that all the children who attend this school, including her own, are actually “off the charts” in their “gifted” capabilities.

I had been opposed to it. There’s a lot of elitism about the gifted thing, and I had, from a values perspective, you know, I had been opposed to it. But here we were, you know, desperate, so the kids went over there.… I think you have to watch out for how a school bills itself. Because I think the progressive school billed itself as a place that was really sensitive to kids’ feelings, and it ended up being really harmful to our kids’ feelings. And I think that the gifted school bills itself as a place for gifted kids. But I think, really, there are a lot of kids there. There’s a range. And there are kids who are super gifted, and then there are kids who are just a little above average. And so really, there’s room for everyone.… I guess I would even say that a couple of our kids are gifted, but not all of them. But they are all happy and thriving at the gifted school so we are happy.

Rather than academic rigor serving as the basis of whether the school is good or not, Mrs. Anderson instead looks to her own children’s sense of happiness and the extent to which they are thriving. While she knows that it is due to her privilege that she and her husband can offer this educational experience to her kids, she also seems to recognize that not all children can have this kind of childhood. She thinks carefully about the elitist implications of sending her children to the gifted school, but at the end of the day, like many parents, Mrs. Anderson makes a choice that she perceives is best for her children. And as she adds, “Truth be told, I think that if we had been in a neighborhood with a different public school where our kids could have had peers who would have been—who they would have had more in common with, I think that it would have been a better experience than what they ended up with.” When I ask Emily (13) about her school, like Aaron, she tells me that she perceives the school to be diverse: “You know, I have, I mean, my friends—I have, like, three of my best friends are, like, Caucasian, and then I’ve got one Chinese friend. And, you know, one of my other best friends is from India. So it’s like, it’s kind of, you know—everybody is mixed together. And I think they do that on purpose. They say in the handbook, like, we try to like—it’s not discriminate. Like, it’s not like racially—like, we have no preference, but we try to achieve a balance. And I think they do that pretty well.” Emily says she likes her school, and like Aaron, and she draws a clear distinction between the kids with whom she goes to school and who live near her and kids from other parts of the city. “Most of the people we do know are pretty, like, white. But there’s, like, neighborhoods with, like, a ton of African Americans and, you know, high crime rate and stuff like that.” I ask her if she knows any of those kids, and she tells me she does not. “If I went to public school, maybe I would,” she explains.

Her younger brother, Simon (11), also explains to me that he does not know very many black people but that he does have friends who are from China and India at his school. Simon tells me he is “really happy” at his school and that the progressive school he attended was “a joke” where “they didn’t teach you anything”: “You sit around and play on your iPod or just talk or like, I don’t know. I could finish all the work super, super easily.” He also complains to me that the school did not give grades: “Grades are something that I really, really like, because it gives you feedback.” He also references things his parents have said about the school: “My mom told me that it was completely dysfunctional.” I ask him what he thinks the public schools are like. He tells me that he has heard from friends two things: first, there are lots of “white, country-type boys, and they’re all like—they’re all, like, super, super racist”; and second, the black kids cause a lot of problems at the public schools, especially when it comes to violence and fighting. He tells me a story about a big fight he heard about that happened at the public middle school among a large group of black boys. “That would never happen at my school,” he tells me, referring to both the racist, country white boys and the black boys fighting.

Simon’s comments reflect his understandings of whiteness with respect to class—in this context, “country” boys refer to kids from the local, relatively rural, working-class communities. But his comments also reflect his understanding that black boys fighting also never happens at his school—because kids at his school do not fight but also because there are no large groups of black boys at his school. “I think there are two black kids at my school, and they are siblings adopted by white parents,” he tells me, confirming that while he and his sister might both identify their schools as “diverse,” they do not go to school with the kind of black kids who go to public school—or, similarly, the kind of white kids.

The children who attend the private gifted school in Petersfield learn how to justify privilege through interactions they have with their families, peer, and teachers. While many of these same kids who attend this school can talk extensively about inequality in abstract terms, in making sense of their own lives and understanding who they are and where they fit into the world and what is in their best interest, these children embrace their privileges far less critically. These kids articulate racialized notions of who cares about school (us: private school white kids) and who does not (them: public school kids of color or white country boys), who is special and important and smart and sensitive (us) and who is not (them), who needs to be protected and nurtured (us) and who is behaving in violent ways (them). Additionally, when it comes to white public school kids, the private school kids in this study interpret ideas about who is not racist (us) and who is (them), who actually knows about the world (us) and who thinks they do but really does not (them), and who is going to be the one to get into a position of power as an adult to solve social problems (us) and who will just get in the way (them).

Private schools not only benefit children materially but also have a significant ideological impact. Like neighborhoods and public schools, private schools are also part of a white, affluent child’s racial context of childhood—another realm, constructed by parents for reasons that are racialized themselves, in which kids receive, interpret, and produce their own understandings about race and privilege in the United States.

“My Old School Was Racist:” Being a Former Public School Kid

“Second grade was horrible,” Lindsay Kerner (11) tells me. “My teacher was, like, racist and mean, and she kept, like, making fun of this one kid who was my friend.… He’s my buddy. He’s African American. And I would go home crying a lot, and I wasn’t really learning anything.” I ask her what the teacher did to her friend. “He didn’t really do well in school, so like, she would, like, hold up his work and then make fun of it in front of the whole class. And she would yell at him for no apparent reason a lot.… She only did that kind of thing to that race.” Like her buddy, most of the kids who got in trouble were black. I ask her why she thinks this was the case.

Well, a lot of the kids, like [my friend], he’s really, really poor.… I remember one time, he was late to school, and it was in the middle of winter, and so him and his brother were getting yelled at. And so I was—I overheard, like, I was listening in, but whatever, on their conversation—and so, like, I heard them say that the bus never came, so they had to walk to school. And then they didn’t have any boots, so their shoes were all wet, and they didn’t really have coats. It was really sad.

Lindsay draws a link between race and class and describes a moment at her public school when she witnessed what she identifies as racism happening right in front of her. She is agitated and emotional while recounting this story to me, her voice shaking as she speaks.

Mr. Kerner, Lindsay’s father, also brings up this same episode at the public school to me separately, in an interview when his daughter is not around:

Though [Lindsay’s] needs are academic, her stronger needs are justice. Her talented and gifted coordinator for the first two or three years, kept trying to find a social justice mentor, not a math mentor but a social justice mentor.… She was coming home with these stories every night, until she was in tears and so depressed that she couldn’t take it anymore. That is why we had to move schools. So we moved away from an integrated public school into a small, private, progressive school because of racism.… And she has blossomed since then in a progressive school that promotes social justice, social concerns.… Putting Lindsay into a private environment allowed her to be in an environment where she could see justice as opposed to prejudice.

Before all of this happened, the Kerners were opposed to private schooling for their children. Though Mr. Kerner denies that politics shaped the choice he and his wife made about where to buy a home, he tells me, “We wanted the best house in the nicest neighborhood that we could afford in a neighborhood that had a really good public school, and it would be really nice if that school was integrated along a number of different dimensions.” He goes on to tell me that as a parent, one of his goals is to place his children in situations in which there are all kinds of diversity. “We want to make sure we are not living in a pocket community where they will only see people of the same stratification that we are, economic, racially, developmentally, etcetera.” For these reasons, the Kerners bought the home they did, in a different part of Wheaton Hills than the Hayeses that feeds into a school that is not part of the Pairing A or B scenario but that similarly serves two very different demographics of kids: white, affluent children such as the Kerners living on the edge of Wheaton Hills and kids living in Hampton Court, a low-income, predominantly black neighborhood. “In a city of any size, you’re always going to have people who are struggling due to health, addiction, poverty, etcetera, and there will always be areas.… It represents a troubled area and is therefore more subject than any other area of high poverty—increased crime, decreased home values, unemployment, drugs,” Mr. Kerner explains to me. Unlike many of their peers who opt immediately for private school, the Kerner family gave the public schools a try. And yet, in the end, academic reasons did not pull Lindsay from this school. In fact, Mr. Kerner tells me that both of his children are gifted, like the Hayeses, but that he was able to get the public school to accommodate his kids appropriately. He never had a problem with what the kids were learning in math or science class. His eldest daughter stayed in public school.

Lindsay was pulled from this particular public school because of the traumatic experiences of witnessing mistreatment by white teachers of the economically marginalized kids of color, such as Lindsay’s buddy, from Hampton Court. There are very few teachers of color at most of the schools in Petersfield. What was especially difficult for Lindsay, according to both her and her father, was that the teachers were so nice and accommodating to her:

There was another teacher—an old-guard, white woman, by all counts a talented teacher, particularly good with gifted and talented—and we were excited, especially for Lindsay for the academic match. Turns out this woman was, in my opinion—and I do not use these terms lightly—overtly racist. And one of the troubled African American boys was in this classroom and was consistently wrongly accused of things he didn’t do! So the other little second graders knew, “Hey, I can do something wrong and just point my finger at him, and I’m off scot-free.” And Lindsay would come home so upset about this. And there were rules such as nobody could go to the bathroom unless they all went as a group. And so for my anxious little Lindsay, that meant she was holding it all day long—not good for a second grader! And so I went and talked to the teacher about this, and I’ll never forget what she said. Remember she had the English as a Learned Language block. I said, “Lindsay is traumatized and interprets that rule to mean she can’t go,” and she’s like, “Oh. Reassure her. This rule isn’t for her. It’s for the slippery kids. The ones we can’t trust in the hallway.” Granted, I’m an old-fashioned liberal, but if you have an English as a Learned Language block, I think the word “slippery” should be excised from your vocabulary for fear that it would ever be misinterpreted, let alone used in that context.

Mr. Kerner’s disgust with the actions of the teacher, particularly with respect to what she told him behind closed doors, including a reference to a racial slur, led to the family’s collective decision to pull Lindsay from the integrated public school and send her to a more racially homogeneous private school with a progressive curriculum in place.

“Real-World Stuff” in Private School

“I love my school now!” Lindsay tells me, referring to the private progressive school she now attends: “The people there are nice, and I’m learning, and it’s good there.… We, like, talk about social issues and stuff, so I don’t know, race comes up all the time, and people will talk about it. We just pretty much say whatever is on our mind.… We talk about gender and stereotypes a lot … Our teachers are really weird [laughing]. [My one teacher] will just randomly break out into song throughout the day. It’s really funny.” She goes on to tell me that she does not necessarily think she is getting a better education at her school than she would at the public school but that she does think she is learning more about “real-world stuff” than she would otherwise:

It’s just different. Like when my public school friends, people, talk, most of the things they’re saying are “I’m bored” or “Science sucks.” But they’re learning, like, facts about certain things, and we’re learning more facts and skills.… One time they dumped us in the middle of downtown and gave us a paper and a bus schedule. And so on the paper, it had different locations where we had to go, and so we had to, like, take buses around and figure out what to do and then how to get back. One team got really lost. I mean, we all had chaperones because, duh, but it was really funny.

Lindsay believes that she is more prepared for the real world than her public school friends are. Rather than an academic elitism like some of her peers at the gifted school, Lindsay instead views being a private school kid in terms of knowing more about reality. She describes how her public school friends are different from her in this regard:

So one of my favorite examples is Chelsea, who is one of my closest friends who is really smart, told me that I was going to fail in high school, because I went to [the progressive school]. She thinks that because it’s so different. And [public school kids] are so ignorant that they just don’t get it. They’re not really willing to talk about it. Apparently my school isn’t the real world, which, I mean, I kind of get where they’re coming from, but I think I deal with more problems than they ever have going to a public school.

Mentioning a friend in crisis at her school as well as some of the other challenges that kids at her school face, such as learning disabilities, in addition to the real-life skills she learns at her school, Lindsay interprets public school kids as being snobby with respect to how “real world” they think they are.

Sometimes I get frustrated with the [public school] kids, because they think that just because they have more racial separation and problems at their school that they’re more in the real world, and they understand more things, and how life is hard. But the way I see it is they’re exposed to the racism, but are they talking about it with their teachers? And, obviously, they’re seeing stuff—like there’s this one girl who got raped, and she’s pregnant at their school—and so they see that and they think, “Oh, this is the real world.” And they think that since no one is pregnant at my school, then they must live in the real world and I don’t. And so I think they’re just—they just don’t understand, so, I mean, I cut them some slack.

Rather than drawing primarily on racialized distinctions between the kids at public school as black and Latinx and private school kids as white and Asian, as many of her private school peers do, Lindsay instead compares herself to other white kids at public schools. Lindsay views public schools as racist spaces that hurt all kids—both the black kids with no boots in the winter and the white kids who are put in positions of privilege in ways that they do not know how to navigate. Lindsay views herself in a more positive light than she does her public school peers of all races, and she tells me that because her school will talk openly about these social problems, such as rape and racism, she actually knows more about these topics and is more prepared for a future in the real world than her public school peers are. She tells me that she also talks a lot at her school about the privilege of going to private school: “I think that it’s frustrating that some kids get, like, all the resources they need, and some kids don’t get any at all. But I don’t know how much that’s able to change, because that’s just, like, circumstance and what’s what and stuff and luck sometimes. Like in class,… we hear a lot of weird stories about everyone’s old schools and why they’re at [the progressive school] and what they think about it and how fortunate we are and everything.”

One does need to be “fortunate” to attend Lindsay’s school, as the tuition and fees add up to roughly $14,000 per year. Lindsay does not mention this, but her father puts the tuition bill in the context of his daughter’s well-being and mental health. He is willing to send his daughter to this school, even if it is in some ways less academically rigorous in his opinion, if it makes her happier and more successful at doing the work he believes she is cut out to do. “You know, pedagogically, progressive education is about social justice, is about contributing back to the environment; it is about a social democracy.… It’s easy to supplement her math and science, her two strongest academic areas. It is not easy to supplement social justice when you are in an unhealthy environment.” When it comes to justifying privilege, Mr. Kerner’s motivation for avoiding public schools is very different from that of parents such as the Hayeses or Andersons. And he is not the only parent to express these views. Other parents of children who attend the progressive private school share similar stories with me, discussing in detail the ways that the public schools are too racist for their kids and send their children messages they as parents believe are harmful emotionally and threaten the antiracist ideals they hope their own kids will develop. While some parents avoid the public schools because they worry about their own children “wearing their pants at their knees” or “listening to misogynistic rap music,” parents such as the Kerners want their child to grow up in an environment free from overt forms of racism, to the extent that that is possible. And paradoxically that means avoiding the schools where there are kids of color. Though justifying avoidance of people of color in this example is motivated from a different place than for the Hayeses, the same pattern emerges: white, affluent kids attending private schools who perceive themselves to be receiving a better educational experience than their public school peers are.

Not only does privilege allow parents to pick and choose where their child will be educated, but it also allows parents to change their mind, removing their kid from a school environment when they deem it necessary. Many of the affluent parents in this study reevaluate their school choices as their kids progress through the schools. When a school is no longer working for a child, a new school is selected, and the child is moved. Or, when a new sibling enters a school that does not work for her or him, perhaps the parents send different children to different private schools. Because of the availability of choice in Petersfield, many of the families in this study utilize different schools, both public and private, at different points in time. Lindsay, as compassionate as she is, learns that her own happiness is the most important thing in her life. As she puts it, “We walked away.… Sometimes you have to walk away.” This practice of disengaging when things get too contentious or too difficult or too racist sends messages to kids about the limits of what one must do to fight for the things they believe to be true, even when they mean well.

“We’re Not a Racial School”: Being a Catholic School Kid

Rosie Stewart (10) is also a private school kid with parents who have perhaps the most wealth of any of the families in this study. Her father is a very high-profile, world-renowned medical professional. Her mother is a lawyer. Though living in the most exclusive part of Evergreen alongside local celebrities and politicians, Rosie plays competitive basketball, so her peer group is larger and includes more black girls than that of most other private school kids. As such, she can draw comparisons in ways that other children cannot: “Everyone at my school seems so, like, friendly, and the teachers don’t really care if you do anything wrong. Like, they care if you do something wrong, but they give you second chances and stuff, and if you screw up, they end up forgiving you. That’s not what happens at public schools. Like, they—I think [my] teachers have really good methods. And I just really like it there! It’s a lot of fun!” Rosie feels safe and comfortable at her school, appreciating the fact that if she gets in trouble or does something wrong, she will have a second chance. She knows from talking to her basketball friends that this is not the case at the public school—that kids even get arrested at public schools for doing things kids at her school do all the time, such as talking back to the teacher. “At my school, we are all white. In our grade, we might get a new kid who is black, but we are all white. Yeah, so, there [are] no racial differences.” I ask her why she thinks this is true: “Maybe it’s because more black people are going to public schools because they think they will be with other black people? But I think, I’m pretty sure, most of the people who have signed up at Saint Anne’s, they’ve been welcomed in. It’s not like—we’re not a racial school. We don’t turn people away.” Unlike the children who attend the gifted school who believe any person of color makes a school diverse, Rosie speaks openly about the lack of diversity at her school. But kids such as Rosie do not think that the school is predominantly white because their school is preventing students of color from enrolling. Color-blind rhetoric of the naturalization of racial patterns (i.e., “black people want to be with other black people”) blends fluidly with Rosie’s genuine belief that the school is not “racial” or that the school administrators do not see race when they decide whom to admit.

The Obesity Epidemic, “Crazy Kids,” and Religion

Jessica (11) also attends Saint Anne’s. With the exception of a few boys in her class, everyone who goes to her school is “nice,” she likes her teachers, and she has a large group of friends. Students who attend Saint Anne’s are predominantly white: “Our school isn’t fully diverse.… Different hair colors, of course, but they’ll be the one or two families that have, like, the dark skin and, um, a couple who are Indian. It’s not totally white, and, um, all of our teachers are mainly white women. We have a black computer teacher, um, but other than that, we have a few lunch ladies who are black and a cafeteria guy who is black—he’s actually really nice!” Unlike her peers at the gifted school, Jessica does not believe that a few students of color constitute true diversity—and her notion of diversity includes more than race. She expresses some surprise that the black cafeteria employee is “nice,” and she goes on to tell me how the Indian kids at her school have parents with “big Indian PhDs.” She is also quick to point out to me that aside from recent immigrants from Nigeria, very few black students attend her school. “African Americans go to the worse schools more. I don’t really know why, but that’s just what comes into my head,” she explains. “They are also more poor than European Americans,” she states.

Unlike Aaron, Jessica does not believe that she is smarter than the kids who attend public school, but she does say that she is scared of the kids who attend public school. “I would be a little bit more scared of going to [a public] school because of the fear of the bad facilities and crazy students stopping me from learning and the teachers always having to control them,” she tells me. Jessica tells me that being a private school kid means getting to go to a good school where people care about learning, where the facilities are new and clean, where there are no “crazy” students, and where she does not have to worry about her teachers focusing on the bad kids rather than the ones that “want” an education, such as her. And the kids who go to these schools, though she cannot explain why, are African American mostly. The comment that this idea just “came into her head” speaks to the implicit messages about race that Jessica has most likely received over time. These messages are conveyed at a level so subtle, messages so taken for granted in her community, that she cannot even identify why she holds this particular belief.

Despite moving to Wheaton Hills “because of the good schools,” Mr. and Mrs. Boone have opted out of the public elementary and middle schools and, like the Hayeses and Andersons, plan to transition their children to public school in ninth grade. Their son, Josh, is currently a freshman at Wheaton Hills High School, and Jessica attends Saint Anne’s. I ask Mrs. Boone about their elementary and middle school choices, particularly in light of a previous conversation she and I had in which she expressed her view that private schools, such as the gifted school in particular, give some kids an unfair advantage:

MRS. BOONE: We made the decision, um, based on a religion component primarily. Second component is, it’s two blocks from my house. And I fully believe the importance of grade school should be part of the community. You should be able to walk there. Kids shouldn’t have to be transported, and, um, the way this neighborhood is, you would have to be bused to the other side of town. Kindergarten, one, two, and three is three blocks from here, and then you get bused to the other side of town: 20 minutes on the [highway] for four, five, six.

MAGGIE: So what is the goal of the busing?

MRS. BOONE: Well, it was to integrate the, um, the—the blacks and the whites in other parts of town, but people just fled this neighborhood and moved to suburbs like Sheridan. So, there was, um, quite a community drain of kids in this area because they didn’t want to be bused, you know, 20 minutes away.

The Boones live in the Pairing B part of Wheaton Hills. Mrs. Boone describes to me how white, affluent parents associate Pairing A with hardworking, international students who are typically Asian and equate Pairing B with black and Latinx Americans who are “impoverished,” “needy,” and “troublemakers”—very similar comments to those of the Hayes parents and others. She tells me that this is a problem and that she wishes more white, affluent parents would be more open to Pairing B—she, however, cannot be one of these parents. Despite all her stated values of fairness and her frustration that kids who attend the gifted school are better prepared for high school, her children are also the recipients of a private school education. Rather than seeing herself as someone who wants to avoid the school pairings, however, Mrs. Boone tells me that she wants her children to receive a Catholic education and that this is the reason why she and her husband opted to send the children to private school. Almost in the same breath, though, she presents a secondary reason for choosing Saint Anne’s that has nothing to do with religion: she does not want her children bused across town, which is the same logic she assigns to parents in the past who engaged in white flight to the suburbs during school desegregation efforts. Mrs. Boone simultaneously disavows parents who engage in this logic both in the past and in the present (i.e., parents who choose the gifted school), while she herself embraces it (by choosing the parochial school). One way Mrs. Boone reconciles these ideas is in reference to the obesity epidemic: “There’s a lot of people in Petersfield who are concerned about childhood obesity. Well, you’re on a bus, you’re standing at a bus stop as opposed to walking three or four blocks? Just the play[ing outside], looking at water trickle down, birds, things like that. I think that’s a component of childhood that we have compromised by making them sit in the car. And now there is an obesity epidemic!” Mrs. Boone draws on what she perceives to be socially acceptable explanations for opting out of the public schools—and specifically opting out of Pairing B, since initially the Boones moved to this neighborhood because of the public schools, not the close proximity to a Catholic school—and justifies her avoidance of Pairing B schools. This allows her to maintain consistency in her values and actions: she is not opting out of the public schools because she is racist like those parents who choose the gifted school; she is opting out because she wants her children to have a religious upbringing and in an effort to fight the obesity epidemic by having her children walk to school. She believes this is a very different motivation from all the other whites around her who choose, for instance, the gifted and talented school, because her choice, she believes, is not motivated by race. She can justify her avoidance of these schools—and the kids who attend them—in nonracial terms.

The most explicit example of this process of justifying avoidance occurs when I ask Mrs. Boone about the population of students of color at Saint Anne’s:

It just so happens that in Jessica’s class, she has the Nigerian and the Indian and a half Native American, and then you’ve got all your Swedes and your Germans, and they’re all in there [laughing]. Jessica is best friends with the Nigerian, and what we’re seeing is a ton of parental involvement from this child’s parents! You know, this kid is bah-laack [pointing to her skin on her arm, implying that the child’s skin is a very dark color]. She’s an African American, but her parents are first generation—well, they aren’t even a generation; they are right from Nigeria, and they know the importance of staying together and of education and their faith, and they’re conveying that to their kids. And they live somewhat close to Hampton Court.… And honestly, I don’t think [this family] even associate[s] with American blacks. Um, because the ideology is so different. There is more of an educational component. This child could blow the doors off of great grades and attention and preparedness. She’s very bright! And her parents are great. It’s very interesting.

Mrs. Boone is excited about her daughter’s friendship as she values having international diversity in Jessica’s life. And certainly Mrs. Boone does not see herself as someone who avoids Pairing B because of the perceived racial composition of the school. Yet Mrs. Boone acts in ways that do not seem to align with what she says. When asked, Mrs. Boone shares further thoughts about the differences between blacks living in poverty and what she considers to be “educated blacks”:

I see the distinction more of as, um, education. Because [President Obama] is a black educated man and talks eloquently, and nobody would think twice. If someone is speaking with a very thick—what is that? you-bonics?—or other ethnic, black language, I think that colors a [white] person’s perspective and then just the education level and how they carry themselves. But if you have someone who is white and carrying themselves not eloquently, that would also categorize them, and they would be comparable. So I think it’s more now toward your education and how you carry yourself as opposed to what color your skin is.

Mrs. Boone engages in explicit color-blind logic in which she minimizes the significance of race in the United States and makes a class-based argument for why she approves of the Nigerian friend and not of the other black kids living in Hampton Court. Mrs. Boone also tells me how enriching it is for her children to experience the culture, language, and food of people around the world, both in Petersfield through acquaintances and also through travel. Most importantly, she states that “the Nigerian” will provide Jessica with exposure to a positive culture instead of the negative culture of “American black” kids.

Rejecting Catholic School

Chris, the child depicted at the start of this chapter, is also a student at Saint Anne’s. As mentioned, he finds the school elitist and the other kids “snobby” and “ridiculous,” and he cannot wait for the ninth grade. His mom, Gail, and I discuss his views: “I’m really proud of how he’s sort of stepping up and was willing to say, ‘These are my politics, and I think this is wrong.’ Even when he was kind of surrounded by people who thought the [newly passed conservative legislative] agenda was terrific, and you know, that shows a character that I’m really glad is there.… Now, he has a little bit of an explosive temper that we have to work on a bit [laughing].” Chris has a very deep sense of fairness and justice, refusing to eat animals because of their treatment by factory farms and purposely wearing political buttons and shirts to school that he knows will antagonize his politically conservative peers. Chris is appalled by the reactions of his peers when Osama bin Laden is assassinated. I pick him up from school that day, and he looks at me after slamming the car door behind him with anger in his voice and says, “Maggie, I cannot believe everyone is celebrating this. That is just sick. And you should have heard all the racist things people were saying today about Muslims.”

Over the course of my research, Chris convinces his parents (who also have their doubts about the school) to take him out of private school and send him instead to public school. I speak to his mom about all of this, and she provides her own interpretations of some of the dynamics that are at play within the Wheaton Hills community as well as within Saint Anne’s and what troubles her about it. She tells me that she believes some of the parents truly want a Catholic education “partly because they have a perception that the public schools lack values, and they tend to be socially conservative, and so, they don’t want their kids learning about same-sex marriage, and they don’t want their kids learning sex ed in fourth grade.” But she also has some more serious critiques about the authenticity of such claims: “But then again, the flipside of it is, when recently, Chris announced he was going to [public school], the little community, meaning Chris’s community, his peers, the perception is, why would you want to go there? It’s scary. There are bullies. You know, people are drinking, and people are doing drugs, and people are having sex. And, like, there’s this perception that there is this, like, wild, deviant behavior going on in the public schools that doesn’t happen in Catholic schools, which, of course, is ridiculous.” Similar to what some of the private school kids told me, so too did Chris hear these things from his peers and later discuss them with his mother.

Gail continues and speaks explicitly and straightforwardly about how race matters in this context. “More than wanting even religious values, there’s a sense of protecting kids from negative social influence that people want when they go there. And I probably wanted that too. I think I did.” I ask Gail what she means by this, and she speaks to me in perhaps the most blunt terms of any participant at any time during this study:

Everyone wants what’s best for his or her kids, and they want their kids to have advantages. And if you’re not really confident you’re going to get the best, it’s hard to really be on board with it, especially when you feel like the stakes are so high. Honestly, I think—and this is going to sound unbelievably racist because it is—I don’t see this educated side of the Petersfield community seeing the underprivileged black community as having a lot to offer. I hear people say, “Well, what do we get out of it, you know? We potentially compromise our kids’ education, there are maybe some risks, and there might be some danger? Why would we want that?” … People really believe without any hesitation that the people coming into the school environment are transient, and maybe they’re not up to speed academically, or maybe they have some social behavioral issues or whatever, and that they’re distracting time and attention from teachers. And the perception is that kids aren’t getting as good an education. And nobody is going to say, “These are the black kids in the classroom,” but, you know, there’s this sort of euphemism.

I think people here, they don’t want to give up what they’ve got. Like, what they’ve got for their kids is good; they don’t want to mess with it. And I think there’s this fear that with limited resources, if we focus our resources on closing the race achievement gap, the fear is that they’re going to do it by closing it from the top down and that then, the opportunities for their bright, well-prepared, educated, affluent kids are going to be less. And no one is willing to compromise when it comes to their children.

Gail’s words tear down the veneer of fairness and the justifications of privilege that her fellow parents work hard to construct about what is going on in Petersfield. She speaks openly about what she believes is the actual underlying motive behind all the private school choices in Wheaton Hills: affluent, white parents’ fears that black kids will lessen the educational success of their own kids. This racial logic is nothing new, with direct links to the push for legal school segregation in the United States’ not-so-distant past.

Gail continues:

We are all parents who can provide a lot of support, but at the same time, we’re also parents who tend to really value academic achievement and want our kids to be poised to do well, successfully, and are afraid of anything that might undermine that. So that’s why there is so much private schooling in my opinion [around here]. Parents are scared that their white kid won’t get the best schooling because of the black kids in the public school classroom. It’s a huge problem. And it makes me feel really uncomfortable about keeping the kids in private school.

Though few parents are willing to say these sorts of things so bluntly, Gail’s analysis fits with much of what her fellow parents are willing to do in their everyday lives. As the examples in this chapter have illustrated, there is fear on the behalf of parents—fears about what their children will not learn at school but also fears about what they will learn. And, across the board, limited attention appears to be paid by parents to the messages that one’s own child is interpreting growing up in this environment.

As the next school year unfolds and Gail moves Chris to public school, he meets new friends, has new teachers, is exposed to many more students of color along with a different set of issues at school. He tells me one night over a year later, when I am having pizza with the family, that there are still “jerks” and “annoying people” at school but that he likes being a public school kid “way better” than being a private school kid.

Lessons of Being a Private School Kid

Part of how Chris, Aaron, Emily, Simon, Lindsay, Jessica, and Rosie and other private school kids form ideas about race and privilege is connected to the fact that they attend private school. The specifics of these white children’s views vary, but with the exception of Chris, the children maintain an understanding of themselves as special. They believe that their school is “not for everyone” and that public school kids are “ignorant” or “misbehaved” or “loose” or “loud” or have “bad” parents and racist teachers. When these interpretations of public school kids operate alongside the popularly shared assumption that to be a private school kid also means to be white, being a private school kid shapes how these young people talk about race and privilege. And, except for Chris, they have learned strategies of how to go about justifying privilege, even when they hold contradictory ideas at the same time, such as abstract ideas about fairness but also desires to do whatever it takes to go to Harvard.

Researchers have examined the ways that white parents have consistently hoarded educational resources over time, evinced in persistent separate school systems for children of color in the United States23 or in the logic derived from scientific racism of long-supported practices such as tracking24 or in the actions of parents who “work cumulatively to protect the advantages their kids receive from the way the schooling is currently organized.”25 However, little attention has been paid to the consequences of this process for the white kids who attend these private schools or who are in “high tracks.” Certainly, the material consequences are clear. But on the basis of this research, other consequences emerge as well.

As sociologists have documented extensively, “many families go to great lengths to place their children in the schools they believe are best, to the extent their resources will allow.”26 These “great lengths” include not only putting children into the “best” schools but also securing the “best” education once children are there. For instance, the parents in this study support lawsuits on kids’ behalf, advocate for more AP courses, spend thousands of dollars a year on kids’ education,27 tell other adults in front of children about just how unique their child is, respond immediately when kids report negative experiences at school by going in to yell at the teacher or even to remove the child from a particular school, make subtle suggestions that the black kids who just joined the school are problematic, and so forth, with a veneer of fairness covering it all. Even if parents also accompany these actions with telling their kids that they are “fortunate” and need to appreciate their unearned privileges and even if they express progressive political views in their homes or reject meritocratic ideology in theory, in practice, these parents’ actions, especially those informed by justified avoidance, speak louder than their words. These actions, like choosing a school, play a powerful role in shaping their children’s understandings of who they are—as well as who they are not. The majority of the private school kids in this study interpret their status to mean that they are unique, special, deserving, extraordinarily talented, more hardworking, more sensitive to the problems of the world, more in need of protection from gangs and drugs and loud black kids, more knowledgeable about real-life skills or current events, or really, as the one private school child critic, Chris, puts it, just “better than everyone else.” At times, these interpretations mirror meritocratic ideology; other times, they embrace the color-blind frame of cultural racism; and other times, they suggest the emergence of what Tyrone Forman calls “racial apathy,” or little concern for ongoing racial injustices and a lack of action to try to fix them.28

In addition, these kids are, in many ways, attending better schools. This is hard to deny when kids’ friends at public school tell them they are bored in science class but the private school kids cannot wait for their science class because of the “cool lab equipment” and hands-on experiments they know they will be doing. This is hard to deny when a kid’s school has only 10 students in a classroom as opposed to 30 or when a kid feels that his voice is heard when he gets to talk critically about the world and practice real-life skills rather than completing bubble sheets or when a child knows that she will enter high school ahead of everyone else or when kids are given second chances. This is hard to deny when one’s highly qualified teacher is willing to admit that she does not know the answer to one’s question, and instead student and teacher look it up together and learn side-by-side, and when kids are well nourished emotionally inside the classroom and when going to school makes one feel happy and safe and excited and confident. Unsurprisingly, given the structural advantages that these white, affluent kids have, most of these children are already thriving. Their successes in their private schools, however, serve to reinforce their parents’ justifications that they are deserving of special opportunities in the first place. They are good students, so they deserve good schools, so they are good students. Like what Gail articulates, what parent would not want these kinds of opportunities for their own child in a society that is so unequal?

And yet these opportunities also come at a cost: a material cost, in tuition dollars spent by parents, but also an ideological cost to these kids. The understandings that these children interpret and produce and retell to and among themselves, the frameworks for understanding patterns in the world around them, and their road map for making sense of inequality in the United States are all produced through a lens of privilege, even when counterevidence is provided through rich history lessons that decenter whiteness or invigorating political debates that focus on concepts such as structural racism. As evidenced by the kids’ voices themselves, while they are aware of racial inequality in the United States in abstract terms—in some cases being able to speak more fluently about it and in more sophisticated terms than almost any other kids in the entire project—they are also interpreting the “specialness of white kids” and their own vested personal interest in maintaining privilege.29 These Wheaton Hills kids tell me they care about fairness and justness and equality. They want everyone to have an equal chance. They want to live in a society where there are no poor people and everyone has enough food to eat. They think rich people should give away some of their money to help poor people. And yet, despite wanting to idealistically change the world, they also want to have power and influence within it.30 As such, evidence of the ideological costs of private schooling comes from the voices of these kids themselves—kids who can speak fluently and critically about race and racial inequality in the United States but who simultaneously believe they are better and more deserving than everyone else.