BECAUSE THE SCHOOLS ARE GOOD. THAT WAS WHY MY PARENTS moved our family from Leningrad, in the Soviet Union, to the suburbs north of New York City. There were other reasons, too, that we didn’t end up in Kansas or Oregon, but the quality of public education was foremost. In fact, it was a primary reason we moved to the United States instead of moving to Israel, where military service would await at the end of a high school career.
Nobody ever understands how lucky he is. So it was with me. It seemed normal, for example, that I had a full-time language teacher devoted to me and a small scrum of other Russian immigrants. The well-stocked classrooms, the well-compensated teachers, the newest textbooks—that was just how things worked. When my high school was named the sixtieth best in the nation, the news was met with widespread derision by the student body, because we were ungrateful in the way of all teenagers. Most of us had no clue that, just a few miles away, there were children attending schools unfit for the developing world, never mind for the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.
It was in high school that I started to understand the vagaries of public education. The way, for example, my own excellent schooling was funded by the wealthy families with enormous houses sequestered in the wooded hills above town. My own father, meanwhile, a PhD who had worked in a physics lab in the Soviet Union, delivered pizza. And there were the inner-city kids who were bused into our suburban enclave. They were the “benefactors” of a desegregation plan, though also the victims of long-standing racial inequalities. We didn’t understand that, of course. Those kids, the black kids, stayed together, moving quietly through the hallways.
Later, after college, I became an educator, working in schools across Brooklyn, in large part to directly address the inequalities I had come to understand in the course of my own public education. This book is a continuation of that effort.