10 
FRESH PAINT
THE OTHER DAY I WENT TO AN EVENT in our community designed to “love on” our elementary school. A big sign on the fence said “Love Rockwood.” At various events over the summer I had seen people from a church group helping out at community events wearing red visors or hats with the same slogan on them. Those hats and visors, those banners hanging up on the fence during a community project work day, brought up a lot of feelings for me. I felt conflicted—grateful that our elementary school was getting attention, thrilled to see hundreds of people descend onto our little school and give it a new coat of paint, landscape the children’s garden, put in fresh-smelling bark chips everywhere. I felt real warmth at the sight of so many busy little bees roaming around the brown August grass, so many men up on ladders, women running the water-and-ice cream stations, the youth group with their goofy leader making balloon animals for the kids in the community.
At the same time I wondered why our school needed to be loved in this way in the first place. Why did it need hundreds of volunteers, most of them White and middle class, to come and do the work of maintaining a pleasing appearance once a decade? Would our school really need this outside intervention, complete with balloon animals and bounce houses and canvas tents and banners, if the people declaring their love actually lived here and sent their children to school here? What exactly does it mean to love a neighborhood, to adopt it, to help it, to fix it, when you wouldn’t actually ever move into it?
I still remember the way my stomach felt the first time I googled our local elementary school. I knew most of my neighbors sent their children there, of course—beautiful, loud, intelligent, disobedient, belligerent, kind, and shy children. I knew my own value was to live with my neighbors in mind, and that included sending my kids to the same school as they did. But as my daughter neared school age, and I, like so many other parents from my similar background, googled the school to find out more about it, I felt queasy. I felt my values slowly sinking out of my pores. I found myself staring at a large red score of 1, the lowest score on a scale that went upwards to 10. I saw a school that had been deemed a failure. And I feared that I was signing my own child up for failure by sending her there.
I remember gathering up my fizzling resolve and setting up a meeting with the principal. My daughter would be entering the next year, but I wanted to scope it out. I met with the principal and stammered out a few questions. I mentioned I was interested in sending my daughter to school there, and that I wanted to get involved and help the school, help the families. Did they need help? How could I best support them? The principal was busy, he had things to do, and he looked me in the eye and in a few sentences deflated all of my carefully constructed hierarchies. Well, if you want to send your child here, do it, he said. But we already have a lot of great families, and we’re all working hard together here. If you want to join us, you’re more than welcome.
He smiled brightly in the way that meant the meeting was over. I walked back through the halls of that unassuming building, the walls covered in pastel murals, art projects, and cheerful slogans. I was shocked at the joy I felt, almost as tangible as a mild electric current. I don’t know why I was surprised: there in the midst of a large concentration of children and the people dedicated to helping them learn and grow and be safe. Joy—along with outbursts of anger, frustration, curiosity, boredom—was a natural outcome of grouping kids together, of rounding up all of these little humans made in the image of God.
The principal’s answer had astonished me. It was exactly the right response, centering the hardworking families of the community and crushing my White do-gooder dreams. I was impressed, and I filled out the enrollment paperwork immediately. When I found out this principal took another job at a better-paying and better-resourced district, I was disappointed. But it was too late. He had already convinced me to join the good work that was already happening. I’m indebted to him for that short conversation we had. In the years that have passed since, I have fallen ever more deeply in love with all of the people that make up our little school, our bastion of light in the midst of a world hell-bent on not investing in certain communities.
People have the right to make whatever choices they want about where they live and how they educate their children. This liberty is woven so deeply into our minds we don’t know how to interrogate it. We can talk about loving our neighbors all day long, but this can be hard to do when we orient our lives around loving ourselves and our immediate families. We make these choices under the name of common sense, the natural and normal pursuit of achievement and success, and of the God-given commandment to love your children. But what happens when our freedoms affect the freedoms of others?
Perhaps it’s time for people like myself to spend more time considering the ramifications of exercising our rights. In my experience, people like me—people with privilege in an unequal society—love to talk about intent. We want to do good. We want to love others. We want to help others (and if it only happens every few years, and a big deal is made of our help, then that’s the cherry on top of the cake).
But I’m tired of talking about intent. Instead, I want to talk about impact. I want to talk about what happens when we all choose what we believe is best for ourselves or for our children in a world that’s set up for some people to exploit and benefit from inequality. And I can think of no more concrete example of the devastating effects of this pattern than the public education system in the United States.
Nikole Hannah-Jones writes almost exclusively on racism in the United States. Like so many who are paying attention, she believes the issue of school segregation lies under the surface of so many other issues. The choices we make in regard to education—both at the policy and individual levels—have ripple effects that go on for decades. In her work Jones focuses on schools in light of the recent history of desegregation in the United States. For years, Black children were segregated into Black schools, White children to White schools. The practice was inherently dehumanizing and contributed to segregation and unequal access to resources, and the Supreme Court found it to be unconstitutional in 1954.
Without forced integration through the court system, we would never have known how well it works for all. The results were plain: it raised both scores and graduation rates for Black children, and it wasn’t detrimental to White children, whose scores and graduation rates remained the same.1 And yet, since the heyday of integration in America in the 1980s and 1990s, we have slowly slipped back into schools that are largely segregated—much like our neighborhoods. While there are few all-White schools left, there are many schools that are all-Black or all minority students. How and why does this happen? The answer is clear: White parents are behind the push to resegregate.
These decisions are couched in many different terms: people just want what is best for their kids. They want to give them the freedom to explore. They want them to get a Christian education. They are worried about godless public schools. They want to make sure their kids grow up with their values. They want more time to be together as a family. They want to protect their kids from the realities of the world as long as possible. And while there are certainly circumstances and individual children that make these decisions more complicated, the majority of privileged parents perpetuate narratives that center on anxiety about scholastics and achievement, religious education, peer friendships, and about protecting one’s children from the world. And the impact, regardless of intent, boils down to actions that prioritize individual benefits over the collective flourishing of a community.
All forms of education are political and reflect the beliefs of the caregiver (and society as a whole). We are all experimenting with our children, all the time. All of us influence our children because of our politics—how we engage our responsibility to be civically minded. Those who opt out of the public education system—whether through homeschooling or by immersing themselves in a specific denomination or Christian school or going to great lengths to send their children to an elite private or public school—are also making choices and placing their kids on a different kind of altar: one that assumes that the sacrifice is worth it and that their children need to somehow get ahead in a world where some will be the captors and others will be the captives.
Someone’s kids have to attend the worst school in your city. In your mind whose kids should that be? I think our answers to that question reveal a great deal about how deeply the American value of autonomy has been lodged in our hearts. We will fight to ensure that our kids get the best, and we try to forget about everyone else—unless perhaps, every once in a while, there’s an opportunity for charity, to give back, or to “love on” that fits our needs and maintains the status quo of the hierarchy (and makes us feel better, to boot).
My husband and I chose our daughter’s school on purpose, and we have the privilege and social mobility to do so. But school choice is not a reality for the majority of my neighbors. For one, there are few options in our neighborhood—two or three small charter schools that don’t reflect the racial or socioeconomic makeup of our neighborhood. When we moved into this neighborhood, my daughter was five. We lived in an apartment complex that was infamous for many reasons, but which we found to be a haven for families from many different backgrounds. We didn’t have a single conversation about school choice, although it was a constant topic of conversation for most of my White, middle-class friends who lived elsewhere. All of the neighbors I knew—most of them immigrant and refugee families—weren’t trying to get into alternative schools or thinking about homeschooling. It made me wonder why they weren’t doing everything in their power to “get ahead.” Why weren’t they more afraid of the school system, of what it might do to their beautiful, unique children?
But then I realized most of them trusted the system and took it at its word. The United States government said that the mission of the Department of Education is “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”2 Some of my neighbors believed in the myth. They believed that what America really wanted was for every child to have the right to a good and equitable education—even as all the evidence suggested otherwise, even as everybody in the know either abandoned or never even set foot in the schools classified as “bad,” because of poverty or race, disguised as test scores.
The more we work together in our neighborhood, at our low-rated school, the more we are working at getting more power to the families who are farthest from the seats of decision making. This involves complicated parent-group meetings, uncomfortable conversations, showing up at school board meetings and reaching out to superintendents. It means paying attention to demographics, funneling resources into things that benefit the most children instead of hoarding resources for a few.
As the apostle Paul says, “‘Knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). Learning for the sake of acquiring more than someone else is the definition of a puffed up education. But loving and building resources into the groups that have historically been disinvested in by both the system and by individuals? That’s what it means to love our school and our neighborhood: to build power, starting from the very bottom of the hierarchy. That is what we need more than any once-a-decade event designed to clean up our building.
What does it mean to love something, to “love on” a community when you won’t live there or send your kids to school there? It means you only want to love it in a certain way, a way that keeps the world as it fundamentally is, but with a fresh coat of paint every decade or so. I think it’s a form of propping up structures of inequality while calling it charity.
The “Love Rockwood” banners and signs and hats still feel jarring to me when I see them. The truth is, I do love our community, our school. So does my daughter. So does the majority of our community. On paper there might be a few concerns, like how the test scores are not great, or how over 94 percent of the student body is at or below the poverty line. But this is what it looks like in the flesh: my daughter eating a free school lunch every day along with her classmates (and sometimes breakfast too). Going to the kind of school where good-hearted people deliver backpacks stuffed full of school supplies or jackets or mittens. Her small body sitting shoulder to shoulder with children who have known (and who continue to know) all sorts of trauma. Together, these children of God are building each other up into the kind of neighbors Jesus envisioned. The ones who have been taught to see differently than the empire sees. The ones who believe that the poor are blessed, that the meek and the overlooked are the ones who’ll make the best leaders, and that those who have mourned and suffered will throw the best parties in the new creation.
I still remember the joy I felt the first time I walked those halls, because it comes back to me every time I am inside that space. It’s one of the only places in our entire city that treats these precious children as if they are worthy of being invested in. It’s one of the only spaces in our neighborhood where anyone, regardless of income, race, able-bodiedness, or religion will be served to the best of the school’s ability. While there are still real challenges to be faced in such an unequal system (especially for kids of color), I can’t deny the presence of the Holy Spirit; it’s obvious to me that our school is a place where God is at work. But love is not just a feeling, not just the spark in my step I get at our school. Love is a concrete way of living in the world that prioritizes others, and other people’s children, over our own. Because of my relationships with people who live on the outskirts of the American Dream, I’ve had the privilege of having my values laid bare before me. I’ve had to ask myself time and again what my highest value for my family is: Do I want my child to “succeed” in the cultural-achievement oriented sense, or do I want her to succeed at loving her neighbor as herself? Which value is stronger?
My friends and neighbors don’t have the resources that the outside church group did—they didn’t have the tents or the tractors or the money to buy bark chips. But they love their school every day in the ways that count: braiding their children’s hair before school, checking backpacks at night, showing up for school events, cooking a feast from around the world for Teacher Appreciation Week. Most of them have no grand intentions of saving or even “loving on” our neighborhood. They simply live here and understand that we will all benefit when we all flourish. They keep showing up. They teach me about the importance of looking at our impact, loving me and my daughter all the while.