My son attends a public middle school in Newton, and he has started naming things I spent years hoping he wouldn’t have to. He talks about the silent segregation in his school. Nobody announces it, but he feels it all the same. Not long ago, his friends came from many cultures, races, and religions. Now, by his own choice, he spends most of his time with other kids of color. It was a social and emotional decision, and I understand why he made it: those are the spaces where he doesn’t have to explain himself.
He has also noticed that the adults around him sometimes expect less of him than of his white peers. He tells me he can do more. He’s right, and I have had to fight, more than once, for the school to ask more of him. He already understands that his room for error is smaller than his white classmates’, so he moves through school with a level of intentionality no child should need. That kind of vigilance adultifies a child in ways that are deeply unfair. It is the price he pays for attending a “good school.” I’ve been thinking about his words a lot since reading Nikole Hannah-Jones’s recent piece on New York’s public schools and Black children. I’ve read it the way I once read Malcolm X’s autobiography, over and over, each pass forcing me to confront my own schooling and a hard truth about my son’s: I now have to outsource his cultural footprint.
It gets harder every day to help him navigate his Blackness in white spaces, especially under a political climate the internet amplifies and celebrates.
My mother faced a version of this. Like so many Black mothers, she was trying to do two things at once: give her child access to the American Dream and protect him from what so often comes wrapped inside it. She got me into the “good school” in Cambridge, just 3.3 miles from our home in Roxbury. It looked better. It was an illusion of better. Black children there still lacked real champions.
A generation later, I’m on the other side of that drive. I’m the parent who made it to the suburbs, to the district families move for. And I can tell you the illusion looks the same from here.
I’ve spent my career inside this problem, starting as a 22-year-old teacher in the South Bronx and East Harlem and later working with school leaders across New York City and in Newark. That work taught me that leaving your community to find a decent school isn’t a quirk of the system. It is the system. Our schools are public in name, but the public is mostly invested in its own children, not in children who are someone else’s problem.
Suburbs are where that truth is easiest to ignore. In neighboring Cambridge, poverty and privilege sit on the same block, so the contradiction is hard to hide. Out here, distance does the hiding for us. We can believe in equity sincerely, vote for it, and put it in our school newsletters, because the children who pay for the gaps mostly live somewhere else. Or they ride a bus in from Boston every morning and are expected to be grateful for the seat.
That bus exists because of people who refused to look away. Ruth Batson spent decades documenting the segregation Boston pretended not to see, and her organizing helped create METCO, the program that still brings Boston children into suburban districts like ours. Mel King insisted that political power and educational access were the same fight. Charles Ogletree used his platform at Harvard to hold the region’s institutions to the equity they claimed. Bob Moses argued in “Radical Equations” that math literacy is a civil right, a demand owed to every child, not a favor handed down by “good schools.” My mother was working in that tradition, whether or not she had the words for it. Suburban parents are part of it too, whether we realize it or not.
As a volunteer, I’ve sat in more than 30 IEP meetings beside parents I’d often met that same morning, because no parent should walk into that room alone. What I’ve seen, in city and suburb alike, is what Robin DiAngelo calls “nice racism” fluent in the language of equity while the outcomes never move.
Here’s what suburban parents like me can do:
Treat every child in our schools as our own. That includes the METCO students and the kids of color who live here. Show up for them at PTO meetings, in school committee testimony, and in our own kids’ friendships with the same energy we bring for our own children.
Stop telling ourselves how good we have it. A “good school;” by reputation is not the same as a good school for every child in it. Ask who’s thriving and who isn’t, and don’t accept vague answers.
Stop square-dancing around algebra. Who gets pushed into advanced math, and who gets quietly steered away from it, shapes a child’s whole future. No parent should have to fight for their child to be challenged. Many parents have had to, and I’ve been one of them. Many more don’t know they need to.
Share what we have. Suburban families have tutoring budgets, flexible schedules, and networks that other families don’t. Many of our schools are peanut-free because we refuse to accept the risk to even one child with an allergy. We owe our children the same standard when it comes to opportunity. The “good school” should have to earn its name, one child at a time, every child.
Tony Clark
Newton Public Schools Parent