Parents, she says, need to lean into the strike zone and send their kids to public school, in the name of improving the schools for everyone.
Benedikt isn’t thinking through what would actually happen if everyone felt a moral obligation to send their kids to public schools. What would actually happen is that she wouldn’t live in Brooklyn, because New York would have lost all of its affluent families in the 1970s — the ones who stayed largely because private schools allowed them to maintain residence without sending their kids into schools that had often become war zones.
The chaos that those families were fleeing seems unimaginable today. Here’s Vincent Cannato, in “The Ungovernable City,” describing what happened in Franklin Lane High School, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens: “The worst incident occurred on Jan. 20, 1969, when a teacher, Frank Siracusa, ran down the stairs to see who had thrown a rock through his window. In the stairwell he was confronted by three black youths who sprayed him with lighter fluid, kicked and punched him and then set him on fire.”
Now, Benedikt could lecture you until the cows came home about your moral obligation to public schooling, but you still wouldn’t leave your kids in a school where the teachers were being set on fire. If you couldn’t send your kids to private school, you’d just move.
That, in fact, is what happened to most urban school systems. But in much of Manhattan many stayed. If there hadn’t been educational options, the middle class and wealthy families would have left — and the schools would have been even worse, because the tax base to support them would have eroded even more dramatically than it did.
They kept New York City’s middle-class urban culture alive, along with the network of services that supported it. They loved New York passionately. But they loved their kids more.