Picking the Right School for Your Child: it doesn't have to be a hard decision

Making choices between like things?

A few years ago, I heard a great Ted Talk about making difficult choices. The talk was given by Ruth Chang, a philosopher at Rutgers University. She said that hard choices aren't necessarily big choices. Hard choices are when the options are not clear. For example, you can go to a restaurant that has a very large menu (I'm sure you can think of a few) and do what my husband does and take a very long time to order. The choices seem endless and many of them sound good. These relatively inconsequential choices are actually a hard decision. Whereas, a very consequential decision can be easy. For example, when I was 17 years old and looking for colleges. There were only a few I liked but when I visited two campuses, I knew instantly which college I wanted to attend. It just felt right. In the end, the school was just right; it gave me what I needed and wanted, and defined what I valued for much of my life.

When choosing a school for your child, we can learn from Chang about how to make this very consequential decision a little easier. What is most likely happening when you are making decisions about where to send your child to school is that the choices are "on par" with each other, meaning the choices are hard because there is no clearly better choice. So how do we choose between good and good? Or, great and great? It is highly unlikely that you would be struggling with one of your choices if that choice was clearly not the right one, such as a school that was an hour away from home or a school that was overcrowded or underfunded. Choices that are similar is what makes them difficult to choose. Our Ted Talk speaker, Dr. Chang, says that when big choices are on par with one another, we need to look inside ourselves (not necessarily at the school). Why?

When we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. … This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it’s not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it’s supported by reasons created by us. When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. You might say that we become the authors of our own lives.

So, when choosing a school, we (and hopefully our child) are the directors of the choice, all other things being equal. We must ask ourselves, what is important to us? Our family? Our child? Do we choose a Montessori school because our child needs guidance from older peers and long term relationships with a teacher? Do we choose a school that our child can walk to so the he feels a sense of community? Do we choose a school that has the best marching band for our music-focused child? Is a religious school really important to us? Whatever it is, it is okay. It is for you and your child to decide.

Ultimately, we should do our homework and know that the schools or districts we are choosing from have (and yes, I'm recommending these things):

(1) students who excel,

(2) a positive school climate,

(3) low teacher-student ratio,

(4) differentiated instruction,

(5) tiered interventions,

(6) a strong teacher evaluation system,

(7) a strong teacher leader (principal/director),

(8) opportunities for all students to lead regardless of age,

(9) music, art, theatre and physical education programs, and

(10) welcoming approach to parents in the classroom (within reason).

After that, we need to decide what we value, what we need and what kind of a future we want to create for our children.

Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that’s why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend. (Chang, 2014).

Check out Dr. Chang's Ted Talk for yourself! https://youtu.be/8GQZuzIdeQQ