Baby C is barely a few months past her 2nd birthday, but her education has been on my mind a lot recently. Although education as a subject has always been of interest to me, even pre kid, it wasn’t until I had a kid that I realized just how all encompassing this matter is.

The first reason that Baby C’s educational future is on my mind is because of our finances. Some of our big long-term debts are coming close to being paid off, which has given us some flexibility to start thinking about our long term goals and finances. Thankfully we’ve been careful not to accumulate any credit card debt, but my student loans have taken a big bite out of our income for the past 15 years. It’s with great excitement that we’re looking forward to having them paid off within 6 months, if not sooner, and our car  – the only other debt we have, except our mortgage – is likely to be paid off within the next year. These two monthly payments alone would give us a large chunk of money back, and because we refinanced our mortgage into a lower rate and a more aggressive term last year, we’re finally building some equity on our condo. Mr. Carrot works in politics, here in the Washington DC area, so his job prospects are always a bit uncertain when it comes to election years, but by early 2017, about a year and a half before Baby C is ready for kindergarten, we’ll be in a place to seriously consider buying a house. Which means we’re thinking about where to buy based on where the “good schools” are.

The second reason I think about Baby C’s education quite a bit is that term – “good schools.” I put it in quotes because I struggle with this term a lot. We live in suburban Virginia, in the largest school district in this state. In the section of the district where we currently live, the schools are rated low to average (primarily on standardized testing data), owing most likely to the fact that our area has a very high immigrant population, and higher number of English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. I, as an immigrant kid myself, nearly failed my first standardized test, having been in the country for six months at that point, but was fluent by the time I entered the next grade six months after that. Thus I have a great deal of skepticism toward school ratings – do they really speak to educational quality, or simply how well kids test? But despite my skepticism, the ratings are hard to ignore. So when we think about where Baby C should go to school, we immediately start to think about areas where the schools are rated higher, which around here also means the cost of living is significantly higher as well and has to factor into our planning.

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Beyond the ratings, the educational experience Baby C is going to have is of huge importance to me. I have a lot of friends with school age kids, and I hear a very broad range of feedback on what they are experiencing with their kids in school. A friend recently posted that her 6 year old has been struggling with his first year at school because they had to sit a lot, there was little play and activity time, and they weren’t allowed to talk for most of the day. Others have described their kids building volcanoes for science projects and preparing for service trips abroad. I don’t yet know what kind of learner Baby C is going to be, and I’m skeptical that my personal bandwagon for individualized/personalized learning is going to take foothold in the education system, but the idea of her being taught to a test and having few experiential and play learning opportunities saddens me. I worked in after-school programs and tutored kids for years, and have seen firsthand the short and long term damage that a poor learning environment can create. So I hope to spend some time researching our schools and finding potential good spots for us to consider moving to. I’m a huge supporter and big believer in public school education, so I don’t anticipate a private school being a route for us, but I do want my kid to have a good learning experience as she grows up.

Another reason this is on my mind is also around the idea of “good schools” but from a different angle. Having grown up in a very suburban area (though different state) myself, I went to a school with virtually no diversity. My friends were exactly like me (except the whole immigrant kid thing), and it was really only because I was an immigrant kid that I had a built-in predisposition to seek out diversity and get out of my environment. I want more than that kind of homogeneity for Baby C. She’s a mixed race kid, and I want her to see kids of all colors and types around her when she goes to school. As we look at the “good” schools and their makeup, the demographics begin to skew toward significantly less diversity. One great thing about living in the Washington DC area, which is very transient by nature of government and multinational companies’ work, is that we are naturally surrounded by lots of backgrounds, cultures, religions and beyond. The homogeneity I experienced is not nearly as pronounced in our area, but nonetheless, it does give me pause that Baby C may lose the diversity experience I hope she has.

I admit, sometimes I think about all these things (and as I’m re-reading this post), and I sound a little crazy even to myself, to be so entrenched in this topic. I understand fully that there is no such thing as a perfect education, short of homeschool that you design yourself (not gonna happen for us), so something will always give. I also fully appreciate the fact that parental involvement is a huge factor in educational success. The most important thing to me is not that my kid grows up to be a rocket scientist – in fact, I could care less if she ends up a rocket scientist or a starving actress. What matters most to me is that the 12 years she spends in school are not miserable for her. I watched my after-school kids struggle for years with terrible learning environments and being diagnosed with disorders, that could have just as easily have been lack of activity and play to get their energy out of their systems. My own brother was constantly penalized because he got bored easily and tuned out in class, ironically by having the subjects he cared about a lot taken away from him as punishment. I don’t want that kind of misery for my kid. However she learns, I want her to have fun doing it. I want her to find her passions and her path in life (or at least a general direction), whatever that may be. And I hope to find a place that will allow her to do these things happily.