Journalists tend to meet up in bars, like the hipster hangout in Hampden where I was drowning my thirst one summer night. Alcoholic camaraderie among the ink-soaked (or inky camaraderie among the alcohol-soaked) is an occupational hazard.

Well-lubricated young urbanophiles have U-Haul-ed into stable enclaves of working-class white folks like this one, seeking a measure of safety in a city that offers too little of it. Nobody likes to talk about it, but there it is: Even the brave souls of the creative class need a nice place to live, and when they hunt for neighbors these days, they tend to seek out places where people look like them.

Among the slackers and juicing scribblers is an education writer for The Sun. Upon overhearing a conversation about my two kids, who go to school in Baltimore County, he pipes up, with all the subtlety of a capital-I inquisition: "You're not one of those guys who leaves the city because of the schools, are you?"

I am exactly one of those guys, I tell him, but I understand the question/accusation. When I was the reporter's age—around 30—I regularly performed high-and-mighty beat-downs on civic-minded, liberal friends who insisted on sending Junior to Friends or Park or St. Francis of Assisi. "It's guys like you who are ruining the public schools," I would say. "How are things going to get any better if everyone who can afford to flips the bird to city schools?"

Then, I had kids.

Stop me if you've heard this one (or another tale that rhymes with it) before: My wife and I chose to live in a duplex in a safe Northeast Baltimore neighborhood (Beverly Hills) that we picked because of its affordable houses, mixed racial makeup (we're white, by the way), and the local public elementary school's impressive test scores. Not long after our kids were born, the school's test numbers plummeted and reports of classroom mayhem multiplied. We looked for a public alternative; when that failed, we voted with our feet, moving to the vanilla desert of Towson in search of the ever-receding oasis of a strong public education.

This may sound lame, but: We tried. When my daughter started her education eleven years ago, we placed her at the school nearest the daycare provider who watched her and her younger brother two days a week. Several acquaintances who fretted over discipline-challenged schools in Northeast Baltimore worked channels to get their kids into Roland Park, a public K–8 with state testing numbers that rivaled those in the 'burbs. Folks closer to the inner city helped form new charter schools. Others swallowed their secular leanings long enough to enroll their kids in parochial schools. Many, like me, had grown up in city public schools. They would be the first generation to raise kids whose schooling wasn't entrusted to government employees.

We wanted to resist the temptation. A generation earlier, I managed to stumble my way through the Norebo public schools and get out alive. Sure, there were those carefully choreographed "race riots" to avoid during junior high, and thousands of my fellow dopers (or so it seemed) with whom to float through months of four-hour, split-shift days in high school. But, I reasoned, my experiences prepared me for reality better than twelve cloistered years in private school would have.

So my daughter went to a public school where, despite the outbursts from kids who seemed to have been encountering rules for the first time, she learned. Soon her second-grade teacher anointed her a "teacher's helper" to try to corral the situation. Instead of learning more, my daughter re-learned things as she taught them to others. Classroom progress was—as they say—incremental. Art classes were nonexistent, so saintly moms took up the slack, picking up finger paints and construction paper at Target, then carving out time to share what they knew. Because the building's pipes were encrusted with asbestos, the entire school was eventually shut down and moved into my former junior high school, an edifice on Northern Parkway that features all the charm of a medium-security prison.

But this wasn't a horror movie. The school was filled with caring, talented teachers and staff—people who stood their ground as beleaguered colleagues retired or transferred out. Most of the parents were interested in how their kids were doing, so PTA meetings were full. It was more like watching newsreels of Depression-era soup lines. People were being served, but it was a slow and often-desperate process, and the stew was thin.

With first grade approaching for our son, we began to wonder what it would be like not to have to worry about both children getting a bare-bones education (at least until they could apply to one of the secular trinity of city public high schools: City, Poly-Western, and the School for the Arts). We tried to scrape together the nickels to send them to a private school. And we started kicking around the idea of moving out.

We talked to people. While on a magazine assignment to interview lawyer Stephen L. Miles about the favorite part of his house (it's his bathroom), I happened to mention our predicament. Miles' two youngest kids attended public schools in Timonium—a surprise, at least to me. I assumed that a local legal celeb would send his scions to Park. He told me why: "If you pay a higher mortgage and move to the county for the schools, you'll get that money back when you sell. Any money you send to a private school—well, you can kiss that goodbye forever."

We were hardly rich, so this made sense. Too many parents seemed all too willing to grind their souls into a fine, bitter powder working to pay god-awful tuition. We'd always been able to balance home and career; we didn't care to join them.

And besides: If you can't take the word of a TV lawyer, who can
you trust?

We put our house on the market. The folks we shared the duplex with, an elderly couple our family adored, decided that if we were moving on, they should too—after more than thirty years. When I talked about our move with friends and coworkers, I tried to steer clear of the whole school thing—the loaded gun on the table. But instead of righteous scowls and sharp rebukes, all I got were weary nods and words of understanding. "Well, who could blame you?" civic-minded, liberal folks said.

As we searched—frantically—for a budgetable house in a Baltimore County neighborhood with high-performing public schools, signs became clearer that we were doing the right thing. One day, my daughter told me that, as she and her classmates were lining up for dismissal, an older kid from Northern High came hunting for an eighth-grade student at her school. The high schooler hinted at a gun in his sweatpants, and the younger children were quickly herded back into the prison complex—er, interim school—by staff. (Northern, my alma mater, was later closed after ongoing problems with discipline and violence. The building has since been reconfigured into the smaller W.E.B. DuBois High School, with a focus on environmental science. It has been listed as "persistently dangerous" by the state department of education for the last two years.)

My daughter blew it off, but her mother and I didn't, and once we found a house just inside the Beltway, we decided to pull her out of school before the semester change. I dreaded telling her teacher, a saint of a woman who had hung in for nearly thirty years. Here come the recriminations, the accusations, the who-the-hell-do-you-think-
you-ares. Here's what I got: "You're moving to the county? Oh! I'm so happy for you!"

You can imagine how surprised I wasn't to see her boss, the school's principal, at an open house at a magnet elementary school near our new home. She, too, wanted what was best for her kid.

What does it all mean? I wrestled with that then, and I still do. Thousands of people in our predicament over the years have performed this mass pullout from the city's public education system—and the city itself—knowing full well that parents without means—those without cash for tuition, a connection here or there, the ability to take on a larger suburban mortgage or rent—are screwed. Many of us have felt sick about that.

But the sad fact is that when solutions are beyond elusive, people make decisions based on the here and now. And the here and now is ruled by fear. We can argue that race is a big part of the issue—and, no doubt it is. White flight did little to improve the public's commitment to taxpayer-funded schools. But some of our neighbors here in the county are African Americans who left the city for the same reasons.

Class is what's at play here. Acting on their fears of falling backward, or of being left behind in declining neighborhoods, those who can move up, many of them simply so they don't go down. We've gone from "separate-but-equal" education to separate-but-unequal regions. And the same people—a disproportionate number of them black—suffer.

I wish someone had an answer for that. Short of reindustrializing the city so people have decent jobs and some hope, there may not be one. All I know is that looking askance at people who have moved to the 'burbs for the schools won't change anything.      

No matter how much of your heart you have in your politics, you don't sacrifice the well-being of your kids for the sake of anything more abstract.

And in Baltimore these days, that's just how it is.

-Michael Anft

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