Darci Craghead is a white mom in Oklahoma City, OK. Her kids are in 6th, 4th and 1st grade. She is the chapter lead of Integrated Schools in OKC and also serves on the writing and podcast staff collectives. She loves gaming with her sons and nephews, watching shows and shooting the breeze with her daughter, watching basketball, and thanks to her husband she also enjoys watching soccer.
In the spring of 2014, my husband and I prepared for our oldest, our daughter, to begin school as a pre-kindergarten student that fall. We live in the capital and largest city in our state. I grew up in a wealthier suburb of the same city, and many of my friends still lived in that suburb. As a kid, teenager, and young adult I had received the message that sending kids to the city school district just wasn’t an option. I don’t remember explicit conversations about it, although there very well could have been. I just knew that many people who had been in my life considered ‘city schools’ underperforming, not a good environment, or the word ingrained in my mind was ‘dangerous’. As my husband and I had conversations about our daughter’s school options, which would eventually be our sons’ options, there were two we considered. We thought about transferring to the highly rated neighborhood school 5 blocks away, or enrolling in our zoned, not highly rated and under-enrolled neighborhood public school.
I didn’t know much about our neighborhood school and it wasn’t until 2019 when I found Integrated Schools that I heard about the idea of touring a school. We knew one family whose daughter had attended there, and they had a positive experience, although they had to enroll her somewhere else due to circumstances unrelated to the school. Other than that, all I knew about the school is what the building looked like from the outside. I never thought to ask if I could see the inside of the school before enrolling our daughter.
To this day, 8 years into my kids being a part of this school district, I don’t hear about families touring schools. Even at the couple of highly sought-after neighborhood elementary schools, I don’t hear about tours happening. That’s not to say it never happens, but I can say it is not routine or an expectation of preparing to enroll a child in school. When preparing to transition to middle school, if going the application school route, there are dates that prospective families can go to the school for an open house of sorts, to see the building, but that is the closest I can come to thinking of touring being a normal occurrence here. I cannot speak to how or if tours take place among the charter schools in our district. Although charter schools are not as prevalent in our district as in other urban areas, they do contribute to the consolidation of privilege and academic achievement into those schools. Since equity was a guiding value for us, in our local situation sending our kids to a charter school was not on the table. So, as we decided to send our daughter to our zoned neighborhood school, our options may not have been as numerous as in other urban districts, due to the norms of our district.
For me, this kept the decision more about what I had been socialized to think about the best place for a kid to go to school, and how that socialization aligned with what I had learned as an adult about systemic oppression and social injustices. My husband had been in a masters program for community development a few years before, and that had opened my eyes to many social issues I had not been aware of up to that point. He had also started a worker cooperative, a business model that prioritizes the worker and the community, which helped me realize that there are ways to do things differently, and that the status quo isn’t necessarily what we are all stuck with. This thinking began to seep into many areas of my life, including how I thought about education. Not that I wanted a system outside of public education, but that the value of public education was too great to accept that it will just always be unequal. We also placed real value in being a part of the community where we physically live, and we saw potential for how that could happen through our neighborhood school.
When our daughter entered pre-k, I hadn’t learned much about the specifics of the injustices surrounding our country’s public schools, or the history of my local district. I knew basics, like white flight had occurred after desegregation began, many private schools were founded after desegregation, and it was easy to see that majority black and brown schools had not been given the same attention and opportunities as majority white schools. Most importantly, I knew that I needed to learn so much more. There was one question that really guided me through these couple of months of coming to a decision about our children’s schooling… “If there are schools I don’t consider good enough for my children to attend, why would I consider them good enough for any child?”
At first, I thought of this in the sense that it’s not right to consider something good enough for some people, but not good enough for others… it isn’t fair. However, over time I began to view the question differently. It wasn’t that I thought we just needed to send our kids to ‘bad’ or ‘underperforming’ schools in order to prove some kids are not better than others. Also, I didn’t think the schools in our district needed to be saved. I had realized that the idea of schools not being good enough for some kids but okay for other kids is a narrative white people created and continue to perpetuate in order to prioritize comfort over equity. I just couldn’t see a way, as a white person, to push back against this premise of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools while simultaneously using that framework to make decisions about my kids’ education. How could I, for one, say it’s unfair for the system to separate kids into deserving and not deserving, and yet still opt to put my kids in a place that the system deems as ‘good’? Even further, how could I be a part of exposing the faulty basis of the unfair system, that certain schools and therefore some kids are inherently ‘underperforming’, if I actively or passively reinforce this narrative in my actions?
To be sure, I struggled internally with this. I struggled to keep my discomfort in check… to remind myself that all parents want their kids to be safe, happy, and healthy. I struggled to communicate to friends and family why we decided to send our daughter to a school in the city district. I struggled with my own insecurities of how I would form friendships and relationships with families I imagined I wouldn’t share a common life experience with. I struggled with the isolation I felt in the decision because my life was constructed around white middle class norms. On my shakier days, I questioned why we would make a decision that felt so uncomfortable, and then I’d come back to the bigger question of why it felt uncomfortable. When I thought about it, removed from my preconceived ideas of what a ‘good’ school looks like and what was acceptable for a white child’s education, it didn’t feel uncomfortable for my daughter to go to her neighborhood school in the city. It actually seemed very normal, convenient, logical, and natural.
If touring had been a normal routine in our district, I am 99% sure I would have toured the school because at the time I remember wanting more information about it. It would have satisfied a need I felt to be able to tell other people that the school was really cute, or that the teachers seemed great, or that they had amazing murals on some of the walls, or any number of things that may have smoothly transitioned through the awkward silence that followed after telling friends that our daughter would be going to an ‘underperforming’ school in the city district. In hindsight, I know I would have felt reassured of my decision if I had toured the school before enrolling my daughter.
But, I didn’t need a tour of the school to put my mind at ease. I needed to process through the lie I had been socialized to believe about school… that some schools are okay for some kids, while other kids need better schools. I didn’t accept that it was okay for me to opt my kids into school choice or move homes in order to feel more comfortable with my kids’ school, when I knew that the concept of ‘good’ schools versus ‘bad’ schools was born out of the lies that white people had created through racist policies and beliefs. That was the anchoring I needed in order to commit to doing the work of learning how to be a better ally in the fight for equity in schools. While I see the value in the idea behind the Two Tour Pledge, to get white parents to enter a global majority school to realize that it is a building filled with kids who are learning and playing and making friends, just like their child will do, I am not convinced that tours are needed. As I look back now, a tour, which I most likely would have welcomed in 2014 as it may have given me a preview of what my daughter would find when she showed up for her first day of school, neither of us needed it.
My daughter started middle school in person this past January at our zoned middle school (we waited a bit longer to return in person due to family health concerns). This is a global majority school, in the historically Black area of our city named after an influential and dedicated local Black educator, with a rich history in the Black community. Her 6th grade Vice Principal gave her a quick walk through the halls in December before winter break, so she would know where her classes were. I waited in the office due to pandemic guidelines. We made sure they had what they needed in order to make her schedule which she would receive on her first day back, and she started school a few weeks later.
She is doing well, living a normal middle school life with normal middle school friends and normal middle school struggles, in a school full of teachers who care about the students and work hard to provide a full and empowering education. Just like when she started pre-k, I had basic information about the school, I had a continuing path of working for educational equity, and I didn’t take a tour of the school. But this time, I didn’t even have a desire for one, or a sense that one would help me feel more comfortable than I already did about her middle school. The conversations and space to process my failures and growth in the IS community along with our years at their under enrolled and ‘low performing’ elementary school are the main reasons that my comfort level has adjusted regarding my daughter entering middle school, site unseen. I’m grateful for this group as my family continually strives to be a part of living into what we hope to see for our world, and not settle for what we are told is normal or too hard to change.
(Photography & Mural Credit: Muralist Victor Ving and Photographer Lisa Beggs)
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