Very few people in the world of independent schools want to talk much about money.
Except the students, that is. They have an endless fascination with who has more and who has less and how that came to pass and whether it’s fair.
And therein lies a problem – and an opportunity – for administrators, faculty, and parents.
I write about money for a living, but I didn’t intend to be the ringleader for these discussions until parents started inviting me to their schools to try to set everyone straight. They’d seen some of my columns and blog posts in The New York Times about kids’ curiosity about money, and they were having trouble answering their own children’s questions about whether they were rich or poor and how much money they had. And while the leaders at their schools were working hard to implement sensitive, smart diversity programs, the lesson plans focused mostly on race and sexual orientation and not social class.
The reticence around money made perfect sense to me. I’m a product – literally, a creation – of Francis W. Parker School in Chicago, where I was both a full payer and a scholarship kid in my 14 years there. Now, I’m a parent at Brooklyn Friends School paying more than $37,000 each year in tuition. And I know how easy it is to silence a room in schools like these by reminding everyone that if they’re among the majority of parents in the community who can pay full price that they’re probably in the one percent or close to it. People tend to look very uncomfortable when I point this out.
But I don’t think we have much choice except to be honest about it. Money is a source of great mystery and power, and it’s the job of the children we raise and teach to figure out how the world works. They will have lots of questions, and it’s our job to answer honestly and in an age-appropriate way.
The questions may start with the realization that their parents are paying for them to go to school while friends or cousins attend something called public school and pay no tuition. Why are their parents making that choice? Schools can help parents a lot by reminding them that these and other questions are coming and to guide them to sensible replies.
With the private vs. public question, one good answer is pretty simple: This was the best choice that we could make for you. But each family, school, neighborhood, and town is different. And just because a family decides to pay tuition to send a child to school, doesn’t mean the school is better than a public school. The families who do that are just hoping that it will be better for them.
Kids may then want to know how much school costs. The younger ones aren’t far enough in math to have much context for the five-figure bill, but there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the truth. The number is on the school’s website after all, and kids with access to Google are likely to search for their school just after they hunt for their address and stumble on the estimates of their home’s value.
A persistent older student will take this line of inquiry further, wondering whether yours is just a school for rich kids. I’d turn that one right around though and reply with this: What do you think it means to be rich? And if our school is a school for rich kids, is there anything wrong with that? Once parents hear them out, suggest that they try framing the definition expansively: We can be rich in family, friends, good health, and natural beauty. Context is important, too: Rich compared to whom?
Still, the simple truth of the matter is this: Families who send their children to an independent school are incredibly rich in opportunity. Your classes are small, the lab equipment and art supplies are probably excellent, and you have more extracurricular activities than there is time in the school year. There are likely other kids in the school with more money or less, though it’s hard to know for sure. But yes, if you attend this school, you’re rich in many ways, and there isn’t any harm in owning up to it.
The inquiries from the youngest independent school constituents may be less complicated than what you face from their parents though. This is what Mark Stanek at Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, discovered when he was bold enough to try to lead a community-wide conversation around social class in his second year as head of school.
He made real progress, and you can read about it in the story he wrote for Independent School magazine in 2012.
Still, to get as far as he did, school communities need to be prepared to ask themselves aloud the money questions that parents (and prospective parents) whisper about furtively but rarely have the guts to ask directly:
Does our school have a reputation of being too expensive for the upper middle class, who can’t pay full tuition for two children but could pay for much of it? What do our financial aid statistics say about who we choose to help? (We are releasing financial aid statistics right? Or have we convinced ourselves that it would be too controversial?)
What are the optics of having a live auction every year or two, with the wealthiest 10 percent of our community bidding against one another while everyone else watches? Is that the reason that attendance is not what we would hope it would be, or have we neglected to discount the annual gala tickets for families on financial aid at the same rate we discount their tuition?
So we have an open campus. But do we, in essence, have a caste system with it, since some children can’t afford to go out to lunch much at all, let alone in their own vehicles?
Why do we allow parents and babysitters to swoop in during second period with forgotten lunches and homework and sports equipment when some children don’t have that privilege, given that their single parent is working and cannot leave their place of employment? Would it be better – for everyone – to adopt a “No bailouts” policy?
When school potlucks are hosted in people’s homes, who are the people who never offer theirs up because they cannot afford a space large enough to host every parent in the class? Does the hosting become competitive, too? If so, would it make more sense to have the events at school?
Money conversations make all of us uncomfortable. We’re not used to having them. But I will never forget the teacher I met at a conference years ago who casually dispensed with the “independent” moniker we use in polite conversation and simply identified his school as a “money-based institution.”
It’s true. So let’s talk about it.
As with any conversation about difference, diversity is an opportunity, not an obligation, as the children’s book author Michael Tyler puts it. It’s time we made our differing resources a topic that everyone can feel comfortable acknowledging in schools like ours.
Ron Lieber is the Your Money columnist for The New York Times and author of The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money. He speaks regularly to parents, students, and faculty all over North America.