Who will save public schools?

You! says Sandra Tsing Loh, whose hilarious "Mother on Fire" is a rallying cry for urban parents who can't afford a fancy private institution.

By Amy Reiter

Read more: Amy Reiter, Education, Children, Motherhood, Economy, Public Schools, Life, Salon Conversations

Aug. 19, 2008 |

Once upon a time, Sandra Tsing Loh was a poster child for the First Amendment -- "the Jennifer Aniston of amendments," she says -- popular, glamorous, easy to love. This was back in 2004, shortly after Justin Timberlake ripped off part of Janet Jackson's costume and revealed her bejeweled right breast to the Super Bowl-halftime-show-watching masses. Freedom of speech was very much on everyone's mind -- and when Loh got fired for inadvertently uttering the F-word on her Los Angeles public radio show, she found herself a cause célèbre.

"It was amazing. Suddenly I was the coolest thing," she says now, recalling the heartfelt letters and enraged editorials written on her behalf, the invitations to swanky events. "When you're finally in that little updraft, you're like, 'Oh, this is the high life -- fantastic!'"

But not long after her big media moment, Loh -- who has five books and one-woman shows to her credit, has been a regular commentator on NPR's "Morning Edition," PRI's "Marketplace" and Ira Glass' "This American Life," and now holds forth on everything from science to women's issues on her two Los Angeles radio shows and in the Atlantic Monthly, where she is a contributing editor -- found her real cause: rescuing our urban public schools. Yes, yes, she can hear you yawning. "This public education thing is so huge, yet … it's so unsexy," she says. "I would go to parties and people would back away. 'Oh, there's Sandra. She was fired last year for obscenity. Now she's into public school. Good luck with that.'"

Those people haven't read Loh's hilarious new book, "Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting." Or maybe they just don't live in a big city and have kids they can't afford to send to private school. Anyone who does will be riveted by Loh's lively, furiously paced, brutally frank account of her own search for a school for the elder of her two daughters -- or, as she dubs it, "the year I exploded into flames." They will also undoubtedly, and regretfully, recognize their own shameful insanity, their own unshakable obsessions, their own false starts and interludes in which they followed false prophets (private school admissions officers, mothers who think they have all the answers, therapists who live cloistered, tastefully appointed lives).

For any parent who has ever worried that her children will end up uneducated and deprived of art and music because she has chosen a career in the creative fields rather than, say, podiatric surgery, for any parent who has ever dissolved in tears after being ignored by the self-important secretary behind the desk at her corner public school, for any parent who has ever felt the searing pain of unrequited love after touring a fancy private school or suffered an existential crisis while considering a move to the suburbs, "Mother on Fire" will function as much-needed salve -- and inspiration. Because if public school is the urban middle class's tragic fate, it is also one that can end in a catharsis. And after we follow Loh on her journey -- through fluorescent-lit schools, complicated female friendships, the elaborate dances of decades-old marriages -- we emerge euphoric, flush with community spirit and able to laugh at our own insanity.

Still shaky from my own all-consuming quest to find a school for my 5-year-old son (he'll enter kindergarten in one of New York City's fine public schools in September), I spoke with Loh. I reached her at her bungalow home in Van Nuys, Calif., where she was no doubt surrounded by women's literature, PTA fliers and thousands of her daughters' tiny socks.

Why does the search for school make parents so crazy?

I think it's partly a generational thing. I'm 46. In our 20s, women in my generation, we all wanted to be Laurie Anderson. "Oh, she's playing violin on roller skates on an ice block in New York City and going directly from that to her Warner Bros. 'O Superman' tour." So we thought that's what you do: You stay true to your own artistic principles, you don't compromise anything, and then you end up with a giant record deal, all this money and a fashion spread in British Vogue. You go to college, don't get married, don't have kids, become Laurie Anderson, make all this money and sing your song. And then our 30s came along, and reality set in.

And now that we have had kids, parenting has become so consumerized. Even when your baby is in the womb, you have to eat a certain kind of kale and put the Mozart headphones over the belly and have the right kind of sleep pillow. And because communities have fallen out, where you don't have the grandmother or the aunt around to help you, you're just kind of alone in your fear bubble. Into that void come the lactation consultants and the new mommy groups that are all heavily marketed. The mommy Web sites, if you are unfortunate enough to read them, have the Bugaboo stroller ads -- all the "advice" is always laden with stuff that you're supposed to buy.

You're just in the habit of swiping the Visa and solving all your parental problems. So by the time you get into preschool, everybody is kind of fear-based and chattering. And even the 2-year-olds are trying to practice their block work to get into the best kindergarten. You're pretty much surrounded in this bubble by people who are going to swipe their Visas and get themselves out of the horrible public school system. Which I had never directly experienced.

It's a key theme in your book: how people fear public schools -- without knowing anything about the public schools.

When I was at public radio looking at kindergartens for [my older daughter] Madeline, for months I did not meet anybody who had their kids in public school in Los Angeles, which is really shocking. I'm a journalist so my friends are journalists: magazines, newspapers, even public radio. Nobody had their kids in public school. That's why I would never think of just going to the corner school and poking my head in. Because that's like going to the DMV.

My generation is so used to having our public spaces look like the Starbucks, with the beautiful lighting and the little bit of Nina Simone and my coffee that's blended a certain way from Costa Rica. So the first time you walk into a public school, you go, "Oh my God the lighting is really ugly. Why are those flags drooping so sadly there? Why does the person typing not look up?" It's a real shock to the system.

And yet when you looked inside it, you found some surprising things.

I did. There's so much catastrophizing about public school by people who have not set foot in there for decades because "no one goes there." I really don't think our school system is an evil borg force. It's sort of like the government. It's not even efficient enough to be a borg of total evil, even if it wanted to be.

So yeah, you find many things. It's like Costco, as opposed to a specialty store like Dean & DeLuca. The Dean & DeLuca is very inviting, it's personal, it's got the beautiful lighting and everything is where you'd expect to find it, but you're spending an arm and a leg. Costco has hellacious lighting and the parking is terrible and you've got these huge towers of paper towels. But if you comb through those aisles, you see hothouse tomatoes on sale and Glenlivet for, what, $10? I remember one time seeing Yo Yo Ma actually play at our local Costco! You'll find some amazing value in there if you just get over the lighting and look. And as a middle-class person -- because there's a huge divide that's fallen out between the upper class and lower class [in our cities] -- we just have no choice. The good school district is $1.5 million homes. Private schools when I was looking were starting at $14,000 and now they're definitely in the 21s. Especially for two kids, it's really unaffordable.

Next page: How much is choosing a school for our kids also about our own identities as parents?