“Learning to choose is hard. Learning to choose well is harder. And learning to choose well in a world of unlimited possibilities is harder still, perhaps too hard.” “
—Barry Schwartz

What’s the best school in San Antonio? The answer is not as simple as it may seem.  Parents and students here have an array of excellent choices:  traditional public schools, magnet schools, charter schools, private schools, parochial schools,  independent schools, and some families select to home school their children. 

So, with all these possibilities, what are parents to do?  Do we let our kids make the decision? Truthfully, this may be one of those cases where it can be crucial to distinguish between input and decision-making. The child can have input – maybe even a lot of it – but the tuition-paying parents need to make the final decision. After all, one of the benefits of being older is we have the wisdom to know what may be truly important in the long run and what may feel significant in the moment. 

For example, how should we weigh the caliber of the academic program versus the success of the sporting teams?  How much should the diversity of a school community count?  What role should the facilities or the school’s lunch program play in our decision-making process?  Every family will answer these, and many other, questions differently.

As you may have read in last week’s Communique, Keystone ranked first in five categories in this year’s Niche rankings:

Please don’t get me wrong, these accolades are nice, and if there’s a competition, we’d prefer to come out on top. But what do these rankings really mean?  After all, they can change from year to year for seemingly inconceivable reasons, so how exercised should we get about them? If we fall from the top spot one year and rise the next, does that really mean that the quality of what we do has truly changed?

Keystone students and faculty/staff members produce excellent work in and out of the classroom and have for decades. This excellence will continue in the future, regardless of what the rankings say.  So, we take lists like these with a grain of salt.  

The hubbub over rankings go back more than a century. A recent article in The Atlantic recounted acrimony around a set of college rankings in 1911 that led President William Howard Taft to ban any federal reports on them in 1913. Two decades later, writer Edwin Embree made an informal list of “the dozen greatest universities in America.”  He told The Atlantic:” A storm at once broke over my temerarious head.” The article continued: “An unnamed politician responded with curses and threats over the exclusion of his state’s university on the list. The unranked institutions demanded to be ranked and threatened libel suits. The highly ranked wished to be ranked higher. An eager swarm of pupils and their mothers’ clamored to know what college to attend. Only the Harvard people, whose institution Embree ranked first, were happy.” 

This clamor has only increased since 1983, when the U.S. News and World Report began ranking colleges and universities. Each year, the U.S. News rankings provoke a new round of teeth-gnashing and howls of anger.  Students, administrators, faculty/staff, and alumni heartily agree when their college is highly ranked or protest loudly when their beloved institution falls behind others.  Some schools attempt to game the system while others profess that they don’t care, but act as if they do. These rankings might not matter for the big-name schools, but regional colleges and universities can see more applications and alumni donations when they place high on the U.S. News list.

Sadly, the Niche rankings have the same effect on pre-collegiate schools. We’d like to think that going up or down is solely a matter of bragging rights, but it can affect applications and even parents’ desire to stay or move to a different school. We can’t afford to think we’re above it all because we know that current and prospective families do pay attention.  

So what’s the best school? The better question is: what’s the best school for your child and your family? If you’re looking at independent schools, San Antonio offers a range of institutions with very different atmospheres, cultures, philosophies, approaches, and challenges. Parents should look at schools through a variety of lenses and bear in mind that what works for one child may not work for another. 

As parents, we should also remember that we are choosing a community for ourselves as well as our children for as long as they will attend that school.  It’s a difficult burden for parents to feel uncomfortable on the sidelines or in the theater when their child is performing.  It’s imperative that the values, climate, and culture of a school match those of their family.  When a child feels caught between the mores of their school and the teachings of their household, it can tear at their sense of identity and fracture the family.    

Numbers may feel important when looking at a school, but the feel of the community can be just as crucial, if not more of a priority. On many days, children and teens will spend more time at school and with their teachers than they will at home with their parents. In a supreme act of faith, we parents turn our most beloved asset over to strangers, and hope and pray that our children will be ok.   

Ultimately, we want our schools to be great places for our children to learn and blossom as students and as young people. The right fit school can truly help our children become the people they were meant to be.