porsche cayenne for everything
class anxiety, cars, and education in Massachusetts suburbs
Most of my childhood was spent in Newton, MA, a city of about 90,000 people in the Boston area. When we moved there from Cambridge, I was five, just finishing kindergarten. Though I missed Cambridge, especially my friends, life didn’t really change that much—my new neighborhood also had parks, an ice cream shop, a good library. The biggest change was my school: where, in Cambridge, I’d been sent to Jewish Day School in the hopes I’d learn Hebrew while I was there, in Newton I was sent to public school. My mother was mortified when she heard I was asking other children whether they were “Jewish or Christian,” and told me that under no circumstances was I to ask my classmates about their religion. There were other religions besides those two, she explained, and some people didn’t have any at all.
We moved at the beginning of the summer, and that fall I started at my new school. I remember noticing, that September, that most of the houses on the street leading up to my school were small, one-story houses with big yards. Only one—the one right next to the school—towered over the others, a gigantic McMansion. I goggled at it daily as we made our way to the morning bell, asking my parents if we could go in and look at what was inside. I couldn’t fathom what would even be in a house so big.
Middle school rolled around, and I met a new crop of kids from the other elementary schools, and also those who’d gone to private institutions. I began to realize that they were the ones who lived in those humongous houses and along the older mansion streets. Some years, new kids joined or left, as they were admitted or rejected from private schools. My middle school crush was one of them. She told me that the only reason she and I were attending the same school was that she hadn’t been admitted to private school for her middle school years. I hated middle school, so I could understand wanting out, but even then I found that kind of weird.
I matriculated to the public high school across the field, a school of about 2500 students with new Macs in the libraries, a good arts program, and by then a hard-studying reputation. She peeled off and went to a prestigious private school attached to one of the local universities. I didn’t mind high school so much, and liked my teachers, but I’d swallowed a lot of prestige politics while at dinner with her family, and wondered whether I really should apply to private school too. Thankfully, my parents vetoed the whole thing. That year, I attended a New Year’s Eve party with her family, in a townhouse in the Back Bay, listening to the hosts gush over my crush’s school acceptance, as the conversation turned to public school.
“You’re lucky,” the hosts said to my crush’s parents. “If you didn’t get into private school, the public schools are at least…okay. A good backup. We don’t have anything here in Boston.”
I was speechless. I’d only ever thought of public education in Massachusetts as very good, not as some kind of second-best option. Boston is a district with more challenges than Newton, mostly due to having more poor, Black, and Latino students after decades of white flight and racial segregation. But Boston is also known to have a number of very good test-admission schools, which I thought should have assuaged some of these parents’ anxiety. In Newton, I’d heard many of my classmates talk about what their parents had done to get them an education at the public high school, bearing high rents and debt for a good public education. Many of my teachers had doctorates, just like the school where my crush was going. I thought of her gigantic house and the fact that throughout middle school, she’d never taken the school bus, ever—her au paire drove her to and from school, every day.
As the years went by, small house after small house in my neighborhood was torn down and replaced with a big one that took up the whole lot. By the time I was in high school, the small houses were the anomaly, not the norm. Newton wasn’t going through gentrification the same way places like Boston and Cambridge were—many of its neighborhoods have never been working-class; they started as country homes for Boston’s wealthiest and grew more populous as white people fled to the suburbs after the 1960s. But the suburban city grew more excessive; affordable housing projects were opposed and shot down several times, despite the city’s ostensible progressivism. Sometime in high school, I began to notice that some of the cars parked along the little village centers were brands that I’d only ever seen on sports cars—Mercedes, BMW, Lincoln. But they weren’t sports cars—they were luxury SUVs, with the most common offender being the Porsche Cayenne. I laughed when I saw one for the first time, parked outside a coffee shop in Newton Highlands. It’s a weird and lumpy car with no more room than a normal hatchback, and its existence makes zero sense.
Because the Porsche Cayenne is the car to buy when a Toyota would be more than just fine, but you couldn’t possibly be seen driving one. It’s the car that you take to the private school that your child doesn’t need, which provides a worse education to its students than many of the public options do, as you grumble about high taxes on your high income in a sprawling city whose excellent services are still too common for you, a convenient backup in case your child’s private middle school acceptance doesn’t go through. It’s the kind of class anxiety that is available primarily to members of the educated professional class, the social class I’ve been part of since birth. The biggest absurdity, to me, is also that my public high school was already very prestigious, routinely sending fifteen or more students to various Ivies through a combination of good academics and legacy standing. It’s not even a Toyota in this analogy—more like a Volvo or a Volkswagen.1 Going to public school in Newton, MA is already winning most games of class and wealth.
I based the title of this post off of a stupid-ass 2021 blog post from Sam Altman, and I did it because Sam Altman also subscribes to the Porsche Cayenne model for everything (though he probably drives a Tesla, if he drives at all). Remember when he used unnecessarily fancy finishing oil to cook with? Porsche Cayenne behavior, though it’s pretty small potatoes.2 Meanwhile, Newton now has a mayor who sent all her children to private school and lives in the same very rich neighborhood as my middle school crush. I don’t know whether she drives a Porsche Cayenne, but that’s not the point.
The Porsche Cayenne model of everything means opting for the option that is private or expensive or resource-intensive instead of the necessary and more-than-sufficient version, which is sometimes public but not always, due to class anxiety or prestige or whatever other reasons these people choose to believe. I’m not immune—I attended a private university even while the University of Massachusetts provides an excellent public education. But in Newton as everywhere else, the wealthy and the wannabe-rich withdraw from public life to insulate themselves, even from options that are better than the norm. As prices continue to rise in places like Newton and as both literal and figurative Porsche Cayennes proliferate, I wonder if city residents will pull back further from public education and public services, to everyone’s detriment.
That’s not to say that public education is always great or even good—this argument is pretty local to where I’m from, which is an extremely well-funded educational district in a state with excellent public education. Newton has an eye-popping 95% graduation rate, according to the Massachusetts Department of Education, much higher than the Massachusetts average of 88.4%, which in turn is higher than the national average of 87%. This demonstrates the district’s class and wealth more than its excellence. There’s a lot of beater-car districts in the broader United States, probably more of those than anything else, and I think a lot of people sending their kids to private schools understand the reality of what they’re doing. This is really about how, even with good investment, class politics make it impossible to build public goods that are used by everyone. Even if that’s not the primary problem facing most public education right now, it is an issue that I don’t see going away.
Because as all this is happening, the Trump administration is illegally cutting funds from all Massachusetts schools, money which was already appropriated by Congress. It’s almost hard to talk about this because it comes as no surprise, and is one of so many things going horrendously wrong in this country, some of which have much more immediate life-or-death consequences. But trying to wreck the educational system in a state that consistently ranks (near-)top in public education is emblematic of the absolute contempt this administration has—not just for public education, but for all public life. One of the functions of public education is to socialize children and to teach them how to be citizens, and eroding its quality means that anyone with the means is less likely to send their children to public school, and more likely to opt for some eye-poppingly expensive private option that will implicitly reinforce their isolation in their socioeconomic class. My public education was not perfect, but it was excellent by most standards, and even that wasn’t good enough for the Porsche Cayenne thinkers of the world.
Newton’s good educational offerings didn’t come naturally, even with the level of funding and resources in the district; they required other forms of active support as well. When arts funding went on the chopping block every few years, parents and teachers had to beg the school committee not to ax beloved programs. At school concerts, my teachers often wore union shirts and advocated against cuts to parents in the audience; they went on strike last year because paying educators with a good living wage and a fair contract is still the last thing on every school district’s list. The excellence of my public education was a lesson in itself for me: that public goods can be better than a private option, when funding and support are strong. The other lesson I learned is that its excellence can dwindle if not maintained—a lesson in entropy that is perhaps much more important than the main argument of this essay.
Public education needs your support, and that means advocacy to elected officials, donating if you can to help teachers provide their students with supplies, advocating for better state-level support for education, and yes, encouraging parents to send their children to public schools—certainly in places like Newton, where in my opinion private education is almost always superfluous. I think that we should all use public services whenever possible, and while it’s easy for me to say that, coming from a state with well-funded and high-performing schools, it’s a responsibility that I take seriously as a small part of trying to be a good citizen.
To conclude: fuck Porsche Cayennes in all their forms. Support public education!
What I’ve been up to
I had a truly horrible week with a hellish academic administrative fiasco, hence the rage level of this post. Things seem to be sorted for now!
I submitted my Master’s thesis for examination back in May!
Both poetry reading marathons—in NYC and France—went well, as did my Montréal launch. I’m doing a surprise virtual appearance at one of the Bristol Translates workshops this week!
I discovered that you cannot, and I mean cannot, get a decent hot fudge sundae in Montréal, though I’d love to be proven wrong. Chocolate sauce does not count as hot fudge. Is there a similar lack throughout Canada, or is this Montréal/QC-specific? This is a terrible drawback for what is otherwise a near-perfect city to live in. My favorite sundaes as of late have been from Cabot’s ice cream (Newton, MA), Sundae school (Cape Cod), and Mitchell’s Ice Cream (Cleveland, OH).
The Midwest has called me, as usual, for the vicinity of July 4th.
I went to see the Art Institute of Chicago with a friend!
I read several books in quick succession!
There are a lot of fireflies!
I saw some good fireworks, though they were briefly disrupted by a grass fire.
It’s mulberry season! I’ve been finding a lot of joy and peace in foraging, though I’ve gotten some pretty dramatic purple stains on my hands.
Thanks to my friend Rachel for suggesting these makes as analogies for Metro-West Boston Area Suburban Education.
I’m still deciding whether ChatGPT-as-Google search is Porsche Cayenne behavior, but my leaning is yes.