Diversity of schools - can this work both ways? Am I being unreasonable?

[Anonymous]

All 3 Ward 6 middle schools.

[Anonymous]

Asian families prioritize high-performing schools over diverse schools everywhere they live in this country. The fact that few DCPS and DCPCS middle and high schools can attract any should be a wake-up call to all stakeholders.

[Anonymous]

It's normal on DCUM to talk about "diverse" schools w/out any Asians. For many of the AAs and whites who post here, Asians are irrelevant!

[Anonymous]

I mean, my guess is the schools where <1% of kids are white are like 90% Black, which is not diverse at all. OP is looking for true diversity, no? For some reason, people conflate having a good number of Black people means it's diverse, but that's not what that means.

[Anonymous]

we have come so far from the ideals of Brown vs. the Board of Education --- once upon a time, we decided to integrate schools, creating schools with diversity that matched the proportions of the overall population.

What happened to us? I'm sure there are people on this thread and others on DCUM who consider themselves good liberals who have found themselves convinced that segregation is normal and even desirable.

Even the premise of this thread bothers me. Why is OP taking the two extremes as options? How can we make individual choices that result in more integration of schools, rather than more segregation?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:we have come so far from the ideals of Brown vs. the Board of Education --- once upon a time, we decided to integrate schools, creating schools with diversity that matched the proportions of the overall population.

What happened to us? I'm sure there are people on this thread and others on DCUM who consider themselves good liberals who have found themselves convinced that segregation is normal and even desirable.

Even the premise of this thread bothers me. Why is OP taking the two extremes as options? How can we make individual choices that result in more integration of schools, rather than more segregation?

We probably can't. It's up to us to dismantle systemic racism so that we level the economic playing field. We aren't necessarily dividing along racial lines anymore, it's the racism that has pushed minorities into poverty that is doing the job. In America, poor people tend to be Black because of our history and systems, etc. What I find interesting is when people think that having 60% of a school white is automatically awful, even when 60% of our general population is white. Or a PP who mentioned Asians... well, Asians are like 7% of the population so why is it automatically racism if around 5-7% of a school is Asian?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Asian families prioritize high-performing schools over diverse schools everywhere they live in this country. The fact that few DCPS and DCPCS middle and high schools can attract any should be a wake-up call to all stakeholders.

no stereotyping or anything.

[Anonymous]

i am not the op. the op presumably believes true diversity is desirable but also that 95% same race schools are a product of systemic forces and individual choices away from that school. there's some residual guilt when that is your neighborhood school and you nonetheless choose to drive across town for another option. it's not the pro-community choice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:i am not the op. the op presumably believes true diversity is desirable but also that 95% same race schools are a product of systemic forces and individual choices away from that school. there's some residual guilt when that is your neighborhood school and you nonetheless choose to drive across town for another option. it's not the pro-community choice.

but what if the school doesn't represent the community? for example if the neighborhood is 30/30/30 split, but the school is overwhelmingly one race.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Asian families prioritize high-performing schools over diverse schools everywhere they live in this country. The fact that few DCPS and DCPCS middle and high schools can attract any should be a wake-up call to all stakeholders.

no stereotyping or anything.

. Are you a first or 2nd gen Asian immigrant? If not, pipe down. What do you know about the stereotyping of Asians in this country. Racism bothers us little. As an immigrant group, we’re more focused on academic achievement than any other. DC public schools are too political for almost all is us past elementary in Upper NW and Cap Hill. The rigor, challenge and respect for Asian cultures and languages just isn’t there. Even BASIS and Walls struggle to attract Asian families.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Asian families prioritize high-performing schools over diverse schools everywhere they live in this country. The fact that few DCPS and DCPCS middle and high schools can attract any should be a wake-up call to all stakeholders.

no stereotyping or anything.

. Are you a first or 2nd gen Asian immigrant? If not, pipe down. What do you know about the stereotyping of Asians in this country. Racism bothers us little. As an immigrant group, we’re more focused on academic achievement than any other. DC public schools are too political for almost all is us past elementary in Upper NW and Cap Hill. The rigor, challenge and respect for Asian cultures and languages just isn’t there. Even BASIS and Walls struggle to attract Asian families.

Can you expound on this? It's continually frustrating that all DE&I efforts seem to focus on AAs and gay people.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Asian families prioritize high-performing schools over diverse schools everywhere they live in this country. The fact that few DCPS and DCPCS middle and high schools can attract any should be a wake-up call to all stakeholders.

no stereotyping or anything.

. Are you a first or 2nd gen Asian immigrant? If not, pipe down. What do you know about the stereotyping of Asians in this country. Racism bothers us little. As an immigrant group, we’re more focused on academic achievement than any other. DC public schools are too political for almost all is us past elementary in Upper NW and Cap Hill. The rigor, challenge and respect for Asian cultures and languages just isn’t there. Even BASIS and Walls struggle to attract Asian families.

FSU immigrant here, I put us as a close second after Asians for not carrying about politics and obsession on math/chess/academic achievement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:i am not the op. the op presumably believes true diversity is desirable but also that 95% same race schools are a product of systemic forces and individual choices away from that school. there's some residual guilt when that is your neighborhood school and you nonetheless choose to drive across town for another option. it's not the pro-community choice.

but what if the school doesn't represent the community? for example if the neighborhood is 30/30/30 split, but the school is overwhelmingly one race.

Right but it's challenging because how will the school ever represent the community if people don't send their kids there IB?

We are in this situation with our IB school and I think this is our last year there, regrettably. But as our kid has aged it has felt less like a neighborhood school because so few of our neighbors send their kids there. For ECE yes, but not beyond. Most of my child's friends there live outside the school boundary now, which eliminates one of the main appeals of going to your IB school. Most of our immediate neighbors send their kids to charters or to DCPS in nearby boundaries.

We tried.

[Anonymous]

Former Soviet Union immigrants are on a par with Asians in achievement in instrumental music. Like Asians, they gravitate to suburban schools with strong math and chess teams and orchestras and bands.

My Asian immigrant parents and grandparents could have absolutely cared less if my siblings and I, and our children, attend public schools with low-income AAs and Latinos. They had far too many of their own problems in East Asia, wars, dictatorship, ancestral lands confiscated, famine etc. Privately, I don't care much myself (and I worked as a Dem Congressional staffer for years). Good white liberals don't really get East Asian immigrants.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Asian families prioritize high-performing schools over diverse schools everywhere they live in this country. The fact that few DCPS and DCPCS middle and high schools can attract any should be a wake-up call to all stakeholders.

no stereotyping or anything.

. Are you a first or 2nd gen Asian immigrant? If not, pipe down. What do you know about the stereotyping of Asians in this country. Racism bothers us little. As an immigrant group, we’re more focused on academic achievement than any other. DC public schools are too political for almost all is us past elementary in Upper NW and Cap Hill. The rigor, challenge and respect for Asian cultures and languages just isn’t there. Even BASIS and Walls struggle to attract Asian families.

Can you expound on this? It's continually frustrating that all DE&I efforts seem to focus on AAs and gay people.

I'll give you an example. There's no DC public MS or HS that teaches Asian languages to an advanced level. Almost every UMC friendly option pushes Spanish, Latin or beginning Chinese on your kid. Wait a minute, you say, what about YuYing and DCI? The truth is that their Mandarin programs are weak to the point of being laughable. There are essentially no native speakers and very few parents supplement for Chinese seriously, so standards for speaking are abysmal. At BASIS, students can't even study Chinese until 8th grade and native speakers of tough Asian languages are forced to choose between studying a new language from 8th grade or taking beginning Chinese, even if they're already fluent (all but ensuring that native speakers will wind up weak in both the new language and Chinese, which requires the learning of 3000+ characters for basic literacy).

In the DC burbs, middle schools and high schools celebrate and support Asian immigrants who excel at learning their own languages, or at least leave them alone to get on with it. There are schools in Fairfax teaching half a dozen Asian languages to an advanced level, a year or two past AP study. In DC public schools, we're just not very welcome past elementary, explaining why there are so few of us.