This American Life about desegregation in schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My grandmother was a single mom of 6 kids in rural India. Farming was the only source of income and it was modest income , hard labor, not many resources, no school in the village, no college within 10 miles. All 6 of her kids graduated from college (3 also finished masters). She instilled in them that they must study if they have to break this cycle, this was drilled into them everyday ( back in the 70s). Trust me when I say this, If she and her kids could do this, all AAs in this country can do this , you guys don't know what's it like to not have resources. It's time for personal responsibility people, lift your families, lift your communities on your own shoulders. Barack Obama became president because of the whites in this country, this country is ready for you, it's time to stop blaming the whites.

That's an inspirational story. However, I must point out, as the African immigrant PP and others more eloquently put it--this is apples and oranges we're talking about. The experience of an immigrant coming to this country in the late 20th or 21st century is different from that of people who have lived here for generations under the enduring effects of institutionalized racism.

My dad is Indian, and I could also tell a similar story about how he made it out of his tiny rural town. However, the experience of your grandmother and my father are notable because *they made it out of poverty,* or their kids made it out. This is not necessarily the experience of the many they left behind.

Also, what about the history of the caste system in India, which was propagated during the British colonial regime? Even today with the caste system officially outlawed, are lower castes all given the same opportunities as those in higher castes? This is the closest--although still imperfect--analogy I can get to the experience of AAs here, and the systematic disenfranchisement that they've faced over the years.[/quoteI

America's racism is a caste system. Our society was built on it. It's baked in.

[Anonymous]

I went to a catholic school with underpaid teachers, no playground- we played on the parking lot, school books that were clearly very used, a school gym from the 1950s and hadn't been updated since, an antiquated science lab (only in high school), 33 childten per class with one teacher-i could go on. There was a waiting list to get in!
If the parents aren't enforcing discipline at home, and the students come to school not ready to learn and follow directions, of course it's a recipe for failure. Why can't majority minority schools be a place were people want to come? If the students are performing at high levels, they will come.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:DC has and is still ignoring the black middle class that fled to PG, Howard & Charles county. They should be actively pursuing these people back into the city. A city with a Large white professional/wealthy class and a majority poor black one is a disaster waiting to happen. The black middle class could even things out in neighborhoods and schools

Wait the middle class blacks from where move to where? Laughable, the school systems where they are not making headlines, it is not that DCPS is ignoring them but it is that YOU ALL ARE NOT THAT AND A BAG OF CHIPS. Let's be real being a smart child with two parents is not headline news for normal publications. Now if you're needing the Washington Afro, Jet, Ebony and Black Enterprise to make you the topic then so be it.

[Anonymous]

Thank God for anonymous forums. As a white mother of a black child sometimes I can be a bit naive about the extent of racism. I come to this forum sometimes to get an unvarnished and unfiltered glimpse into what some members of my community think about my child. Helps me be sober about what he is up against.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thank God for anonymous forums. As a white mother of a black child sometimes I can be a bit naive about the extent of racism. I come to this forum sometimes to get an unvarnished and unfiltered glimpse into what some members of my community think about my child. Helps me be sober about what he is up against.

I don't see why people label it "racism" when someone doesn't think highly of you and your abilities because you failed school.

Schools in US are so easy and the bar is so low that it takes minimal effort to succeed. All you have is excuses for 10 pages - we don't have money, we are too tired to read to our children, we can't join PTA, our teachers are not as good, our books are second best, the penniless immigrants have it better than us, we didn't know you could transfer to another school, on and on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thank God for anonymous forums. As a white mother of a black child sometimes I can be a bit naive about the extent of racism. I come to this forum sometimes to get an unvarnished and unfiltered glimpse into what some members of my community think about my child. Helps me be sober about what he is up against.

Maybe I'm naive, but I take solace in the fact that most of these posters (or one poster repeatedly) are likely not currently DC public school parents (e.g., the poster who said her husband experienced violence during integration efforts in the 70s).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I went to a catholic school with underpaid teachers, no playground- we played on the parking lot, school books that were clearly very used, a school gym from the 1950s and hadn't been updated since, an antiquated science lab (only in high school), 33 childten per class with one teacher-i could go on. There was a waiting list to get in!
If the parents aren't enforcing discipline at home, and the students come to school not ready to learn and follow directions, of course it's a recipe for failure. Why can't majority minority schools be a place were people want to come? If the students are performing at high levels, they will come.

I went to school in Soviet Russia. We were poor. I had one uniform I would wear all year long. Shoes were a birthday present. We didn't have toiletries like shower gels or tampax. We wore second hand clothes from previous generations, like my grandmother's, mothers. We didn't have a car. My parents would save all their life to buy some basic cheap particleboard furniture. Food was hard to come buy, you hand to stay in long lines for a chance to buy some meat.

The school was very modest. We did not have a playground, no labs, no library, no snacks, no field trips, no fancy supplies like markers, just pens and pencils, no fancy posters on the walls. Our books were second hand from previous classes. We also had 30 kids in a class and 1 teacher. Some teachers were terrible. Homework took hours. Yet we didn't have a single drop out. All my class went to college.

This was the not the worst. My mother had a much worse situation after the end of the WWII, when Russia was ruined and poverty was unbelievable. Her whole generation was one of the best educated in the world, they all had degrees.

My grandmother also had even worse. She had to hike 4 miles through the woods to the nearest school starting age 6, they lived out in the country. I'm not even going to go into how poor she was when the WWII started. She was always hungry and sleep deprived. She finished college. So did her generation and they sent people to space and made amazing technological progress.

So I find it hard to accept poverty as an excuse for AA students' situation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Maybe I'm naive, but I take solace in the fact that most of these posters (or one poster repeatedly) are likely not currently DC public school parents (e.g., the poster who said her husband experienced violence during integration efforts in the 70s).

The TAL's story doesn't take place in DC. The situation with failing black schools they'are talking about is all over the country, in every state.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My grandmother was a single mom of 6 kids in rural India. Farming was the only source of income and it was modest income , hard labor, not many resources, no school in the village, no college within 10 miles. All 6 of her kids graduated from college (3 also finished masters). She instilled in them that they must study if they have to break this cycle, this was drilled into them everyday ( back in the 70s). Trust me when I say this, If she and her kids could do this, all AAs in this country can do this , you guys don't know what's it like to not have resources. It's time for personal responsibility people, lift your families, lift your communities on your own shoulders. Barack Obama became president because of the whites in this country, this country is ready for you, it's time to stop blaming the whites.

Thank you! This is such an important post. My mother-in-law grew up poor in Mexico, immigrated to the US and got all her four kids through college. She worked hard to get her family where they are today. Americans are just lazy and entitled and desperately need to open their minds to a less American-centric worldview. Just look who comes to this country ready to work, who's lined up outside of Home Depot with their tool belts on? Where are those who complain about not being able to find a job in this city??

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My grandmother was a single mom of 6 kids in rural India. Farming was the only source of income and it was modest income , hard labor, not many resources, no school in the village, no college within 10 miles. All 6 of her kids graduated from college (3 also finished masters). She instilled in them that they must study if they have to break this cycle, this was drilled into them everyday ( back in the 70s). Trust me when I say this, If she and her kids could do this, all AAs in this country can do this , you guys don't know what's it like to not have resources. It's time for personal responsibility people, lift your families, lift your communities on your own shoulders. Barack Obama became president because of the whites in this country, this country is ready for you, it's time to stop blaming the whites.

Thank you! This is such an important post. My mother-in-law grew up poor in Mexico, immigrated to the US and got all her four kids through college. She worked hard to get her family where they are today. Americans are just lazy and entitled and desperately need to open their minds to a less American-centric worldview. Just look who comes to this country ready to work, ready to make their families better, who's lined up outside of Home Depot with their tool belts on? Where are those who complain about not being able to find a job in this city??

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to a catholic school with underpaid teachers, no playground- we played on the parking lot, school books that were clearly very used, a school gym from the 1950s and hadn't been updated since, an antiquated science lab (only in high school), 33 childten per class with one teacher-i could go on. There was a waiting list to get in!
If the parents aren't enforcing discipline at home, and the students come to school not ready to learn and follow directions, of course it's a recipe for failure. Why can't majority minority schools be a place were people want to come? If the students are performing at high levels, they will come.

I went to school in Soviet Russia. We were poor. I had one uniform I would wear all year long. Shoes were a birthday present. We didn't have toiletries like shower gels or tampax. We wore second hand clothes from previous generations, like my grandmother's, mothers. We didn't have a car. My parents would save all their life to buy some basic cheap particleboard furniture. Food was hard to come buy, you hand to stay in long lines for a chance to buy some meat.

The school was very modest. We did not have a playground, no labs, no library, no snacks, no field trips, no fancy supplies like markers, just pens and pencils, no fancy posters on the walls. Our books were second hand from previous classes. We also had 30 kids in a class and 1 teacher. Some teachers were terrible. Homework took hours. Yet we didn't have a single drop out. All my class went to college.

This was the not the worst. My mother had a much worse situation after the end of the WWII, when Russia was ruined and poverty was unbelievable. Her whole generation was one of the best educated in the world, they all had degrees.

My grandmother also had even worse. She had to hike 4 miles through the woods to the nearest school starting age 6, they lived out in the country. I'm not even going to go into how poor she was when the WWII started. She was always hungry and sleep deprived. She finished college. So did her generation and they sent people to space and made amazing technological progress.

So I find it hard to accept poverty as an excuse for AA students' situation.

I think it's really interesting that so many posters on this thread are unable to relate to anything other than their own experience. As if because you had an experience in the Soviet Union, the actual, stated experiences of other people are not valid, and the explanations (well documented and supported by research) cannot possibly be valid because they do not mesh with your beliefs about how you and yours escaped your own cycle of poverty.

Racism in housing policies is real. While one might argue that there is no longer such an active policy to prevent Black people from living in certain parts of town, the legacies of previous policies is very much in attendance. Discrimination in employment is also real. There are laws enacted to actively prevent discrimination, but those laws have not eliminated the more subtle forms of discrimination. Discrimination within the education system is also real. You can talk about test scores and crime rates all you want. You can say that you'd say those things about any student who tests poorly and behaves badly, regardless of their skin color, but you're not going to receive much opportunity to do that, because in this city, the White kids go to private school or they go to school in upper NW - both of which are predicated on a certain level of income. I know that person such as yourself understands the every day difficulties associated with poverty, so I'm not going to insult you by listing them, provided that you do me the courtesy of not denying their existence.

My child goes to a Title 1 school in DC. I am intimately familiar with the complicated and toxic cocktail of factors that result in poor test scores and a lot of behavior issues. Saying "It's just racism" is missing the point, because it's not just racism. It's generations of racism. It's generations of poverty. It's living in a city with a huge wealth divide, that is incredibly segregated. It's coming from homes where one or both parents work more than full time at low-skilled jobs just to pay the bills. It's coming from homes where one or both parents may not be fluent in English, which remains an obstacle, particularly for things like literacy.

When people say, "Where are the parents? Why are they not teaching their children?" they are both correct and completely missing the point. Your parents and mine had educational role models. Someone, at some point, instilled in them the belief that education is what will help break the cycle of poverty, that it might actually be the only thing. Not everyone has had that message, for a lot of different reasons. In this country, the reality is that people of color were not ALLOWED to go to school for a long time. When they were allowed, their schools were terrible and the assumption was that they would ultimately end up as domestic employees or manual laborers. Their education was treated as irrelevant. When you give a person THAT message regularly, they will start to believe it. Then they will live out that prophesy. Then they will have children and the cycle will perpetuate itself.

There is someone on this thread who keeps mentioning that the honor student in Normandy is an outlier, with the undertone that because of this, we should discount her story as being something that is not germane to the broader conversation. That is incorrect, and it assumes that children who grow up poor and Black are unteachable, that their education is irrelevant because no matter what you do, the ones who succeed will be "outliers." Please consider the strong messages about the importance of education and then consider that the "outlier" stories are part of that message.

[Anonymous]

Nothing is going to change until there is partnerships/accountability in the community

All the charter movement is doing is sucking out the most motivated people and leaving the lowest of the low still rotting away in the DC public school system

Reality check any middle class AA moved out of the city or is sending their kid to a private school/charter just like any other person would do

Again I care about solutions here. What do we do to fix Generations of failure.

Some possible options/case studies

Harlem Children's Zone
New Orleans School District
Tennessee School Improvment Plan Program

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to a catholic school with underpaid teachers, no playground- we played on the parking lot, school books that were clearly very used, a school gym from the 1950s and hadn't been updated since, an antiquated science lab (only in high school), 33 childten per class with one teacher-i could go on. There was a waiting list to get in!
If the parents aren't enforcing discipline at home, and the students come to school not ready to learn and follow directions, of course it's a recipe for failure. Why can't majority minority schools be a place were people want to come? If the students are performing at high levels, they will come.

I went to school in Soviet Russia. We were poor. I had one uniform I would wear all year long. Shoes were a birthday present. We didn't have toiletries like shower gels or tampax. We wore second hand clothes from previous generations, like my grandmother's, mothers. We didn't have a car. My parents would save all their life to buy some basic cheap particleboard furniture. Food was hard to come buy, you hand to stay in long lines for a chance to buy some meat.

The school was very modest. We did not have a playground, no labs, no library, no snacks, no field trips, no fancy supplies like markers, just pens and pencils, no fancy posters on the walls. Our books were second hand from previous classes. We also had 30 kids in a class and 1 teacher. Some teachers were terrible. Homework took hours. Yet we didn't have a single drop out. All my class went to college.

This was the not the worst. My mother had a much worse situation after the end of the WWII, when Russia was ruined and poverty was unbelievable. Her whole generation was one of the best educated in the world, they all had degrees.

My grandmother also had even worse. She had to hike 4 miles through the woods to the nearest school starting age 6, they lived out in the country. I'm not even going to go into how poor she was when the WWII started. She was always hungry and sleep deprived. She finished college. So did her generation and they sent people to space and made amazing technological progress.

So I find it hard to accept poverty as an excuse for AA students' situation.

I think it's really interesting that so many posters on this thread are unable to relate to anything other than their own experience. As if because you had an experience in the Soviet Union, the actual, stated experiences of other people are not valid, and the explanations (well documented and supported by research) cannot possibly be valid because they do not mesh with your beliefs about how you and yours escaped your own cycle of poverty.

Racism in housing policies is real. While one might argue that there is no longer such an active policy to prevent Black people from living in certain parts of town, the legacies of previous policies is very much in attendance. Discrimination in employment is also real. There are laws enacted to actively prevent discrimination, but those laws have not eliminated the more subtle forms of discrimination. Discrimination within the education system is also real. You can talk about test scores and crime rates all you want. You can say that you'd say those things about any student who tests poorly and behaves badly, regardless of their skin color, but you're not going to receive much opportunity to do that, because in this city, the White kids go to private school or they go to school in upper NW - both of which are predicated on a certain level of income. I know that person such as yourself understands the every day difficulties associated with poverty, so I'm not going to insult you by listing them, provided that you do me the courtesy of not denying their existence.

My child goes to a Title 1 school in DC. I am intimately familiar with the complicated and toxic cocktail of factors that result in poor test scores and a lot of behavior issues. Saying "It's just racism" is missing the point, because it's not just racism. It's generations of racism. It's generations of poverty. It's living in a city with a huge wealth divide, that is incredibly segregated. It's coming from homes where one or both parents work more than full time at low-skilled jobs just to pay the bills. It's coming from homes where one or both parents may not be fluent in English, which remains an obstacle, particularly for things like literacy.

When people say, "Where are the parents? Why are they not teaching their children?" they are both correct and completely missing the point. Your parents and mine had educational role models. Someone, at some point, instilled in them the belief that education is what will help break the cycle of poverty, that it might actually be the only thing. Not everyone has had that message, for a lot of different reasons. In this country, the reality is that people of color were not ALLOWED to go to school for a long time. When they were allowed, their schools were terrible and the assumption was that they would ultimately end up as domestic employees or manual laborers. Their education was treated as irrelevant. When you give a person THAT message regularly, they will start to believe it. Then they will live out that prophesy. Then they will have children and the cycle will perpetuate itself.

There is someone on this thread who keeps mentioning that the honor student in Normandy is an outlier, with the undertone that because of this, we should discount her story as being something that is not germane to the broader conversation. That is incorrect, and it assumes that children who grow up poor and Black are unteachable, that their education is irrelevant because no matter what you do, the ones who succeed will be "outliers." Please consider the strong messages about the importance of education and then consider that the "outlier" stories are part of that message.

This is probably the best post on the whole damn thread.

[Anonymous]

^^Agreed. I wish people would really consider these points.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
one generation requires that freedom to leap which does not happen if the schools are all poor people who still don't feel like they merit the investment of resources their wealthier counterparts do.

You know, there immigrants from Africa and middle East wasing up on the shore of Europe who would kill for the opportunities that you have, for the crappy books that you don't bother to read because they are not premium white kids books, for your free libraries, for your seat in a classroom that you often skip. Who wouldn't dream of dropping school.

If we bring a rural Chinese impoverished kid and put him in your place, he'll make all As. There are kids in India who started a school under a bridge because they feel education is their ticket out of slums.

And you sit here, entitled. And complain that you didn't get the best of everything and this is your excuse for failure.

OMG. I'm a NP so not the poster you attempted to respond. In fact, you didn't respond at all to anything she said. You simply took an opportunity to spew your hate. Learn to fucking read and comprehend what you've read before trying to school someone.