Study: "Discussions of D.C. public school options in an online forum" (yes, this one)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I haven’t read the article. But what I can share is that my friend is a very accomplished scholar in the world of education policy. She’s published a number of pieces in prestigious journals and argued sentiments similar to what’s in the Brookings excerpt. And for a good decade I heard about her strong conviction to send her kids to our IB middle school. Fast-forward, her kids now attend private.

Scholars can opine as much as they want. Parents act in the interest of their kids. And the desire to obtain the best education for our kids makes hypocrites of most DC liberals.

Does the Brookings author have kids (upper elementary or older) enrolled in DC public schools? If so, where?....

Right and how does your friend justify her about face???

I have a similar experience, had colleagues who bought in Mount Pleasant in the early 2000's while I decided to rent (and later buy) an apartment in upper NW so I could send kids to public schools all the way to HS without having to rely on the lottery. we discussed the issue of the schools at the time and they were confident, they were very involved in the community, started working with local school when first kid was a toddler and blah blah. we lost contact for a while and met them years ago and asked how they were doing, they had 3 kids and had moved to Bethesda. for the schools. No justification, simply local school sucks and we need good public education for our kids. i volunteered years ago in a DCPS in a disadvantaged part of town. met a 6th grader (elementary school was going to 6th grade at the time) who was unable to read. she would read books for toddlers, with hard pages and 4 words per page, putting her fingers under each word and reading syllable by syllable. no sane person would send her kid to a school where kids read like that in 6th grade if you have any other choice.

[Anonymous]

Agree with the article being bad.


The one question I have for everyone is if wealthy white parents don’t segregate then why is there such a low number of white kids at Banneker? In all my years of living in DC and reading DCUMs, this is the one school that supports the argument.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

I have a similar experience, had colleagues who bought in Mount Pleasant in the early 2000's while I decided to rent (and later buy) an apartment in upper NW so I could send kids to public schools all the way to HS without having to rely on the lottery. we discussed the issue of the schools at the time and they were confident, they were very involved in the community, started working with local school when first kid was a toddler and blah blah. we lost contact for a while and met them years ago and asked how they were doing, they had 3 kids and had moved to Bethesda. for the schools. No justification, simply local school sucks and we need good public education for our kids. i volunteered years ago in a DCPS in a disadvantaged part of town. met a 6th grader (elementary school was going to 6th grade at the time) who was unable to read. she would read books for toddlers, with hard pages and 4 words per page, putting her fingers under each word and reading syllable by syllable. no sane person would send her kid to a school where kids read like that in 6th grade if you have any other choice.

Of course, on the MCPS forum, they'll tell you that the schools in Bethesda are terrible because MCPS is terrible. But I'm just jealous that the study is about DCUM discussions of DC schools (which I know nothing about) instead of DCUM discussions of MCPS schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I think the conclusion should have been that when privileged parents (which means any parent who can choose) choose, they choose the best school for their kids they can find. I am not sure where the segregation comes from

That one I can help you with. The segregation comes from the accumulation of American history.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:These folks apparently spent 4 years studying DCUM and never contacted me once. I think they made fundamental errors in their analysis. I strongly reject their primary conclusion. I also suspect that their scraping of the site may be behind some of the strange performance issues we have occasionally had.

They never contacted you at all? That's pretty remarkably bad research. There is so much missing. Just the number of post and thread deletions at a minimum would impact this kind of analysis, and you could offer insight.

How disappointing. I hate shoddy research!

One correction. The authors did contact me once with the following message (I've omitted names):

To Whom It May Concern,

In order to study the interests of parents of school-aged children in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, xxxxx, would like to record for research purposes the text of a selection of postings on http://www.dcurbanmom.com/. This research would be conducted using a technique called “web scraping” whereby an automated program reads the source code behind a web page, extracts the text of forum posts, and stores those pieces of information in an offline file. The text of these posts will not be associated with specific usernames in the downloaded copy, and will be used for research purposes only. Research results will only be reported in the aggregate, and the full texts of the posts will not be shared. In accordance with your site’s policies, we would like to secure your permission to undertake this project. The goal of this research is to provide policy recommendations which will better address the interests of the parents of school-aged children in the DC metro area.

I gave them permission to do this (I note that they did publish the full text of a few messages in their study contrary to their commitment, but I don't care about that). Also, I had no idea that they would download every single post in the forum. I would not have agreed to that.

I didn't know that the study had been published until I saw a tweet about it today. I'm in a discussion on Twitter with a Professor who is arguing that their would be no benefit in talking to me about it. I pointed out that there is significant interest in Deal and Wilson among black families. Are those families choosing segregation? Just suggest removing Shepherd from the Deal and Wilson boundaries and see what kind of hornets nest you find yourself in. That would really increase their word count, but is that favoring segregation?

Parents attempt to find the best educational opportunities for their children within the parameters created by their specific social-economic situations. An interesting discussion would be about what characteristics are considered "the best". If you made a list of several factors, I concede that "racial segregation" might be on the list and one chosen by some users, but I do not think that it would be a consideration of the majority of our users. To the contrary, I fully believe that racial diversity is generally seen a strength of charter schools and one of the factors that has made several charters among the most popular of the DCUM community.

[Anonymous]

considering how uppity people get about being called Karen it all seems so true

and in a blind study they wouldn't contact the owner of a message board to find out what is public.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I think the conclusion should have been that when privileged parents (which means any parent who can choose) choose, they choose the best school for their kids they can find. I am not sure where the segregation comes from

That one I can help you with. The segregation comes from the accumulation of American history.

Right. That is the answer and ignoring it is lazy and poor scholarship.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Agree with the article being bad.


The one question I have for everyone is if wealthy white parents don’t segregate then why is there such a low number of white kids at Banneker? In all my years of living in DC and reading DCUMs, this is the one school that supports the argument.

Glad you brought this up. No doubt some students/families don’t apply to Banneker for various reasons rooted in systemic racism, overt racism, etc. but I do wonder (my kid is many, many years away from high school) if we applied would we be negatively impacting the school. I mean, this is a pretty great school that now serves mostly Black and brown students and if all of us white families started going there, we’d kind of destroy that culture, right? I’d hate to be the white family cashing in on the good thing Black and brown families built. But I’d be curious what others thought. Maybe I’m over analyzing.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:considering how uppity people get about being called Karen it all seems so true

and in a blind study they wouldn't contact the owner of a message board to find out what is public.

With that kind of brilliant scholarship, I assume there is a place at Brookings for you. Consider how your post would sound in a different context with "Karen" replaced with another term. I don't think you would conclude that your theory is true.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:This is their conclusion:

The conversations on DC Urban Moms illustrate what other research has also shown: When privileged parents choose, they tend to choose segregation

This is an extremely unfair characterization that completely misses the nuanced and complex reality. It is extremely disappointing to see such drivel presented as serious research.

Totally agree and I honestly hope you will post some type of rebuttal.

[Anonymous]

Wait I don’t even understand this. How can any researcher put their name on something based on postings on an anonymous website?!?

[Anonymous]

brookings should be embarrassed to have its name on this. studying what anonymous people say on a web site is a really lazy form of scholarship.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agree with the article being bad.


The one question I have for everyone is if wealthy white parents don’t segregate then why is there such a low number of white kids at Banneker? In all my years of living in DC and reading DCUMs, this is the one school that supports the argument.

Glad you brought this up. No doubt some students/families don’t apply to Banneker for various reasons rooted in systemic racism, overt racism, etc. but I do wonder (my kid is many, many years away from high school) if we applied would we be negatively impacting the school. I mean, this is a pretty great school that now serves mostly Black and brown students and if all of us white families started going there, we’d kind of destroy that culture, right? I’d hate to be the white family cashing in on the good thing Black and brown families built. But I’d be curious what others thought. Maybe I’m over analyzing.

Agreed, my understanding is it’s like an HBCU. It’s a HBHS...
will be looking more closely when the time comes for sure though.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:These folks apparently spent 4 years studying DCUM and never contacted me once. I think they made fundamental errors in their analysis. I strongly reject their primary conclusion. I also suspect that their scraping of the site may be behind some of the strange performance issues we have occasionally had.

They never contacted you at all? That's pretty remarkably bad research. There is so much missing. Just the number of post and thread deletions at a minimum would impact this kind of analysis, and you could offer insight.

How disappointing. I hate shoddy research!

One correction. The authors did contact me once with the following message (I've omitted names):

To Whom It May Concern,

In order to study the interests of parents of school-aged children in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, xxxxx, would like to record for research purposes the text of a selection of postings on http://www.dcurbanmom.com/. This research would be conducted using a technique called “web scraping” whereby an automated program reads the source code behind a web page, extracts the text of forum posts, and stores those pieces of information in an offline file. The text of these posts will not be associated with specific usernames in the downloaded copy, and will be used for research purposes only. Research results will only be reported in the aggregate, and the full texts of the posts will not be shared. In accordance with your site’s policies, we would like to secure your permission to undertake this project. The goal of this research is to provide policy recommendations which will better address the interests of the parents of school-aged children in the DC metro area.

I gave them permission to do this (I note that they did publish the full text of a few messages in their study contrary to their commitment, but I don't care about that). Also, I had no idea that they would download every single post in the forum. I would not have agreed to that.

I didn't know that the study had been published until I saw a tweet about it today. I'm in a discussion on Twitter with a Professor who is arguing that their would be no benefit in talking to me about it. I pointed out that there is significant interest in Deal and Wilson among black families. Are those families choosing segregation? Just suggest removing Shepherd from the Deal and Wilson boundaries and see what kind of hornets nest you find yourself in. That would really increase their word count, but is that favoring segregation?

Parents attempt to find the best educational opportunities for their children within the parameters created by their specific social-economic situations. An interesting discussion would be about what characteristics are considered "the best". If you made a list of several factors, I concede that "racial segregation" might be on the list and one chosen by some users, but I do not think that it would be a consideration of the majority of our users. To the contrary, I fully believe that racial diversity is generally seen a strength of charter schools and one of the factors that has made several charters among the most popular of the DCUM community.

Wow. That's pretty horrific behavior. They scraped the whole site and stored it without permission, and also quoted direct posts in violation of a promise?

I don't know much about academic ethics standards, but that certainly seems overtly shady.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Agree with the article being bad.


The one question I have for everyone is if wealthy white parents don’t segregate then why is there such a low number of white kids at Banneker? In all my years of living in DC and reading DCUMs, this is the one school that supports the argument.

Glad you brought this up. No doubt some students/families don’t apply to Banneker for various reasons rooted in systemic racism, overt racism, etc. but I do wonder (my kid is many, many years away from high school) if we applied would we be negatively impacting the school. I mean, this is a pretty great school that now serves mostly Black and brown students and if all of us white families started going there, we’d kind of destroy that culture, right? I’d hate to be the white family cashing in on the good thing Black and brown families built. But I’d be curious what others thought. Maybe I’m over analyzing.

Agreed, my understanding is it’s like an HBCU. It’s a HBHS...
will be looking more closely when the time comes for sure though.

I also think white parents are less likely to buy into Banneker’s culture. They are more old school in terms of discipline, course offerings are more rigid ( most kids take Algebra I in freshmen year) and the principal runs the school like someone who doesn’t want parents who question her choices. There is a racial aspect to all of this as well.