Dumb WaPoo Article on Public Schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ok let me try again and again apologies for broad brushes

If you are high SES in DC you aren't even in public schools unless you are in NW (the rich white part or a tiny piece of capitol hill)

Most upper middle income people (largely white but other races as well leave DC at 3rd grade at the latest)

So who is left mostly poor people who are black and more and more Hispanics several years below education level this is why DC public schools suck and will always suck

Some of the charters are doing a bit better but there aren't enough good ones to make a dent in the system

And I agree with the PP since most of the students in Public Schools in DC are poor and black you are never going to have actual diversity in the current system

Unless you bus people out of rich white upper NW (which will never happen)

DC schools spend double to triple what other jurisdictions spend per student.

What does the average DCUM high SES person do? Get the heck out of DC or send their kids to privates like any other parent would if they could afford to

Thank you. These facts (and I think they are all accepted facts on this board) show that the problem with under-performing student outcomes in DC has literally nothing to do with DCPS and its policies, personnel, or implementation.

[Anonymous]

I disagree completely. You cannot let DCPS, its policies and its legacy of dysfunction, corruption, poor teacher quality, crumbling physical infrastructure and straight up abuse within its school system off the hook.

IF I had any confidence whatsoever that the people in charge and within DCPS were competent, seasoned professionals I would not hesitate to put my white, affluent kids into a middle or high school with a majority of struggling students who are living in poverty.

But no way do I do that when I see the bumbling, politically driven, haphazard and spotty manner in which DCPS "implements policy" and "educates children"

[Anonymous]

This is not a "dumb" article.

It's a news story about a recently-released GAO report on re-segregation of public schools.

Do you dispute the data?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes

It's not rocket science

All the white people/high SES but still mostly white actually in public schools are

1. NW
2. Capitol Hill
3. A few select charters which are at least 35% white

And all of those schools fall within the successfully integrated segment of the GAO report's statistics because none are 75% or more white.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is not a "dumb" article.

It's a news story about a recently-released GAO report on re-segregation of public schools.

Do you dispute the data?

PP, the article is superficial and doesn't examine the root causes for the result. If I want to know the result of the GAO article, I'll read its executive summary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok let me try again and again apologies for broad brushes

If you are high SES in DC you aren't even in public schools unless you are in NW (the rich white part or a tiny piece of capitol hill)

Most upper middle income people (largely white but other races as well leave DC at 3rd grade at the latest)

So who is left mostly poor people who are black and more and more Hispanics several years below education level this is why DC public schools suck and will always suck

Some of the charters are doing a bit better but there aren't enough good ones to make a dent in the system

And I agree with the PP since most of the students in Public Schools in DC are poor and black you are never going to have actual diversity in the current system

Unless you bus people out of rich white upper NW (which will never happen)

DC schools spend double to triple what other jurisdictions spend per student.

What does the average DCUM high SES person do? Get the heck out of DC or send their kids to privates like any other parent would if they could afford to

Thank you. These facts (and I think they are all accepted facts on this board) show that the problem with under-performing student outcomes in DC has literally nothing to do with DCPS and its policies, personnel, or implementation.

right, DCPS has nothing at all to do with it! It's perfect! Those poor black kids are just destined to fail anyway.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok let me try again and again apologies for broad brushes

If you are high SES in DC you aren't even in public schools unless you are in NW (the rich white part or a tiny piece of capitol hill)

Most upper middle income people (largely white but other races as well leave DC at 3rd grade at the latest)

So who is left mostly poor people who are black and more and more Hispanics several years below education level this is why DC public schools suck and will always suck

Some of the charters are doing a bit better but there aren't enough good ones to make a dent in the system

And I agree with the PP since most of the students in Public Schools in DC are poor and black you are never going to have actual diversity in the current system

Unless you bus people out of rich white upper NW (which will never happen)

DC schools spend double to triple what other jurisdictions spend per student.

What does the average DCUM high SES person do? Get the heck out of DC or send their kids to privates like any other parent would if they could afford to

Thank you. These facts (and I think they are all accepted facts on this board) show that the problem with under-performing student outcomes in DC has literally nothing to do with DCPS and its policies, personnel, or implementation.

right, DCPS has nothing at all to do with it! It's perfect! Those poor black kids are just destined to fail anyway.

Well, the parents of kids in these terminally low-performing neighborhoods could either move to a better neighborhood; or be lucky enough to be accepted to a high-performing charter school; or (if not wealthy) seek a scholarship to a private school. Otherwise, truly unfortunately, yes, PP is correct about the fate of these kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is not a "dumb" article.

It's a news story about a recently-released GAO report on re-segregation of public schools.

Do you dispute the data?

Yes, it's dumb. If we're going to talk real segregation, we need to include privates and parochial schools in the equation. Parents have options -- to forget that is plain dumb.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is not a "dumb" article.

It's a news story about a recently-released GAO report on re-segregation of public schools.

Do you dispute the data?

Yes, it's dumb. If we're going to talk real segregation, we need to include privates and parochial schools in the equation. Parents have options -- to forget that is plain dumb.

They can also just move to Bethesda, Arlington or McLean. They make these choices primarily for safety reasons and academics. Where's that is this breaking "story"?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is not a "dumb" article.

It's a news story about a recently-released GAO report on re-segregation of public schools.

Do you dispute the data?

Yes, it's dumb. If we're going to talk real segregation, we need to include privates and parochial schools in the equation. Parents have options -- to forget that is plain dumb.

They can also just move to Bethesda, Arlington or McLean. They make these choices primarily for safety reasons and academics. Where's that is this breaking "story"?

Yep.

Newsflash: Parents care about their kids!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok let me try again and again apologies for broad brushes

If you are high SES in DC you aren't even in public schools unless you are in NW (the rich white part or a tiny piece of capitol hill)

Most upper middle income people (largely white but other races as well leave DC at 3rd grade at the latest)

So who is left mostly poor people who are black and more and more Hispanics several years below education level this is why DC public schools suck and will always suck

Some of the charters are doing a bit better but there aren't enough good ones to make a dent in the system

And I agree with the PP since most of the students in Public Schools in DC are poor and black you are never going to have actual diversity in the current system

Unless you bus people out of rich white upper NW (which will never happen)

DC schools spend double to triple what other jurisdictions spend per student.

What does the average DCUM high SES person do? Get the heck out of DC or send their kids to privates like any other parent would if they could afford to

Thank you. These facts (and I think they are all accepted facts on this board) show that the problem with under-performing student outcomes in DC has literally nothing to do with DCPS and its policies, personnel, or implementation.

right, DCPS has nothing at all to do with it! It's perfect! Those poor black kids are just destined to fail anyway.

Can you point to one, single school district anywhere in the United States, of any size, that has the demographics of dcps and does a really solid job with all of its poor African American students? Do not answer "charter XYZ" or "solitary school abc" in east LA. I'm asking you to name an entire district full of poor AA kids where most of the kids are on grade level and graduate on time.

I will wait.

[Anonymous]

Havent read through the pages of responses here, but I will find time to do that. This is one of the most important and most difficult social challenges of our generation, in my opinion.

I am one of the "urban gentrifiers" in DC -- we bought our home downtown in 2005. I dislike the term gentrify, but wanted to identify myself as an upper/dual income, Asian, liberal, two young kids and an idealist kind of person. We send our kids to a local dual language DCPS (non charter) school. The kids there are mainly low income and mainly minority. Our kids are learning extremely well, but there are challenging things that have nothing to do with the children who are there, but our approach to educating lower income children. The school has a focus on "rigor" through tons of homework. I mean avalanches of homework. (which we do, but others decline to do; research is ambivalent on whether homework helps anyone); we lack enriching afterschool activities; instead even the littlest kids sit in study hall like rooms doing homework or drawing... I'm ok with it for my kids given that they love to draw and don't mind the academic work, but it is not ideal. There is only a tiny amount of recess, like 15 minutes, and the rest of the day is given over to test prep. Even in specials, like gym and music, the focus is on regimentation, order and discipline. Kids sit out the entire music period because a couple of them didn't file into the classroom silently. Recess is cancelled because kids were not silent -- yes, silent -- in the gym. I doubt (though I don't know for a fact) that these same rules are in place in schools in upper NW dc or in the suburbs. I think the way we treat young children will result in how they grow up. If we treat schools like prisons or factories, no matter how "rigorous" the work, we will be rewarded with prisoners and low-wage workers. I'd like to see the tenets of the most successful charter schools be actually applied to regular public schools serving low income kids -- focus on creativity, movement, outdoors, etc. a "well rounded education" integrating all the subjects.

For now my kids are learning well and have excellent friends. But I know the paths will diverge in middle school, if not earlier... I wish the other kids had the same opportunities, but I don't see a feeder pattern emerging that will help make that happen. We have the $$ to move or go private, if need be, but I will miss the diversity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok let me try again and again apologies for broad brushes

If you are high SES in DC you aren't even in public schools unless you are in NW (the rich white part or a tiny piece of capitol hill)

Most upper middle income people (largely white but other races as well leave DC at 3rd grade at the latest)

So who is left mostly poor people who are black and more and more Hispanics several years below education level this is why DC public schools suck and will always suck

Some of the charters are doing a bit better but there aren't enough good ones to make a dent in the system

And I agree with the PP since most of the students in Public Schools in DC are poor and black you are never going to have actual diversity in the current system

Unless you bus people out of rich white upper NW (which will never happen)

DC schools spend double to triple what other jurisdictions spend per student.

What does the average DCUM high SES person do? Get the heck out of DC or send their kids to privates like any other parent would if they could afford to

Thank you. These facts (and I think they are all accepted facts on this board) show that the problem with under-performing student outcomes in DC has literally nothing to do with DCPS and its policies, personnel, or implementation.

right, DCPS has nothing at all to do with it! It's perfect! Those poor black kids are just destined to fail anyway.

Can you point to one, single school district anywhere in the United States, of any size, that has the demographics of dcps and does a really solid job with all of its poor African American students? Do not answer "charter XYZ" or "solitary school abc" in east LA. I'm asking you to name an entire district full of poor AA kids where most of the kids are on grade level and graduate on time.

I will wait.

+100.

We'll have to wait for a while...

In the meantime, can anyone shed light on what happened on school districts RUN BY AAs, such as Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago...and of course DC?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You can always re-litigate an issue. Lawrence v Texas legalized sodomy about 20 years after a decision that did the opposite. You can always try to bring a case again to SCOTUS. But the current state of the law appears to be that if black people live in neighborhood X because it's what they can afford, and the schools in neighborhood X are poor performing, then the only constitutional requirement is that the govt not intentionally reduce the quality of schools in X. For example, the govt cannot underfund those schools. But in DC, schools in black neighborhoods are overfunded relative to schools in white neighborhoods. This satisfies the requirement of equal inputs. Sadly, and I am genuine when I say sadly, there doesn't appear to be a constitutional requirement of equal outcomes.

That is the constitutional law. There are federal and state statutes that would be the basis for a disparate impact claim.

Sometimes I wonder if you dcum lawyers actually went to law school??

Thanks for the ad hominem.

I am aware of no federal or "state" statute that would give rise to a successful outcome against DC, or that would even create a cause of action. Look at the way Catania's at-risk funding magnifies Title I. In DC, the government already allocates disproportionate resources to majority-minority schools in an attempt to close the achievement gap. Despite this, poor black kids do worse on standardized tests and drop out in higher numbers. (Similar thing happens with impoverished whites in states that have impoverished whites, by the way; DC has too few to be statistically meaningful). There is no law at any level of government that I am aware of that gives rise to a cause of action against a DC government that is already providing all of this extra money, renovations, special ed support, not to mention chartering many charter schools in an effort to address this.

This notwithstanding the aspirational arguments in the article that are based not on federal or state statutes per se but rather on a novel application of international human rights law, most of it unratified and weak in this country, to interpret those statutes. That kind of legal reasoning does feature in the courts of other countries. Good luck with it here.

This is completely different from the situation in other states, like the one in Ferguson MO that was featured on NPr a while back. In those situations the schools in black neighborhoods are under-resourced *relative to majority white schools*, partly because of racist neglect and partly because of how local (real estate) taxes are used to fund education. None of that applies in DC.

The federal statute that best addresses the achievement gap is actually NCLB, in my opinion, and that's damning with faint praise. It's the only federal statute that creates real consequences for unequal outcomes (as opposed to inputs), but as we all know it is achieving some closed schools and not much else.

again, did you go to law school? the article discusses how the feds could enforce federal civil rights laws, as well as successful state law/state constitutional suit in colorado. as for your assertions of fact - well, we'll see.

A friend of mine once said "I went to law school, because it was the highest degree I could obtain without being good at math."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ok let me try again and again apologies for broad brushes

If you are high SES in DC you aren't even in public schools unless you are in NW (the rich white part or a tiny piece of capitol hill)

Most upper middle income people (largely white but other races as well leave DC at 3rd grade at the latest)

So who is left mostly poor people who are black and more and more Hispanics several years below education level this is why DC public schools suck and will always suck

Some of the charters are doing a bit better but there aren't enough good ones to make a dent in the system

And I agree with the PP since most of the students in Public Schools in DC are poor and black you are never going to have actual diversity in the current system

Unless you bus people out of rich white upper NW (which will never happen)

DC schools spend double to triple what other jurisdictions spend per student.

What does the average DCUM high SES person do? Get the heck out of DC or send their kids to privates like any other parent would if they could afford to

You're giving broads a bad name.

Seriously, your stereotypes miss the conflict at the margins - which is exactly what the contention on fora such as DCUM is about.