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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:Another huge flaw. On page 23 there is a section specifically looking at Brookland. It says this:

The conversations about Brookland schools on DC Urban Moms illustrate one mechanism by which this self-segregation occurs. Nearly three thousand forum conversations, almost one-fifth of the total, mention at least one Brookland elementary school, and total attention to these schools has grown over time. But DC Urban Moms participants focus heavily on a few schools in the neighborhood. On average, elementary schools in Brookland that are less than 50 percent Black are mentioned more than four times as often per year as schools that are more than 50 percent Black. Figure 8 plots this correlation.

On the face of it, this supports the argument that DCUMers are a bunch of Klan members. But, then look at which schools are being discussed. The frequently-mentioned schools are all charters. Charters are open to students regardless of where they live in the District. So, any of our posters might be interested in those schools. The less-talked-about schools are public and therefore have residency restrictions. Fewer of our posters have a reason to discuss those schools.

This data simply cannot be taken seriously.

Except that in Brookland, most of the in-bounds schools have enough open spaces to accept many if not most external applicants, so, while I totally and completely agree that this study is terrible, this particular point doesn't quite hold up.

More polite way of saying this point is wrong.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:Another gem:

Of all the substantive terms we counted on any topic, the single most common was “in-bound,” which appeared in nearly two-thirds of all conversations in the forum.

A long process for drawing new boundaries occurred during the time they analyzed posts.

This illustrates one of my criticisms. There was no historical context for what was going on in DCPS (such as the boundary study) during the data period they scraped. There were likely other overarching issues that could give you clues about why certain terms may be discussed a lot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Please do, since I'm already seeing this study get trotted out on neighborhood facebook as great scholarship.

I am considering writing a response. One irony I guess is that the report will probably generate more traffic to DCUM. Hopefully it won't be a bunch of racists coming to find out how to get into an all white school.

The racists would quickly discover that there aren't any all-white public schools in the DC system, not even close.

Um, doesn’t Janney come close, for one?

Yes, if by “all-white” you mean reflecting national averages.

It's a bit more. "White students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white" - from "Harming Our Common Future: America's Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown".
At Janney, it's 74%, and the next-biggest group is Multiracial, which I would guess is also different.

Yes, and Janney (Key, Mann, Murch, Brent etc.) parents could move to the burbs, or a different part of the country, or go private in the District, to enroll their children in schools that are even more white.

This study is coming at the wrong jurisdiction and the wrong parents.

That's the most irritating part of both this study and the whole annoying take that urban parents are the problem. It ignores the national issue of segregation by school district. The legacy of white flight. Many more issues that are much closer to being "the problem" than parents trying to find a decent school for their children in an urban area.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Please do, since I'm already seeing this study get trotted out on neighborhood facebook as great scholarship.

I am considering writing a response. One irony I guess is that the report will probably generate more traffic to DCUM. Hopefully it won't be a bunch of racists coming to find out how to get into an all white school.

The racists would quickly discover that there aren't any all-white public schools in the DC system, not even close.

Um, doesn’t Janney come close, for one?

Yes, if by “all-white” you mean reflecting national averages.

It's a bit more. "White students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white" - from "Harming Our Common Future: America's Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown".
At Janney, it's 74%, and the next-biggest group is Multiracial, which I would guess is also different.

Yes, and Janney (Key, Mann, Murch, Brent etc.) parents could move to the burbs, or a different part of the country, or go private in the District, to enroll their children in schools that are even more white.

This study is coming at the wrong jurisdiction and the wrong parents.

This is the problem I had with the "Nice White Parents" podcast as well- concentrating on a small number of white people who remain in the center jurisdictions, meanwhile 85-90% of the white kids in the region are in the suburbs. Many, many of those people are more explicit about their locational choices being based on school racial makeup (I have talked to some people in Fairfax who have heard these comments from neighbors, barely coded). Not saying white people in the District should be let off the hook- there is something interesting there about liberal hypocrisy (liberal in the streets, conservative in the sheets, so to speak) and about how far white people are really willing to go in terms of the racial makeup of their kids' school. But there are 90k kids in public school in the District, something like 15% are white- you are literally talking about less than 15,000 white kids. Total enrollment in the five closest school districts (PG, Arlington, Montgomery, Fairfax, Loudon) is 595,000, of which around 35% are white, so over 200,000 white kids in those public schools. Forest for the trees here.

There are some really unusual racial dynamics going on in this area- it has probably the largest middle and upper middle class black population of any metro area in the country. The District has almost zero poor white people. You have the ways the middle ring suburbs are changing and becoming more heavily Hispanic. The large Middle Eastern-American and Asian-American populations now in Fairfax and Loudon. School options/choice layer on to this. But it's gonna take a LOT more work and nuance to analyze all that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Please do, since I'm already seeing this study get trotted out on neighborhood facebook as great scholarship.

I am considering writing a response. One irony I guess is that the report will probably generate more traffic to DCUM. Hopefully it won't be a bunch of racists coming to find out how to get into an all white school.

The racists would quickly discover that there aren't any all-white public schools in the DC system, not even close.

Um, doesn’t Janney come close, for one?

Yes, if by “all-white” you mean reflecting national averages.

It's a bit more. "White students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white" - from "Harming Our Common Future: America's Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown".
At Janney, it's 74%, and the next-biggest group is Multiracial, which I would guess is also different.

Yes, and Janney (Key, Mann, Murch, Brent etc.) parents could move to the burbs, or a different part of the country, or go private in the District, to enroll their children in schools that are even more white.

This study is coming at the wrong jurisdiction and the wrong parents.

This is the problem I had with the "Nice White Parents" podcast as well- concentrating on a small number of white people who remain in the center jurisdictions, meanwhile 85-90% of the white kids in the region are in the suburbs. Many, many of those people are more explicit about their locational choices being based on school racial makeup (I have talked to some people in Fairfax who have heard these comments from neighbors, barely coded). Not saying white people in the District should be let off the hook- there is something interesting there about liberal hypocrisy (liberal in the streets, conservative in the sheets, so to speak) and about how far white people are really willing to go in terms of the racial makeup of their kids' school. But there are 90k kids in public school in the District, something like 15% are white- you are literally talking about less than 15,000 white kids. Total enrollment in the five closest school districts (PG, Arlington, Montgomery, Fairfax, Loudon) is 595,000, of which around 35% are white, so over 200,000 white kids in those public schools. Forest for the trees here.

There are some really unusual racial dynamics going on in this area- it has probably the largest middle and upper middle class black population of any metro area in the country. The District has almost zero poor white people. You have the ways the middle ring suburbs are changing and becoming more heavily Hispanic. The large Middle Eastern-American and Asian-American populations now in Fairfax and Loudon. School options/choice layer on to this. But it's gonna take a LOT more work and nuance to analyze all that.

Indeed. It's facile "anti-gentrification" type "analysis." We deserve better from institutions like Brookings.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:Another huge flaw. On page 23 there is a section specifically looking at Brookland. It says this:

The conversations about Brookland schools on DC Urban Moms illustrate one mechanism by which this self-segregation occurs. Nearly three thousand forum conversations, almost one-fifth of the total, mention at least one Brookland elementary school, and total attention to these schools has grown over time. But DC Urban Moms participants focus heavily on a few schools in the neighborhood. On average, elementary schools in Brookland that are less than 50 percent Black are mentioned more than four times as often per year as schools that are more than 50 percent Black. Figure 8 plots this correlation.

On the face of it, this supports the argument that DCUMers are a bunch of Klan members. But, then look at which schools are being discussed. The frequently-mentioned schools are all charters. Charters are open to students regardless of where they live in the District. So, any of our posters might be interested in those schools. The less-talked-about schools are public and therefore have residency restrictions. Fewer of our posters have a reason to discuss those schools.

This data simply cannot be taken seriously.

Except that in Brookland, most of the in-bounds schools have enough open spaces to accept many if not most external applicants, so, while I totally and completely agree that this study is terrible, this particular point doesn't quite hold up.

More polite way of saying this point is wrong.

My point is not wrong. The assertion I quoted above about which Brookland school are mentioned more frequently appears to be the justification for this statement in the "Discussion" section of the report:

Even within a gentrify-ing neighborhood, and even when other local schools have similar test scores, the schools with more white students receive much more attention.

This again ignores the fact that the schools that received more attention are charter schools that don't have residency requirements. It is quite possible that a poster who is inbounds for a top DCPS school would be interested in one of the charters, but unlikely that the same poster would be interested in a Brookland DCPS. There is simply a larger pool of users who would be potentially interested in discussing the charter schools than there is for the DCPS schools. The only way such a comparison could be legitimate is if only mentions of the schools by Brookland residents were analyzed and that is not possible with the data available to the researchers.

[Anonymous]

Tangential Question: what is the difference between integrating neighborhoods and gentrification? People are angry if neighborhoods are segregated but upset with gentrification. Is gentrification entirely income related?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Please do, since I'm already seeing this study get trotted out on neighborhood facebook as great scholarship.

I am considering writing a response. One irony I guess is that the report will probably generate more traffic to DCUM. Hopefully it won't be a bunch of racists coming to find out how to get into an all white school.

The racists would quickly discover that there aren't any all-white public schools in the DC system, not even close.

Um, doesn’t Janney come close, for one?

Yes, if by “all-white” you mean reflecting national averages.

It's a bit more. "White students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white" - from "Harming Our Common Future: America's Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown".
At Janney, it's 74%, and the next-biggest group is Multiracial, which I would guess is also different.

Yes, and Janney (Key, Mann, Murch, Brent etc.) parents could move to the burbs, or a different part of the country, or go private in the District, to enroll their children in schools that are even more white.

This study is coming at the wrong jurisdiction and the wrong parents.

This is the problem I had with the "Nice White Parents" podcast as well- concentrating on a small number of white people who remain in the center jurisdictions, meanwhile 85-90% of the white kids in the region are in the suburbs. Many, many of those people are more explicit about their locational choices being based on school racial makeup (I have talked to some people in Fairfax who have heard these comments from neighbors, barely coded). Not saying white people in the District should be let off the hook- there is something interesting there about liberal hypocrisy (liberal in the streets, conservative in the sheets, so to speak) and about how far white people are really willing to go in terms of the racial makeup of their kids' school. But there are 90k kids in public school in the District, something like 15% are white- you are literally talking about less than 15,000 white kids. Total enrollment in the five closest school districts (PG, Arlington, Montgomery, Fairfax, Loudon) is 595,000, of which around 35% are white, so over 200,000 white kids in those public schools. Forest for the trees here.

There are some really unusual racial dynamics going on in this area- it has probably the largest middle and upper middle class black population of any metro area in the country. The District has almost zero poor white people. You have the ways the middle ring suburbs are changing and becoming more heavily Hispanic. The large Middle Eastern-American and Asian-American populations now in Fairfax and Loudon. School options/choice layer on to this. But it's gonna take a LOT more work and nuance to analyze all that.

Indeed. It's facile "anti-gentrification" type "analysis." We deserve better from institutions like Brookings.

A friend who is a sociologist says "everyone really just wants to study themselves". I think that's a part of why you see work like this (and the Nice White Parents podcast)- the types of people who work at Brookings and NPR nowadays live in places like DC, Brooklyn, etc, so they are attracted to study their world. That plus what seems like laziness to do a pretty basic word analysis study, versus what really should be a much more complex and demographically balanced case study/ethnography of a few focus groups. That type of work would be much much complicated, time consuming and expensive.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:Another huge flaw. On page 23 there is a section specifically looking at Brookland. It says this:

The conversations about Brookland schools on DC Urban Moms illustrate one mechanism by which this self-segregation occurs. Nearly three thousand forum conversations, almost one-fifth of the total, mention at least one Brookland elementary school, and total attention to these schools has grown over time. But DC Urban Moms participants focus heavily on a few schools in the neighborhood. On average, elementary schools in Brookland that are less than 50 percent Black are mentioned more than four times as often per year as schools that are more than 50 percent Black. Figure 8 plots this correlation.

On the face of it, this supports the argument that DCUMers are a bunch of Klan members. But, then look at which schools are being discussed. The frequently-mentioned schools are all charters. Charters are open to students regardless of where they live in the District. So, any of our posters might be interested in those schools. The less-talked-about schools are public and therefore have residency restrictions. Fewer of our posters have a reason to discuss those schools.

This data simply cannot be taken seriously.

Except that in Brookland, most of the in-bounds schools have enough open spaces to accept many if not most external applicants, so, while I totally and completely agree that this study is terrible, this particular point doesn't quite hold up.

More polite way of saying this point is wrong.

My point is not wrong. The assertion I quoted above about which Brookland school are mentioned more frequently appears to be the justification for this statement in the "Discussion" section of the report:

Even within a gentrify-ing neighborhood, and even when other local schools have similar test scores, the schools with more white students receive much more attention.

This again ignores the fact that the schools that received more attention are charter schools that don't have residency requirements. It is quite possible that a poster who is inbounds for a top DCPS school would be interested in one of the charters, but unlikely that the same poster would be interested in a Brookland DCPS. There is simply a larger pool of users who would be potentially interested in discussing the charter schools than there is for the DCPS schools. The only way such a comparison could be legitimate is if only mentions of the schools by Brookland residents were analyzed and that is not possible with the data available to the researchers.

Sampling error, no?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Tangential Question: what is the difference between integrating neighborhoods and gentrification? People are angry if neighborhoods are segregated but upset with gentrification. Is gentrification entirely income related?

There are many threads that discuss this obvious contradiction.

One of the most recent ones is here, if you'd like to discuss:
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/944121.page

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Please do, since I'm already seeing this study get trotted out on neighborhood facebook as great scholarship.

I am considering writing a response. One irony I guess is that the report will probably generate more traffic to DCUM. Hopefully it won't be a bunch of racists coming to find out how to get into an all white school.

The racists would quickly discover that there aren't any all-white public schools in the DC system, not even close.

Um, doesn’t Janney come close, for one?

Yes, if by “all-white” you mean reflecting national averages.

It's a bit more. "White students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white" - from "Harming Our Common Future: America's Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown".
At Janney, it's 74%, and the next-biggest group is Multiracial, which I would guess is also different.

Yes, and Janney (Key, Mann, Murch, Brent etc.) parents could move to the burbs, or a different part of the country, or go private in the District, to enroll their children in schools that are even more white.

This study is coming at the wrong jurisdiction and the wrong parents.

This is the problem I had with the "Nice White Parents" podcast as well- concentrating on a small number of white people who remain in the center jurisdictions, meanwhile 85-90% of the white kids in the region are in the suburbs. Many, many of those people are more explicit about their locational choices being based on school racial makeup (I have talked to some people in Fairfax who have heard these comments from neighbors, barely coded). Not saying white people in the District should be let off the hook- there is something interesting there about liberal hypocrisy (liberal in the streets, conservative in the sheets, so to speak) and about how far white people are really willing to go in terms of the racial makeup of their kids' school. But there are 90k kids in public school in the District, something like 15% are white- you are literally talking about less than 15,000 white kids. Total enrollment in the five closest school districts (PG, Arlington, Montgomery, Fairfax, Loudon) is 595,000, of which around 35% are white, so over 200,000 white kids in those public schools. Forest for the trees here.

There are some really unusual racial dynamics going on in this area- it has probably the largest middle and upper middle class black population of any metro area in the country. The District has almost zero poor white people. You have the ways the middle ring suburbs are changing and becoming more heavily Hispanic. The large Middle Eastern-American and Asian-American populations now in Fairfax and Loudon. School options/choice layer on to this. But it's gonna take a LOT more work and nuance to analyze all that.

Exactly. And I do think there is definitely some nuance in what makes UMC white parents think a school is acceptable. When you dig into it, you see that Beers Elementary and Miner Elementary have very, very similar PARCC scores. And yet, Beers is a total unknown to DCUM and most white parents wouldn't even consider it as an option, frankly in large part because it is black and in Ward 7. Whereas Miner is commonly discussed here as an acceptable option for ECE. Or is the lack of acceptance of school like Beers because there is no discussion of it on DCUM compared to Miner, which might actually indicate that the Brookings research is onto something?

Another aspect is the unrelenting escalation of parenting in general. In the past, a school where 25% of the kids are on-target in test scores might be considered just fine. Your kid will be at the top of the class, maybe a little bored, NBD. It's ELEMENTARY school. Now on DCUM you have parents insisting that "my kid has got to be in a cohort of high performers by 3rd grade!!!111!!!" I don't think that sentiment is largely or even mostly based on race (although there is some of that), but rather on the intensive parenting culture we have now and the sense that we have to fight for every single advantage. Where I disagree with the thrust of the Brookings paper is that this attitude by the privileged is somehow always harmful to the underprivileged. And if it is, how is policy going to effectively intervene? Unless you make giant societal interventions that make parents less anxious, like, say making college and housing actually affordable for the middle class ...

There are micro-moments where the "must maximize" culture of DCUM does probably hurt the underprivileged. Most notably, in boundary discussions where parents "lose" the school they believe they are entitled to. The collective freak-out over the idea of clustering Maury, Miner, and Payne was another one that surely did not reflect well on a group of parents that likely otherwise claim to be progressive. But that's the highly local exception, not the rule. Even if Maury parents could be browbeaten into clustering with Miner and Payne, that's THREE schools out of a total of how many? How is that going to help Wards 7 and 8?

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:Sampling error, no?

Huge sampling error. And it undermines many of their conclusions.

[Anonymous]

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.

There's a footnote that says you ok'd them doing this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tangential Question: what is the difference between integrating neighborhoods and gentrification? People are angry if neighborhoods are segregated but upset with gentrification. Is gentrification entirely income related?

There are many threads that discuss this obvious contradiction.

One of the most recent ones is here, if you'd like to discuss:
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/944121.page

Thanks!!

[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.

There's a footnote that says you ok'd them doing this.

Sort of. See my later post where I included the email the sent me. Their email does not really represent what they ended up doing.