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

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote: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?

This is an example of where the obvious explanation is simply missed. Miner is in a neighborhood where we have a lot of posters whereas Beers is in a neighborhood from which we have very few users. People simply talk about their local schools. Not a surprise.

[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.

your entitlement is in your last sentence. you don't deserve anything from brookings.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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?

This is an example of where the obvious explanation is simply missed. Miner is in a neighborhood where we have a lot of posters whereas Beers is in a neighborhood from which we have very few users. People simply talk about their local schools. Not a surprise.

you know your demo because that is what you sell to advertisers.

and the fact that your site isn't inclusive is what they are studying

no snark to your site not being inclusive; some people don't care; some people don't have time; tech, etc. none of the UMC moms I know are ever on DCUM and they also don't feel the way the majority of these people here do about schools. their kids are all in dcps, will be in dcps for the full 12, no one is moving, no one demanded schools need to open.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wait, three people were actually paid to read dcum for months?!

Too bad we missed that job application, right?

[Anonymous]

It just seems wrong to base any conclusions about schools on an anonymous message board or which the demographics aren’t identified and which likely don’t represent a fair sampling of views of any particular segment of society.

Seems you would first have to do a study of the population posting on the DCPS forum of DCUM before claiming to find meaningful insights from the postings here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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?

Great points. If you go back in US history, post-WWII, American government made significant interventions to massively increase opportunities for the working/middle class (let's be honest, most of that was aimed at white people and a lot of it explicitly or implicitly attempted to keep out black people). You had the GI Bill. You had big investments in basic research, which filtered down to state universities, allowing them to massively expand and serve a growing middle class. These things fed into each other. Now it's the opposite- you have much smaller investments, you have state governments DECREASING funding to state universities, so what do they do? They concentrate more and more on students who can pay full boat, and sure as hell aren't increasing class sizes to let in more kids from poor homes.

All of this feels like people who are understandably anxious about their hold on to money/privilege/whatever, and the future of their kids when those things are seemingly less available each year. So you have this scratching and clawing at whatever they can get their hands on. It feels like a community on the edge of a volcano that is constantly erupting- always trying to keep the magma flow out of their little parcel, because it feels like stopping the volcano altogether is impossible, so you concentrate on what feels possible. Pretty much need to make massive changes in the structure of American society and government to really deal with these issues. That doesn't wash our hands of it, by any means, but it feels really weird to point again and again at the 10-15% of people shifting the magma around (while the rest mostly don't have resources to deal with it) and not focusing on the volcano itself.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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?

This is an example of where the obvious explanation is simply missed. Miner is in a neighborhood where we have a lot of posters whereas Beers is in a neighborhood from which we have very few users. People simply talk about their local schools. Not a surprise.

True, but I think it also interacts with real estate. Eg, you can buy this beautiful house that is zoned for Randle Highlands (a school with objectively decent scores) for just $549k, but how often does that get suggested on the real estate forum without someone saying "but the schools!" https://www.redfin.com/DC/Washington/1718-29th-St-SE-20020/home/10151369

[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.

Thank you for bringing up that podcast, in reading this report I kept thinking of that. The threads on here discussing it were pretty good. We LOVE to pick apart these nice white liberal parents, and meanwhile, most of the country's closet racists sit undisturbed in the suburbs and rural areas, enjoying comfortable full segregation without any bothersome journalists and academics trying to come after them.

I don't deny there is racism in DC and self segregation; I just don't think it's nearly as bad as what you'll find outside the borders. How quickly we forget that a decade ago or so there were very few parents of any means who sent their kids to our public schools whatsoever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

your entitlement is in your last sentence. you don't deserve anything from brookings.

As Brookings serves the public good we, as members of the public, are free to point out when a think tank with an educational mission puts out research inconsistent with their mission statement. It is not entitlement, but rather holding them accountable to their own stated goals to say "We deserve better."

Here is their mission statement:
The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC. Our mission is to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wait, three people were actually paid to read dcum for months?!

Too bad we missed that job application, right?

Haha right? I’ve been doing their job for free the whole pandemic!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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?

This is an example of where the obvious explanation is simply missed. Miner is in a neighborhood where we have a lot of posters whereas Beers is in a neighborhood from which we have very few users. People simply talk about their local schools. Not a surprise.

you know your demo because that is what you sell to advertisers.

and the fact that your site isn't inclusive is what they are studying

no snark to your site not being inclusive; some people don't care; some people don't have time; tech, etc. none of the UMC moms I know are ever on DCUM and they also don't feel the way the majority of these people here do about schools. their kids are all in dcps, will be in dcps for the full 12, no one is moving, no one demanded schools need to open.

Right. right. who again? I call BS on all your UMC mom friends staying in DCPS for the full 12 and not caring if schools opened.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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?

This is an example of where the obvious explanation is simply missed. Miner is in a neighborhood where we have a lot of posters whereas Beers is in a neighborhood from which we have very few users. People simply talk about their local schools. Not a surprise.

you know your demo because that is what you sell to advertisers.

and the fact that your site isn't inclusive is what they are studying

no snark to your site not being inclusive; some people don't care; some people don't have time; tech, etc. none of the UMC moms I know are ever on DCUM and they also don't feel the way the majority of these people here do about schools. their kids are all in dcps, will be in dcps for the full 12, no one is moving, no one demanded schools need to open.

Right. right. who again? I call BS on all your UMC mom friends staying in DCPS for the full 12 and not caring if schools opened.

Yeah, I don't know a single parent who doesn't feel strongly on schools reopening. One way or the other, strong feelings are typical.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wait, three people were actually paid to read dcum for months?!

Too bad we missed that job application, right?

Dream job!!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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?

This is an example of where the obvious explanation is simply missed. Miner is in a neighborhood where we have a lot of posters whereas Beers is in a neighborhood from which we have very few users. People simply talk about their local schools. Not a surprise.

you know your demo because that is what you sell to advertisers.

and the fact that your site isn't inclusive is what they are studying

no snark to your site not being inclusive; some people don't care; some people don't have time; tech, etc. none of the UMC moms I know are ever on DCUM and they also don't feel the way the majority of these people here do about schools. their kids are all in dcps, will be in dcps for the full 12, no one is moving, no one demanded schools need to open.

Right. right. who again? I call BS on all your UMC mom friends staying in DCPS for the full 12 and not caring if schools opened.

Yeah, I don't know a single parent who doesn't feel strongly on schools reopening. One way or the other, strong feelings are typical.

Meet new people - there are a lot of us out there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

your entitlement is in your last sentence. you don't deserve anything from brookings.

As Brookings serves the public good we, as members of the public, are free to point out when a think tank with an educational mission puts out research inconsistent with their mission statement. It is not entitlement, but rather holding them accountable to their own stated goals to say "We deserve better."

Here is their mission statement:
The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, DC. Our mission is to conduct in-depth research that leads to new ideas for solving problems facing society at the local, national and global level.

Non profit - not a public institution. You don't have to like them and maybe that will be harder for them to find funding. BUT THEY DON'T OWE YOU ANYTHING.

This was funded by private money.

Also maybe you are the problems you can't see it.