Diversity of schools - can this work both ways? Am I being unreasonable?
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Anonymous
Your kids will be outplayed by the ones from families that don’t live in the world of pink butterflies but try to do what’s best for their kids, using common sense. |
Anonymous
| Why can your kid only "belong" with people of his own race? Why can't he "belong" with people of other races who share his interests? |
Anonymous
Honestly I cannot relate as a mixed non-white person. I mean your child will see themselves in cartoons, movies, books, and any type of media. They have family and I’m sure many neighborhoods kids are white. Whiteness and white affirmation is everywhere. White people can never experience being a POC to the extent we can, whiteness is celebrated even in schools that are 1% white because we still learn about white people and white history. Even a place like DC. Also unless you get a racist teacher there will still be things your child can relate to in the classroom, specifically race wise. I think here what should really be unpacked is what does it mean to be white to a child? The reason POC children should be around other POC and not just white is because there is little media showing excellence, diverse roles, and the joy of being a POC. Look how much hate the fictional mermaid is getting just for being Black. I find it highly odd when white parents are concerned about seeing whiteness, it is literally everywhere. |
Anonymous
I don’t need to ask a teacher at some elementary school. My kid currently attends a DCPS Title 1 middle school. He is thriving there — academically, socially and athletically. And he is, in fact, being challenged. I am fully confident that he will do extremely well in life despite not being surrounded by kids from families as rich and as fortunate as we are during his brief time in middle school. If only more upper-income families in DC had the same confidence in their own kids. |
Anonymous
Name the middle school |
Anonymous
| You are overthinking this. Pick the best school. |
Anonymous
Whoop-de-doo |
Anonymous
LOL! Your kid is either not high performing or you are living in a low expectation, low achieving bubble. Get back to us how he does compared to his peers once he is actually in a high performing school from this middle school. |
Anonymous
Is he white? Looking at this list of Title 1 DCPS middle schools, only 2 have more than about 1% white student bodies - Eliot-Hine at 8% and Jefferson at 4%. Most of the others are less than a half a percent white, and there are 9 others (11 all together). Assuming roughly 300 kids per school, my back of the napkin math says that there are about 40 white kids in the whole city who meet the criteria you just mentioned, and the vast majority of those go to Eliot-Hine. If your kid is one of the 40, I’d love to have you expand on your experience. Particularly if he’s one of the prob 15 that don’t go to Eliot-Hine. |
Anonymous
DP. I don’t understand why you are attacking her? Her kid’s scores, grades, and learning do not depend on the other students. My child is at a Title 1 school with lower than acceptable SAT scores. My kid scored very high and has excellent grades. My kid is a great writer and his teacher expect him to write at a more sophisticated level than the other kids in class. Your post is insulting to PP and insulting to teachers. The more I’m on this forum, the more I regret coming here. You’re extremely rude. |
Anonymous
The naked cold hard truth is that no one has yet articulated the benefits of being surrounded by low-performing, low-income kids for high-performing, UMC kids. That's because there are none that are provable by research. |
Anonymous
LOL to the first bolded. You really think magnet schools for high-performing kids are based on this fairy tales that high performing kids benefit from being surrounded and challenged by OTHER high performing kids? And just think how much better your kid would have done if he was surrounded by OTHER great writers who could write at a more sophisticated level. Unless you're invested in the idea of your kid standing out in a sea of low performers? |
Anonymous
| i've heard some good things re jefferson middle school in particular. "Jefferson offers accelerated and intervention courses for students at all levels, as well as a variety of enrichment courses - including Project Lead the Way and Coding." i don't myself really understand why in-bound dcps elementary school families often choose to commute to really far to latin or to attend basis instead. |
Anonymous
| even in this scenario "low-performing, low-income kids for high-performing, UMC kids" (which is itself a little bit of a stereotype) - there are some long-term socioemotional benefits to growing up in a socioeconomically diverse setting rather than a more sheltered umc bubble with limited income disparity |
Anonymous
This was true when we were kids but the landscape is different now for at least some subset of the population. Not saying white people experience what POC experience, but the racial landscape specifically for kids/families is really different. There is far less whiteness in kids media than there used to be, and especially in certain urban communities, media that very white is generally frowned upon. My kid (who is white, as am I) doesn't watch much television but what she does watch is very diverse and most of the character leads are POC. Of her books, it's mostly only the "classic" ones that have primarily white characters or even white main characters (assuming they have human characters or the context reads as culturally white, like Olivia where she's a pig but she's also pretty obviously white). Most of the more recently written books have very diverse characters and I'd say they are more likely to have a POC main character than not. The books they read at school are much more likely to have POC main characters, I'm sure by design given the racial makeup of the school. Add in a predominately black elementary school and living in a majority POC city, and my kid's experience is actually not one that reinforces whiteness all the time. This will change as she gets older -- she knows the president is white (though she also knows the Vice President is a black woman and she knows about the Obamas). I know media and culture for older kids and adults is waaaaay whiter, like looking at the MCU universe or at the shows aimed at teen girls and young women. There's still more diversity than when I was a kid but I can see how whiteness tends to be centered more. As a white parent of a white kid, I'm not freaking out about this, but I notice and so does my kid. We have absolutely had lots of conversations about how she has a different skin color than most of her friends. One interesting things is that because she has reddish blonde hair, she tends to get a lot of attention for her hair (not all complimentary) and she actually has experienced having kids and adults come up and touch her hair without her permission, which I know is something that POC in white spaces experience. I am not comfortable calling this "othering" in the sense that POC experience it, but it's also not the experience of someone who has their race and culture centered and celebrated. My point is not to say my kid has it hard -- she doesn't. But the idea that my child is floating through life secure in the primacy of whiteness is false. I think experiences like what I've described can be hard for white parents to navigate because even as you recognize that your kid still obviously has white privilege in the world at large, you can also see how their minority status within the small pocket of the world where you live might impact their self-esteem and ability to make friends. Also, in our case, we aren't high SES. We are squarely MC (not in the fake DCUM sense but in the real sense, with an HHI of around 100k). Oh and we don't have a lot of extended family, so my kid doesn't have this network of white people that is making her feel included racially. She has three grandparents, a handful of aunts and uncles, and her cousins are actually half white and have mixed. My observation is that we are not the only family in this situation. My kid isn't a white kid growing up in a predominantly white city or suburb surrounded by white culture. She does not see whiteness everywhere. As an adult with broader experience I know that this will change, but as a small child who knows she's different than most of her neighbors and friends, she doesn't know that yet. All she knows is that she is different from the other kids in a way that sometimes feels uncomfortable and isolating. |