Disappointed with lack of diversity at a top school

[Anonymous]

I suspect it's more of a "don't ask; do tell" scenario in the sense that, for example, there will be gay parents who want to know how the K curriculum talks about families or Jews who want to know what happens to kids who follow Kosher dietary laws when there's family-style meals in the cafeteria.

As a practical matter, there will be people who don't fit the rich straight WASP profile and they know from experience that their kids will face school situations where they stand out. Will they be the only ones? Will their different experiences be glossed over or dismissed or acknowledged or celebrated or objects of curiosity? These are real questions when you choose a school. And often it takes a critical mass of people involved in the school (parents, faculty, administrators) who are sensitive to particular perspectives to anticipate these moments and figure out how to handle them well.

Personally, I hate all the autobiographical moments in elementary school, but they are there in abundance. So who you are and, by extension, who your kid is and what that means here could and should be a voting issue in some school choice decisions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We still seem to be dancing around the issue of what constitutes diversity .... So, what constitutes true diversity?

Bear here. I like the put-up-or-shut-up question. Here's my view.

Racial diversity. I applaud schools for encouraging it, because I think the natural applicant pool is substantially less diverse than the surrounding community. Some schools seem to do a better job than others. I'm not much of a fan of quotas, or of relaxing standards for any racial minority, but I think it's sometimes a necessary evil to remedy the effects of past/current discrimination. I much prefer it if schools seek racial diversity by working hard to encourage lots applications from racially diverse students, because I believe that enough applications will yield a stronger applicant pool that naturally results on a racially diverse class based on merit alone.

Economic diversity. I think it gets addressed via the financial aid system at these schools. I do not think it makes sense to relax merit-based admission standards in favor of "economic diversity." If a school lacks economic diversity, the solution should be to improve the financial aid system, and encourage applications from a broader base of people by making sure they know the financial aid system is available to help.

Orientation/"lifestyle" diversity. I've got nothing against orientation diversity, but I don't see any good argument for relaxing admission standards on this characteristic. This is primarily because I've never gotten the impression that sexual orientation discrimination (which I think is real and serious) has led to significant disparity in economic/education rates on a societal scale (like racial discrimination has). Put simply, I know lots of single-sex couples with kids, and they're just as able to pay for school as I am, and just as likely to have given their kids early education benefits as I have. I know this is totally anecdotal and not based on any statistics, so it's potentially unreliable, but I've never seen any contrary research to change my uneducated views. Since I don't think there's any inherent discrimination in the applicant pool, I assume the percentage of kids from diverse lifestyles at most schools will roughly match the percentage of kids in the general population.

Religious diversity. I feel the same way about this as orientation diversity -- I favor diversity, but I don't think it warrants any change in admissions standards. I assume that people from all different religions are just as likely to be strong applicants based purely on the merits, and just as likely to apply to private schools as public schools, so I assume that most private school student bodies will roughly match the general population. (I'm leaving out situations that specifically attract students of particular religions, like religious-based schools, because these fit a different profile and are not necessarily striving for the same level of diversity as the average school.)

I'll stop now since I've probably offended everyone somehow. Apologies if I pissed you off. If you don't agree, please educate me rather than just flaming me (since I'll probably just ignore the flames).

[Anonymous]

The "merits" are pretty hard to determine in PreK. No track record of achievement, IQ tests at this age are notoriously unreliable and aren't designed to differentiate among high-performing kids. And that's before we get to the question of whether the best school would be one whose collective IQ was highest.

So, at the elementary level, you have to decide what your mission is. Are you serving a particular neighborhood, or market niche, or community or population? Is diversity part of your mission and part of how you educate? If not, how homogeneous are you willing to be (what if white girls represent 85% high-scorers in your admissions pool and you didn't plan on being a single-sex school)?

And all this is before you get to community-building and related financial and logistical imperatives that mean that, on some level, selective private day schools are choosing families rather than just individual students. And, of course, all private day schools are well aware that they, too, must be chosen by families/parents and that they are looking at how they fit in, whether they feel embraced (vs. there on sufferance), what sort of cohort their kids are likely to be a part of, etc.

I don't expect private elementary/secondary school student bodies to roughly match local demographics. As long as tuitions are hefty, and as long as wealth isn't randomly distributed across the population, the demographics will be skewed. So the question is how and that's a judgment call.
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[Anonymous]

To put this more succinctly, private school are competing -- for prestige and for students. They compete based in part on what sells. Excellence sells, rigor (or AP or IB) sells, diversity sells, comprehensiveness sells, facilities sell, exclusiveness sells. If a school, for whatever reason, (location, reputation, history) can't pull off diversity and excellence, it may decide to go with exclusiveness and facilities. In an area where there are lots of country clubs, that's a reasonable marketing strategy.

[Anonymous]

There's also the issue of whether diversity is about accepting really wealthy minority/orientation/other religion families. I.e., is affirmative action meant to help groups that have been historically economically disadvantaged, or is the purpose to help families who are economically disadvantaged today? Personally I'm a strong supporter of affirmative action, but only really for the second group. Judging from what I've seen at top privates, however, the schools have decided more in favor of the former than the latter.