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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Hello research assistant from Brookings,
Feeling a little testy?

As a career-long non-profit employee, I can assure you that the public benefit of being free of taxation means that all non-profits are accountable to the government (and thus the public) in several different ways.

Also, if you are an .edu, it's generally expected that your papers will meet certain academic requirements which this one clearly didn't meet. If your mission statement says you work for the betterment of society, people may just point out when both your methodology and content are lacking as was very clearly the case this time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Literally everyone makes real estate and school decisions based on school test scores and quality of education ever since at least I was a kid.

My parents, immigrants, chose to scrape together enough money for a 2 bedroom apartment in a good school district in the city I grew up so that me and my sibling could have a high quality education. This has been happening ever since forever and in most cities.

So they spent 4 years to tell us what we already know except they threw the race card into it. Everyone knows that deal and Wilson are diverse or “integrated”.

Maybe judging the quality of education mainly on English and Math test scores isn't a good idea? And maybe basing who gets access to high quality schools on who can afford to live in certain places also isn't a good idea?

How is this new?

Everyone already knows this.

There’s nothing new in this paper.
It makes obvious points with bad data, and brings along a bunch of unsupported sideswipes at parents who are trying to do the right thing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
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.

No, it’s not about us, it’s about BROOKINGS.

If they want to take dirty money from the Waltons to attack parents sending their kids to public school, they can do so.

But we don’t have to respect them. And they just ticked their reputation down a notch.
And everything they have is their reputation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
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.

No, it’s not about us, it’s about BROOKINGS.

If they want to take dirty money from the Waltons to attack parents sending their kids to public school, they can do so.

But we don’t have to respect them. And they just ticked their reputation down a notch.
And everything they have is their reputation.

LOL. cant wait to be called a wtu troll.

[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.

Why would someone inbounds for a "top" DCPS school be interested in one of the charters? It's pretty funny how you're spinning a fantasy "larger pool" instead of admitting you're wrong.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In general, whenever you ask people to take a critical look at themselves- the reaction is defensive.

To ask DCUM users if a critique of DCUM users is accurate is naturally not going to end well. Asking people if they are in privileged bubble is not going to go well. Because if you are in a bubble, by definition you do not know that you are.

In general I have found many on this board to be totally blind to the realities of DC Public Schools and blind to your own motivations behind how you move in this space. Is it segregation- kinda sorta. But mostly in the way that we would all select calm.caring, and safe places for our own children.

I think the rub comes in with it is juxtaposed with the self identification as a liberal community with a strong NIMBY action plan.

I'm not at all blind to the fact that my kids have advantages that a lot of kids in DC don't have, including the ability to leave. I just reject to the pejorative framing of "privileged bubble." I grew up in a lot of ways not in a bubble, and it meant I saw and experienced stuff as a kid that I think most parents would want to protect their kids from. Yes, I want to keep my kids from that. But not enough that we're moving to Bethesda (or Tenleytown), just enough that we do put a lot of thought into how to, while following the rules in DC, make decisions that we think are good for our kids. Also, the schools I'm avoiding aren't schools which would be considered average or adequate in most parts of the country - it's not like I'm insisting that my kids have Mandarin or gifted classes and nothing else will do, I just want my kids to have an actual peer group and classes that reflect that.

But also, shouldn't you want to keep all kids from that? The study is pointing out that when white, upper income people act out of their individual self-interest, the result is racially segregated schools. Segregation perpetuates systemic racism, so either that's something that bothers you, or not.

1) My kids live in a racially integrated neighborhood and go to a racially integrated school.
2) Me sending my kids to Eastern is not going to give all kids the things I want for my kids, it's just going to be a bad experience for my kids. And if a big group of white parents decided to get together and send their kids there, the same people who criticize us for not doing that would now be criticizing us for that.
3) If DCPS is interested in making more schools integrated, they have many tools at their disposal. They choose not to do that, and I make my choices accordingly.

What a disrespectful and uneducated comment about Eastern's teachers and staff, not to mention their student body.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Why would someone inbounds for a "top" DCPS school be interested in one of the charters? It's pretty funny how you're spinning a fantasy "larger pool" instead of admitting you're wrong.

Are you familiar with charters at all? Do you even have kids in these schools? People choose charters for a variety of reasons. Language immersion is a common one. Potentially, someone could choose Lee because they want a Montessori school. Do you really deny that there is a larger pool of people who might discuss charters than there is for a poorly-performing inbounds school? Just look at how many students attending charters live in other neighborhoods.

[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.

we should change the name of the site to DC Rich White Urban Moms (and Dads) so there's no surprises

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

They are literally a public policy think tank. Telling people it's "entitled" to critique their research because "Brookings doesn't owe you anything" is a ... weird thing to do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

They are literally a public policy think tank. Telling people it's "entitled" to critique their research because "Brookings doesn't owe you anything" is a ... weird thing to do.

Critique all you want. But you don't deserve anything better or worse from Brookings.

Love, WTU troll

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In general, whenever you ask people to take a critical look at themselves- the reaction is defensive.

To ask DCUM users if a critique of DCUM users is accurate is naturally not going to end well. Asking people if they are in privileged bubble is not going to go well. Because if you are in a bubble, by definition you do not know that you are.

In general I have found many on this board to be totally blind to the realities of DC Public Schools and blind to your own motivations behind how you move in this space. Is it segregation- kinda sorta. But mostly in the way that we would all select calm.caring, and safe places for our own children.

I think the rub comes in with it is juxtaposed with the self identification as a liberal community with a strong NIMBY action plan.

I'm not at all blind to the fact that my kids have advantages that a lot of kids in DC don't have, including the ability to leave. I just reject to the pejorative framing of "privileged bubble." I grew up in a lot of ways not in a bubble, and it meant I saw and experienced stuff as a kid that I think most parents would want to protect their kids from. Yes, I want to keep my kids from that. But not enough that we're moving to Bethesda (or Tenleytown), just enough that we do put a lot of thought into how to, while following the rules in DC, make decisions that we think are good for our kids. Also, the schools I'm avoiding aren't schools which would be considered average or adequate in most parts of the country - it's not like I'm insisting that my kids have Mandarin or gifted classes and nothing else will do, I just want my kids to have an actual peer group and classes that reflect that.

But also, shouldn't you want to keep all kids from that? The study is pointing out that when white, upper income people act out of their individual self-interest, the result is racially segregated schools. Segregation perpetuates systemic racism, so either that's something that bothers you, or not.

1) My kids live in a racially integrated neighborhood and go to a racially integrated school.
2) Me sending my kids to Eastern is not going to give all kids the things I want for my kids, it's just going to be a bad experience for my kids. And if a big group of white parents decided to get together and send their kids there, the same people who criticize us for not doing that would now be criticizing us for that.
3) If DCPS is interested in making more schools integrated, they have many tools at their disposal. They choose not to do that, and I make my choices accordingly.

What a disrespectful and uneducated comment about Eastern's teachers and staff, not to mention their student body.

Eastern literally had ZERO percent of kids meet Math targets in the last PARCC, and 7% for English. There is no way anyone with options sends their kids there. No way. I think it's terrible the school performs so terribly, but that's not disrespectful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

They are literally a public policy think tank. Telling people it's "entitled" to critique their research because "Brookings doesn't owe you anything" is a ... weird thing to do.

Critique all you want. But you don't deserve anything better or worse from Brookings.

Love, WTU troll

You seem confused about what a think tank is and what they expect their research to do.

[jsteele]

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.

we should change the name of the site to DC Rich White Urban Moms (and Dads) so there's no surprises

Miner is 78% black, yet it is commonly discussed here. I hope that doesn't surprise you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In general, whenever you ask people to take a critical look at themselves- the reaction is defensive.

To ask DCUM users if a critique of DCUM users is accurate is naturally not going to end well. Asking people if they are in privileged bubble is not going to go well. Because if you are in a bubble, by definition you do not know that you are.

In general I have found many on this board to be totally blind to the realities of DC Public Schools and blind to your own motivations behind how you move in this space. Is it segregation- kinda sorta. But mostly in the way that we would all select calm.caring, and safe places for our own children.

I think the rub comes in with it is juxtaposed with the self identification as a liberal community with a strong NIMBY action plan.

I'm not at all blind to the fact that my kids have advantages that a lot of kids in DC don't have, including the ability to leave. I just reject to the pejorative framing of "privileged bubble." I grew up in a lot of ways not in a bubble, and it meant I saw and experienced stuff as a kid that I think most parents would want to protect their kids from. Yes, I want to keep my kids from that. But not enough that we're moving to Bethesda (or Tenleytown), just enough that we do put a lot of thought into how to, while following the rules in DC, make decisions that we think are good for our kids. Also, the schools I'm avoiding aren't schools which would be considered average or adequate in most parts of the country - it's not like I'm insisting that my kids have Mandarin or gifted classes and nothing else will do, I just want my kids to have an actual peer group and classes that reflect that.

But also, shouldn't you want to keep all kids from that? The study is pointing out that when white, upper income people act out of their individual self-interest, the result is racially segregated schools. Segregation perpetuates systemic racism, so either that's something that bothers you, or not.

1) My kids live in a racially integrated neighborhood and go to a racially integrated school.
2) Me sending my kids to Eastern is not going to give all kids the things I want for my kids, it's just going to be a bad experience for my kids. And if a big group of white parents decided to get together and send their kids there, the same people who criticize us for not doing that would now be criticizing us for that.
3) If DCPS is interested in making more schools integrated, they have many tools at their disposal. They choose not to do that, and I make my choices accordingly.

What a disrespectful and uneducated comment about Eastern's teachers and staff, not to mention their student body.

Eastern literally had ZERO percent of kids meet Math targets in the last PARCC, and 7% for English. There is no way anyone with options sends their kids there. No way. I think it's terrible the school performs so terribly, but that's not disrespectful.

Maybe using test scores as a barometer for the student experience is the problem.

[Anonymous]

In sum:

The trends that the article references obviously exist powerfully in the DCUM universe---but also they do not exhaust it.

That they did some web scraping, funneled that into some charts, added some cherry-picked quotes and called it "analysis" and "research paper" is a little ridiculous.