Integration and DC Schools -- A high priority? Yay or nay?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this feels like a place where we should be lifting up Black and Latino voices, not white voices (which is the majority of DCUM). My answer is some mix of I don't know and it depends.

I am white - I do want my kids to go to a diverse school. For me, that means a school that has a good percentage of Black and Latino students, and at least enough white students that my kid doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - I think sending a kid to a school, in America, where there are only a single digit number of kids of their race in the whole school, no matter what race that kid is, is asking a lot of someone really young. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, Garrison and John Lewis are the kinds of schools I want my kid to attend (and we're attempting to lottery to both of them this year).

As to whether DC Prep should try to diversify, or whether schools EOTR should try to diversify, that's a question for the Black community, not a question for me.

It does seem to me like the place where integration is a reasonable goal is places where inbound participation is very low for particular races. There are plenty of white families inbounds for Cleveland, for HD Cooke, for Tubman - why aren't they attending? That's a worthwhile question to ponder. And if there are schools, for example, WOTP that are 70% white and aren't seeing inbound participation from families of color, that's worth digging in to as well. So I do tend to agree with a previous poster that inbound buy in is valuable, and broadly considered to be valuable (even by people like me who are opting out of our IB) and often in DC increases school integration.

Why are you opting out of your IB?

I'm not going to answer detailed questions about this because it would make me pretty identifiable, but I'll say in general terms: Lack of academic peers for my advanced kids, and some social challenges.

But I will say that my experience in having my kids at a DCPS, evaluating schools, learning about the DC school landscape, and navigating this with my own family has shown me that NONE of these issues, in DC at least, are simple, and there are no easy answers. And the only people claiming there are easy answers ("well if DC just did X, everything would be better") generally live in the suburbs (like the Bethesda guy quote upthread). These issues are incredibly complex.

In other words, you don't want your kids going to school with the blacks.

I’m not the person who wrote the original comment, but as a Black parent, I find this kind of response reductive and unfair.

It’s entirely possible for a family to be talking about academic peers and social fit without it being code for “not wanting to be around Black kids.” In fact, in my own case, we moved our son into a predominantly African-American Catholic school that is also high-performing.

One reason? At his previous school, he had essentially no Black male peers in his same socioeconomic band — not one. That matters more than people want to admit. Belonging isn’t just about race. It’s about shared expectations, family context, academic norms, and social environment.

Many white families in DC can reasonably expect that most of the same-race peers around their kids will also be in a similar SES band. That’s not always true for Black families. When it isn’t, the social dynamics can be isolating in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve seen it up close.

Reducing complex conversations about peer groups and school culture to “you just don’t want your kids around Black people” shuts down nuance and ignores how class and race intersect in real ways.

Thank you for this. My (non-white kid) also moved from a Title 1 school to a high performing school and now has friends of different races, but they all are middle class or UMC and ALL have parents who value education.

When I see someone write something like "you don't want your kids in school with the blacks" I know this is a white mom at a Title 1 school who thinks she is performing an act of social justice by sending her kid there, and doesn't see her own racism.

Not bad points. But as a white mom with a kid in a T1 MS, I can also conclude that for white parents who disparage and won’t even consider the school, I do think there is racism at play. As for black MC/UMC kids, I think the issue is in some ways the same as for the white academically on track kids - the school is rightfully geared towards serving the 90% of kids that make up its main population and so advanced academics is not the #1 concern. That said I personally find the teachers and admins at our school to be very, very good and my kid has learned a ton. I wonder if a black MC would fall through the cracks a bit because everyone would assume they were “high risk” instead of EG pushing them into the advanced math class. At a school where grade level or beyond performance was expected then the median standard would be higher for all kids including black kids.

A mind reader, everyone.

Lots of convuluted thinking going on. "When UMC black families choose a good school, it's because they want a good education for their child. When UMC white families choose a good school, its because of racism."

The two families are not equivalent in their motivations and beliefs, obviously.

Also - there is a difference between chosing a school and disparaging a school. The latter is where the implied or even unconscious racial bias plays out. If I hadn’t lived through the process myself I wouldn’t be so aware of it.

LMAO if you think the UMC Black families don't disparage the bad schools. What bubble do you live in. Do you even know your neighbors? Why don't you know this? Could it be a racial bias?

Case in point my college teammates- 75% black, 100% in my position group- think I am a crazy person for sending my kids to DCPS

Same here. I have some black colleagues at work who live in PG and Howard Counties, and they feel the same way. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has a clue about how socioeconomics works.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Integration is very important to me and I am engaged in it, but it is generally overtaken by other priorities on this board.

I'd say mostly, this board wants differentiation and to not have children of board participants in the same schools as students with behavior problems. Those goals do not go well with generalized integration.

There are also more general segregation/race and class relations issues, with a major one being a distribution of income and educational attainment that is at the edges with nobody in the middle (we have a bunch of high income advanced degree holders and HS-or-worse educated low income parents, nothing in between in DC).

If you actually think this, it's a reflection of your own limited social circle. It's wrong. DC has plenty of families that are middle income. Lots of people just have college degrees and no advanced degree, plus plenty of fields offer steady income but not high income. We can afford to own homes (condos or houses in part so the city outside the most gentrified neighborhoods, and also if you bought before rates went up) and care about education, but also money is tight because this is an expensive city and it gets more expensive all the time. On the other hand, living in the city often gives us the ability to live without a car or with just one car, living in small homes keep us from accumulating so much stuff, and there are real cost savings to being close in to work and lots of free entertainment. So a lot of us are loathe to move out of the city where we might get cheaper housing and food but more expensive and longer commutes and a host of other expenses just by virtue of living far away from things.

I regularly feel completely invisible in discussions about education in the city because so many people think as you do. That there are only two kinds of people in the city: (1) rich, mostly white people with advanced degrees, and (2) poor black and hispanic people with a HS education or less. I'm sure your in group #1 and it's actually an embarrassment to your education that you are so ignorant of the many many families of every race in this city that are dual income, have college degrees, are not rich, can still pay our bills, and obviously send our kids to public schools because where the hell else are we going to send them?

What's funny is that we send our kids to school with rich people and poor people, and people just lack the observational skills or common sense to understand that we are middle class. Some of the rich people at our school just assume we are also rich, because we wear professional clothes and have read books, and they seem confused when we don't have opinions on whether Colorado or Vermont is better for New Year's skiing. Other rich people at our school just group us in with the poor people. The poor people all think we are rich, which is fair, because compared to them we are. Literally no one cares if our family's needs are being met by the school system.

Eh--while there are definite divides between income/wealth amongst the college educated and above class--fundamentally everyone in this group is well-educated and want their kids to be well-educated. How are they not aligned on educational priorities? They both want better public schools. Isn't that the common ground. What does it matter that some can afford luxury hobbies/travel and some can't.

IME, rich people often have different educational priorities than me, a well-educated middle class person. They don't have the same worries about their kids being left behind or failing to acquire necessary skills for HS, college, or the job market, because they have enough money not to have to worry about it. There are lots of culture clashes between the rich parents at our school and those who are middle class, even when the middle class parents are actually better educated. If anything, college-educated middle class people have the most anxiety about education because they (we) have the least stable class status and have the most to lose in the AI revolution and the K-shaped economy.

Can you provide some examples? We are talking about public schools here, the ultra rich are all in privates.

Examples:

- Getting hung up on a public school inconvenience that middle class parents just accept and move on from, and wanting to dedicate resources to it. For instance, throwing a fit over DCPS absence policies when they conflict with international travel, and hijacking PTA meetings to discuss it.
- Expecting the school to provide tutoring to help on-grade-level kids become above grade level, and not understanding why that's different from tutoring kids who are lagging behind grade level.
- Assuming families can always spend extra money to provide the kids with something. For instance advocating for programming that can't be subsidized by PTA funds and expecting all families to kick in $50 or $100 to supplement it. This is often accompanied by a promise to pay the fee for at risk or low-income kids, without understanding that middle class families don't fall in that bucket and that more families might struggle with a fee like that then they realize.
- Pushing for programming based on status markers or upper class ideals that they don't understand aren't important to middle class kids or get in the way of practicalities, like pushing for French or Mandarin over Spanish.

These are good examples. Add to it "required" PTO donations of hundreds of dollars and telling parents that it's cheaper than sending your kids to private school. And focusing effort on improving the playground or getting a new gym when existing facilities are adequate.


I disagree with the above grade level point though. Kids should be challenged and offering those opportunities to at risk and middle class kids is a better investment than offering it to upper middle class kids. But supporting below grade level students is so a priority (that's not a place you have to choose)

Yes all kids should be challenged but it is very common for the UMC parents to suck up all the air in the room demanding special attention to their above average kid (sometimes in the form of elaborate 504s or IEPs) as opposed to realistically understanding what is good for the majority. Sometimes the UMC parents have actually caused the issues by advocating against teaching methods that don’t conform to Dr Becky or whatever (like being against homework or drilling math facts).

The abuse of the IEP/504 system to secure advantages for kids who do not need them drives me nuts. It also impacts every level of the school. It changes how teachers and administrators interact with all parents, including those of us who are not trying to exploit the system. Having even a handful of parents in a school who are constantly angling for any advantage for their kids makes all parents suspect.

Yes. I’m not sure it’s knowing abuse but it’s definitely parents who believe in extracting every possible benefit. My kid actually has an IEP but I try to avoid the IEP team as much as possible lol. With some very small exceptions the bulk of support has come from people not on the IEP team. I find that if I ask for things my kid obviously needs it’s very easy. Everything else slides.

This strikes me as so odd. It’s such a horrible process to get an IEP, and every psychologist we saw immediately saw my kids as having xyz disability. I would not wish this on anyone. Yet I am sure the average uninformed person doesn’t understand why it is in place and thinks it’s something like the abuse described above. But the reality is that you’re not a psychologist and this type of thinking just make an it so much harder to get the services and accommodations some students need. My students 5th teacher made our life miserable and our report explained in detail why we needed what we needed.

This is not about kids who need IEPs, but schools and parents offering 504s to typical kids in order to max out test scores. Different thing.

It is so dang hard to get accommodations for kids who need them that lots of these kids end up leaving the system so they can get access to an education. If kids who need it can't get it, I simply don't believe that kids who don't need it are getting it so easily that there is wide spread abuse. I can only asusume that you have never been in this situation and so imagine it must be easy to abuse.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this feels like a place where we should be lifting up Black and Latino voices, not white voices (which is the majority of DCUM). My answer is some mix of I don't know and it depends.

I am white - I do want my kids to go to a diverse school. For me, that means a school that has a good percentage of Black and Latino students, and at least enough white students that my kid doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - I think sending a kid to a school, in America, where there are only a single digit number of kids of their race in the whole school, no matter what race that kid is, is asking a lot of someone really young. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, Garrison and John Lewis are the kinds of schools I want my kid to attend (and we're attempting to lottery to both of them this year).

As to whether DC Prep should try to diversify, or whether schools EOTR should try to diversify, that's a question for the Black community, not a question for me.

It does seem to me like the place where integration is a reasonable goal is places where inbound participation is very low for particular races. There are plenty of white families inbounds for Cleveland, for HD Cooke, for Tubman - why aren't they attending? That's a worthwhile question to ponder. And if there are schools, for example, WOTP that are 70% white and aren't seeing inbound participation from families of color, that's worth digging in to as well. So I do tend to agree with a previous poster that inbound buy in is valuable, and broadly considered to be valuable (even by people like me who are opting out of our IB) and often in DC increases school integration.

Why are you opting out of your IB?

I'm not going to answer detailed questions about this because it would make me pretty identifiable, but I'll say in general terms: Lack of academic peers for my advanced kids, and some social challenges.

But I will say that my experience in having my kids at a DCPS, evaluating schools, learning about the DC school landscape, and navigating this with my own family has shown me that NONE of these issues, in DC at least, are simple, and there are no easy answers. And the only people claiming there are easy answers ("well if DC just did X, everything would be better") generally live in the suburbs (like the Bethesda guy quote upthread). These issues are incredibly complex.

In other words, you don't want your kids going to school with the blacks.

I’m not the person who wrote the original comment, but as a Black parent, I find this kind of response reductive and unfair.

It’s entirely possible for a family to be talking about academic peers and social fit without it being code for “not wanting to be around Black kids.” In fact, in my own case, we moved our son into a predominantly African-American Catholic school that is also high-performing.

One reason? At his previous school, he had essentially no Black male peers in his same socioeconomic band — not one. That matters more than people want to admit. Belonging isn’t just about race. It’s about shared expectations, family context, academic norms, and social environment.

Many white families in DC can reasonably expect that most of the same-race peers around their kids will also be in a similar SES band. That’s not always true for Black families. When it isn’t, the social dynamics can be isolating in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve seen it up close.

Reducing complex conversations about peer groups and school culture to “you just don’t want your kids around Black people” shuts down nuance and ignores how class and race intersect in real ways.

Thank you for this. My (non-white kid) also moved from a Title 1 school to a high performing school and now has friends of different races, but they all are middle class or UMC and ALL have parents who value education.

When I see someone write something like "you don't want your kids in school with the blacks" I know this is a white mom at a Title 1 school who thinks she is performing an act of social justice by sending her kid there, and doesn't see her own racism.

Not bad points. But as a white mom with a kid in a T1 MS, I can also conclude that for white parents who disparage and won’t even consider the school, I do think there is racism at play. As for black MC/UMC kids, I think the issue is in some ways the same as for the white academically on track kids - the school is rightfully geared towards serving the 90% of kids that make up its main population and so advanced academics is not the #1 concern. That said I personally find the teachers and admins at our school to be very, very good and my kid has learned a ton. I wonder if a black MC would fall through the cracks a bit because everyone would assume they were “high risk” instead of EG pushing them into the advanced math class. At a school where grade level or beyond performance was expected then the median standard would be higher for all kids including black kids.

A mind reader, everyone.

Lots of convuluted thinking going on. "When UMC black families choose a good school, it's because they want a good education for their child. When UMC white families choose a good school, its because of racism."

The two families are not equivalent in their motivations and beliefs, obviously.

Also - there is a difference between chosing a school and disparaging a school. The latter is where the implied or even unconscious racial bias plays out. If I hadn’t lived through the process myself I wouldn’t be so aware of it.

LMAO if you think the UMC Black families don't disparage the bad schools. What bubble do you live in. Do you even know your neighbors? Why don't you know this? Could it be a racial bias?

Black people can also be biased toward white supremacy.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Integration is very important to me and I am engaged in it, but it is generally overtaken by other priorities on this board.

I'd say mostly, this board wants differentiation and to not have children of board participants in the same schools as students with behavior problems. Those goals do not go well with generalized integration.

There are also more general segregation/race and class relations issues, with a major one being a distribution of income and educational attainment that is at the edges with nobody in the middle (we have a bunch of high income advanced degree holders and HS-or-worse educated low income parents, nothing in between in DC).

If you actually think this, it's a reflection of your own limited social circle. It's wrong. DC has plenty of families that are middle income. Lots of people just have college degrees and no advanced degree, plus plenty of fields offer steady income but not high income. We can afford to own homes (condos or houses in part so the city outside the most gentrified neighborhoods, and also if you bought before rates went up) and care about education, but also money is tight because this is an expensive city and it gets more expensive all the time. On the other hand, living in the city often gives us the ability to live without a car or with just one car, living in small homes keep us from accumulating so much stuff, and there are real cost savings to being close in to work and lots of free entertainment. So a lot of us are loathe to move out of the city where we might get cheaper housing and food but more expensive and longer commutes and a host of other expenses just by virtue of living far away from things.

I regularly feel completely invisible in discussions about education in the city because so many people think as you do. That there are only two kinds of people in the city: (1) rich, mostly white people with advanced degrees, and (2) poor black and hispanic people with a HS education or less. I'm sure your in group #1 and it's actually an embarrassment to your education that you are so ignorant of the many many families of every race in this city that are dual income, have college degrees, are not rich, can still pay our bills, and obviously send our kids to public schools because where the hell else are we going to send them?

What's funny is that we send our kids to school with rich people and poor people, and people just lack the observational skills or common sense to understand that we are middle class. Some of the rich people at our school just assume we are also rich, because we wear professional clothes and have read books, and they seem confused when we don't have opinions on whether Colorado or Vermont is better for New Year's skiing. Other rich people at our school just group us in with the poor people. The poor people all think we are rich, which is fair, because compared to them we are. Literally no one cares if our family's needs are being met by the school system.

Eh--while there are definite divides between income/wealth amongst the college educated and above class--fundamentally everyone in this group is well-educated and want their kids to be well-educated. How are they not aligned on educational priorities? They both want better public schools. Isn't that the common ground. What does it matter that some can afford luxury hobbies/travel and some can't.

IME, rich people often have different educational priorities than me, a well-educated middle class person. They don't have the same worries about their kids being left behind or failing to acquire necessary skills for HS, college, or the job market, because they have enough money not to have to worry about it. There are lots of culture clashes between the rich parents at our school and those who are middle class, even when the middle class parents are actually better educated. If anything, college-educated middle class people have the most anxiety about education because they (we) have the least stable class status and have the most to lose in the AI revolution and the K-shaped economy.

Can you provide some examples? We are talking about public schools here, the ultra rich are all in privates.

Examples:

- Getting hung up on a public school inconvenience that middle class parents just accept and move on from, and wanting to dedicate resources to it. For instance, throwing a fit over DCPS absence policies when they conflict with international travel, and hijacking PTA meetings to discuss it.
- Expecting the school to provide tutoring to help on-grade-level kids become above grade level, and not understanding why that's different from tutoring kids who are lagging behind grade level.
- Assuming families can always spend extra money to provide the kids with something. For instance advocating for programming that can't be subsidized by PTA funds and expecting all families to kick in $50 or $100 to supplement it. This is often accompanied by a promise to pay the fee for at risk or low-income kids, without understanding that middle class families don't fall in that bucket and that more families might struggle with a fee like that then they realize.
- Pushing for programming based on status markers or upper class ideals that they don't understand aren't important to middle class kids or get in the way of practicalities, like pushing for French or Mandarin over Spanish.

These are good examples. Add to it "required" PTO donations of hundreds of dollars and telling parents that it's cheaper than sending your kids to private school. And focusing effort on improving the playground or getting a new gym when existing facilities are adequate.


I disagree with the above grade level point though. Kids should be challenged and offering those opportunities to at risk and middle class kids is a better investment than offering it to upper middle class kids. But supporting below grade level students is so a priority (that's not a place you have to choose)

Yes all kids should be challenged but it is very common for the UMC parents to suck up all the air in the room demanding special attention to their above average kid (sometimes in the form of elaborate 504s or IEPs) as opposed to realistically understanding what is good for the majority. Sometimes the UMC parents have actually caused the issues by advocating against teaching methods that don’t conform to Dr Becky or whatever (like being against homework or drilling math facts).

The abuse of the IEP/504 system to secure advantages for kids who do not need them drives me nuts. It also impacts every level of the school. It changes how teachers and administrators interact with all parents, including those of us who are not trying to exploit the system. Having even a handful of parents in a school who are constantly angling for any advantage for their kids makes all parents suspect.

Yes it's a scandal IMO. I remember how shocked I was as a private school teacher and realized just how many of the students had extended time. We also moved to a school with a privileged student body and it was offered to our child to maximize their score on one very specific section of the CAPE, even though he is a completely typical kid who does well on all other assessments. This is how Standford ends up with a student body where 40 percent of them have a "disability."

As a college professor it’s a pre/post covid thing. Went from 1-2 per semester per section to like 20 of 30.

During Covid a lot of kids had parents see how little they pay attention. Or how they struggled socially. Or how they really can’t read and there seems to be a dysfunction. Not sure where you teach but it’s depressing to me that you assume you have a classroom full of liars.

PP here. It’s not my place to judge whether someone is “actually” disabled.

People get basically the same score they would regardless of the time they would take. 4 question test from a bank of 30 or so questions and be developed over the years, median score is about a 40%, curve to an 80, about the same number of people trying to cheat (I have a light canary trap, not a really intense one). Pre and post COVID there’s not a change in score distribution.

If it's important to know how many questions a student can get correct in a certain amount of time, then changing the time for some doesn't make sense as an accommodation. If it's not, it would be more fair to give everyone the time they need.

DCPS de facto gives everyone extra time and sets the number of questions to the accommodation level. If you ever move your kid to a parochial shcool, you will realize this.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this feels like a place where we should be lifting up Black and Latino voices, not white voices (which is the majority of DCUM). My answer is some mix of I don't know and it depends.

I am white - I do want my kids to go to a diverse school. For me, that means a school that has a good percentage of Black and Latino students, and at least enough white students that my kid doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - I think sending a kid to a school, in America, where there are only a single digit number of kids of their race in the whole school, no matter what race that kid is, is asking a lot of someone really young. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, Garrison and John Lewis are the kinds of schools I want my kid to attend (and we're attempting to lottery to both of them this year).

As to whether DC Prep should try to diversify, or whether schools EOTR should try to diversify, that's a question for the Black community, not a question for me.

It does seem to me like the place where integration is a reasonable goal is places where inbound participation is very low for particular races. There are plenty of white families inbounds for Cleveland, for HD Cooke, for Tubman - why aren't they attending? That's a worthwhile question to ponder. And if there are schools, for example, WOTP that are 70% white and aren't seeing inbound participation from families of color, that's worth digging in to as well. So I do tend to agree with a previous poster that inbound buy in is valuable, and broadly considered to be valuable (even by people like me who are opting out of our IB) and often in DC increases school integration.

Why are you opting out of your IB?

I'm not going to answer detailed questions about this because it would make me pretty identifiable, but I'll say in general terms: Lack of academic peers for my advanced kids, and some social challenges.

But I will say that my experience in having my kids at a DCPS, evaluating schools, learning about the DC school landscape, and navigating this with my own family has shown me that NONE of these issues, in DC at least, are simple, and there are no easy answers. And the only people claiming there are easy answers ("well if DC just did X, everything would be better") generally live in the suburbs (like the Bethesda guy quote upthread). These issues are incredibly complex.

In other words, you don't want your kids going to school with the blacks.

I’m not the person who wrote the original comment, but as a Black parent, I find this kind of response reductive and unfair.

It’s entirely possible for a family to be talking about academic peers and social fit without it being code for “not wanting to be around Black kids.” In fact, in my own case, we moved our son into a predominantly African-American Catholic school that is also high-performing.

One reason? At his previous school, he had essentially no Black male peers in his same socioeconomic band — not one. That matters more than people want to admit. Belonging isn’t just about race. It’s about shared expectations, family context, academic norms, and social environment.

Many white families in DC can reasonably expect that most of the same-race peers around their kids will also be in a similar SES band. That’s not always true for Black families. When it isn’t, the social dynamics can be isolating in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve seen it up close.

Reducing complex conversations about peer groups and school culture to “you just don’t want your kids around Black people” shuts down nuance and ignores how class and race intersect in real ways.

Thank you for this. My (non-white kid) also moved from a Title 1 school to a high performing school and now has friends of different races, but they all are middle class or UMC and ALL have parents who value education.

When I see someone write something like "you don't want your kids in school with the blacks" I know this is a white mom at a Title 1 school who thinks she is performing an act of social justice by sending her kid there, and doesn't see her own racism.

Not bad points. But as a white mom with a kid in a T1 MS, I can also conclude that for white parents who disparage and won’t even consider the school, I do think there is racism at play. As for black MC/UMC kids, I think the issue is in some ways the same as for the white academically on track kids - the school is rightfully geared towards serving the 90% of kids that make up its main population and so advanced academics is not the #1 concern. That said I personally find the teachers and admins at our school to be very, very good and my kid has learned a ton. I wonder if a black MC would fall through the cracks a bit because everyone would assume they were “high risk” instead of EG pushing them into the advanced math class. At a school where grade level or beyond performance was expected then the median standard would be higher for all kids including black kids.

A mind reader, everyone.

Lots of convuluted thinking going on. "When UMC black families choose a good school, it's because they want a good education for their child. When UMC white families choose a good school, its because of racism."

The two families are not equivalent in their motivations and beliefs, obviously.

Also - there is a difference between chosing a school and disparaging a school. The latter is where the implied or even unconscious racial bias plays out. If I hadn’t lived through the process myself I wouldn’t be so aware of it.

LMAO if you think the UMC Black families don't disparage the bad schools. What bubble do you live in. Do you even know your neighbors? Why don't you know this? Could it be a racial bias?

Black people can also be biased toward white supremacy.

Oh, come on. It's simply a class thing. It's no different than an UMC white family not wanting to send their kids to a school with lots of poor white trash, as they say.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this feels like a place where we should be lifting up Black and Latino voices, not white voices (which is the majority of DCUM). My answer is some mix of I don't know and it depends.

I am white - I do want my kids to go to a diverse school. For me, that means a school that has a good percentage of Black and Latino students, and at least enough white students that my kid doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - I think sending a kid to a school, in America, where there are only a single digit number of kids of their race in the whole school, no matter what race that kid is, is asking a lot of someone really young. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, Garrison and John Lewis are the kinds of schools I want my kid to attend (and we're attempting to lottery to both of them this year).

As to whether DC Prep should try to diversify, or whether schools EOTR should try to diversify, that's a question for the Black community, not a question for me.

It does seem to me like the place where integration is a reasonable goal is places where inbound participation is very low for particular races. There are plenty of white families inbounds for Cleveland, for HD Cooke, for Tubman - why aren't they attending? That's a worthwhile question to ponder. And if there are schools, for example, WOTP that are 70% white and aren't seeing inbound participation from families of color, that's worth digging in to as well. So I do tend to agree with a previous poster that inbound buy in is valuable, and broadly considered to be valuable (even by people like me who are opting out of our IB) and often in DC increases school integration.

Why are you opting out of your IB?

I'm not going to answer detailed questions about this because it would make me pretty identifiable, but I'll say in general terms: Lack of academic peers for my advanced kids, and some social challenges.

But I will say that my experience in having my kids at a DCPS, evaluating schools, learning about the DC school landscape, and navigating this with my own family has shown me that NONE of these issues, in DC at least, are simple, and there are no easy answers. And the only people claiming there are easy answers ("well if DC just did X, everything would be better") generally live in the suburbs (like the Bethesda guy quote upthread). These issues are incredibly complex.

In other words, you don't want your kids going to school with the blacks.

I’m not the person who wrote the original comment, but as a Black parent, I find this kind of response reductive and unfair.

It’s entirely possible for a family to be talking about academic peers and social fit without it being code for “not wanting to be around Black kids.” In fact, in my own case, we moved our son into a predominantly African-American Catholic school that is also high-performing.

One reason? At his previous school, he had essentially no Black male peers in his same socioeconomic band — not one. That matters more than people want to admit. Belonging isn’t just about race. It’s about shared expectations, family context, academic norms, and social environment.

Many white families in DC can reasonably expect that most of the same-race peers around their kids will also be in a similar SES band. That’s not always true for Black families. When it isn’t, the social dynamics can be isolating in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve seen it up close.

Reducing complex conversations about peer groups and school culture to “you just don’t want your kids around Black people” shuts down nuance and ignores how class and race intersect in real ways.

Thank you for this. My (non-white kid) also moved from a Title 1 school to a high performing school and now has friends of different races, but they all are middle class or UMC and ALL have parents who value education.

When I see someone write something like "you don't want your kids in school with the blacks" I know this is a white mom at a Title 1 school who thinks she is performing an act of social justice by sending her kid there, and doesn't see her own racism.

Not bad points. But as a white mom with a kid in a T1 MS, I can also conclude that for white parents who disparage and won’t even consider the school, I do think there is racism at play. As for black MC/UMC kids, I think the issue is in some ways the same as for the white academically on track kids - the school is rightfully geared towards serving the 90% of kids that make up its main population and so advanced academics is not the #1 concern. That said I personally find the teachers and admins at our school to be very, very good and my kid has learned a ton. I wonder if a black MC would fall through the cracks a bit because everyone would assume they were “high risk” instead of EG pushing them into the advanced math class. At a school where grade level or beyond performance was expected then the median standard would be higher for all kids including black kids.

A mind reader, everyone.

Lots of convuluted thinking going on. "When UMC black families choose a good school, it's because they want a good education for their child. When UMC white families choose a good school, its because of racism."

The two families are not equivalent in their motivations and beliefs, obviously.

Also - there is a difference between chosing a school and disparaging a school. The latter is where the implied or even unconscious racial bias plays out. If I hadn’t lived through the process myself I wouldn’t be so aware of it.

It’s exhausting when you accurately call a school bad that is bad, and bad because it has a high at risk population filled with kids from families who legitimately do not care about their kids’ education, and people call you racist. Just because it’s a broken clock situation where at risk almost certainly means black in DC does not make the descriptive claim by racists (“this school is bad”) wrong, even if the belief about the mechanism is false. We need to stop being so negatively polarized into pretending the facts aren’t hitting us (often literally in the case of at risk kids at schools) in the face.

I completely understand why individual parents choose schools with lower at-risk percentages. But looking at longer term outcomes/social spending/quality of life for city residents, I'm not convinced that only having schools with either very high or very low at-risk percentages is actually preferable.

Interesting to see the differences in attitudes on racism and classism in this thread.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this feels like a place where we should be lifting up Black and Latino voices, not white voices (which is the majority of DCUM). My answer is some mix of I don't know and it depends.

I am white - I do want my kids to go to a diverse school. For me, that means a school that has a good percentage of Black and Latino students, and at least enough white students that my kid doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - I think sending a kid to a school, in America, where there are only a single digit number of kids of their race in the whole school, no matter what race that kid is, is asking a lot of someone really young. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, Garrison and John Lewis are the kinds of schools I want my kid to attend (and we're attempting to lottery to both of them this year).

As to whether DC Prep should try to diversify, or whether schools EOTR should try to diversify, that's a question for the Black community, not a question for me.

It does seem to me like the place where integration is a reasonable goal is places where inbound participation is very low for particular races. There are plenty of white families inbounds for Cleveland, for HD Cooke, for Tubman - why aren't they attending? That's a worthwhile question to ponder. And if there are schools, for example, WOTP that are 70% white and aren't seeing inbound participation from families of color, that's worth digging in to as well. So I do tend to agree with a previous poster that inbound buy in is valuable, and broadly considered to be valuable (even by people like me who are opting out of our IB) and often in DC increases school integration.

Why are you opting out of your IB?

I'm not going to answer detailed questions about this because it would make me pretty identifiable, but I'll say in general terms: Lack of academic peers for my advanced kids, and some social challenges.

But I will say that my experience in having my kids at a DCPS, evaluating schools, learning about the DC school landscape, and navigating this with my own family has shown me that NONE of these issues, in DC at least, are simple, and there are no easy answers. And the only people claiming there are easy answers ("well if DC just did X, everything would be better") generally live in the suburbs (like the Bethesda guy quote upthread). These issues are incredibly complex.

In other words, you don't want your kids going to school with the blacks.

I’m not the person who wrote the original comment, but as a Black parent, I find this kind of response reductive and unfair.

It’s entirely possible for a family to be talking about academic peers and social fit without it being code for “not wanting to be around Black kids.” In fact, in my own case, we moved our son into a predominantly African-American Catholic school that is also high-performing.

One reason? At his previous school, he had essentially no Black male peers in his same socioeconomic band — not one. That matters more than people want to admit. Belonging isn’t just about race. It’s about shared expectations, family context, academic norms, and social environment.

Many white families in DC can reasonably expect that most of the same-race peers around their kids will also be in a similar SES band. That’s not always true for Black families. When it isn’t, the social dynamics can be isolating in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve seen it up close.

Reducing complex conversations about peer groups and school culture to “you just don’t want your kids around Black people” shuts down nuance and ignores how class and race intersect in real ways.

I'm the one who wrote the snarky/trolling comment you responded to, but I must say, all kidding aside, your response is spot on, and I appreciate you took the time to type it up. In my experience with kids a a Title I DPCS school, I've seen the same dynamics at play. I've always wondered how this whole race/class thing in DC would look if the city had a meaningful population of poor white people. We just don't, which is rather unique among major cities in this country.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Integration is very important to me and I am engaged in it, but it is generally overtaken by other priorities on this board.

I'd say mostly, this board wants differentiation and to not have children of board participants in the same schools as students with behavior problems. Those goals do not go well with generalized integration.

There are also more general segregation/race and class relations issues, with a major one being a distribution of income and educational attainment that is at the edges with nobody in the middle (we have a bunch of high income advanced degree holders and HS-or-worse educated low income parents, nothing in between in DC).

If you actually think this, it's a reflection of your own limited social circle. It's wrong. DC has plenty of families that are middle income. Lots of people just have college degrees and no advanced degree, plus plenty of fields offer steady income but not high income. We can afford to own homes (condos or houses in part so the city outside the most gentrified neighborhoods, and also if you bought before rates went up) and care about education, but also money is tight because this is an expensive city and it gets more expensive all the time. On the other hand, living in the city often gives us the ability to live without a car or with just one car, living in small homes keep us from accumulating so much stuff, and there are real cost savings to being close in to work and lots of free entertainment. So a lot of us are loathe to move out of the city where we might get cheaper housing and food but more expensive and longer commutes and a host of other expenses just by virtue of living far away from things.

I regularly feel completely invisible in discussions about education in the city because so many people think as you do. That there are only two kinds of people in the city: (1) rich, mostly white people with advanced degrees, and (2) poor black and hispanic people with a HS education or less. I'm sure your in group #1 and it's actually an embarrassment to your education that you are so ignorant of the many many families of every race in this city that are dual income, have college degrees, are not rich, can still pay our bills, and obviously send our kids to public schools because where the hell else are we going to send them?

What's funny is that we send our kids to school with rich people and poor people, and people just lack the observational skills or common sense to understand that we are middle class. Some of the rich people at our school just assume we are also rich, because we wear professional clothes and have read books, and they seem confused when we don't have opinions on whether Colorado or Vermont is better for New Year's skiing. Other rich people at our school just group us in with the poor people. The poor people all think we are rich, which is fair, because compared to them we are. Literally no one cares if our family's needs are being met by the school system.

Eh--while there are definite divides between income/wealth amongst the college educated and above class--fundamentally everyone in this group is well-educated and want their kids to be well-educated. How are they not aligned on educational priorities? They both want better public schools. Isn't that the common ground. What does it matter that some can afford luxury hobbies/travel and some can't.

IME, rich people often have different educational priorities than me, a well-educated middle class person. They don't have the same worries about their kids being left behind or failing to acquire necessary skills for HS, college, or the job market, because they have enough money not to have to worry about it. There are lots of culture clashes between the rich parents at our school and those who are middle class, even when the middle class parents are actually better educated. If anything, college-educated middle class people have the most anxiety about education because they (we) have the least stable class status and have the most to lose in the AI revolution and the K-shaped economy.

Can you provide some examples? We are talking about public schools here, the ultra rich are all in privates.

Examples:

- Getting hung up on a public school inconvenience that middle class parents just accept and move on from, and wanting to dedicate resources to it. For instance, throwing a fit over DCPS absence policies when they conflict with international travel, and hijacking PTA meetings to discuss it.
- Expecting the school to provide tutoring to help on-grade-level kids become above grade level, and not understanding why that's different from tutoring kids who are lagging behind grade level.
- Assuming families can always spend extra money to provide the kids with something. For instance advocating for programming that can't be subsidized by PTA funds and expecting all families to kick in $50 or $100 to supplement it. This is often accompanied by a promise to pay the fee for at risk or low-income kids, without understanding that middle class families don't fall in that bucket and that more families might struggle with a fee like that then they realize.
- Pushing for programming based on status markers or upper class ideals that they don't understand aren't important to middle class kids or get in the way of practicalities, like pushing for French or Mandarin over Spanish.

These are good examples. Add to it "required" PTO donations of hundreds of dollars and telling parents that it's cheaper than sending your kids to private school. And focusing effort on improving the playground or getting a new gym when existing facilities are adequate.


I disagree with the above grade level point though. Kids should be challenged and offering those opportunities to at risk and middle class kids is a better investment than offering it to upper middle class kids. But supporting below grade level students is so a priority (that's not a place you have to choose)

Yes all kids should be challenged but it is very common for the UMC parents to suck up all the air in the room demanding special attention to their above average kid (sometimes in the form of elaborate 504s or IEPs) as opposed to realistically understanding what is good for the majority. Sometimes the UMC parents have actually caused the issues by advocating against teaching methods that don’t conform to Dr Becky or whatever (like being against homework or drilling math facts).

The abuse of the IEP/504 system to secure advantages for kids who do not need them drives me nuts. It also impacts every level of the school. It changes how teachers and administrators interact with all parents, including those of us who are not trying to exploit the system. Having even a handful of parents in a school who are constantly angling for any advantage for their kids makes all parents suspect.

Yes. I’m not sure it’s knowing abuse but it’s definitely parents who believe in extracting every possible benefit. My kid actually has an IEP but I try to avoid the IEP team as much as possible lol. With some very small exceptions the bulk of support has come from people not on the IEP team. I find that if I ask for things my kid obviously needs it’s very easy. Everything else slides.

This strikes me as so odd. It’s such a horrible process to get an IEP, and every psychologist we saw immediately saw my kids as having xyz disability. I would not wish this on anyone. Yet I am sure the average uninformed person doesn’t understand why it is in place and thinks it’s something like the abuse described above. But the reality is that you’re not a psychologist and this type of thinking just make an it so much harder to get the services and accommodations some students need. My students 5th teacher made our life miserable and our report explained in detail why we needed what we needed.

This is not about kids who need IEPs, but schools and parents offering 504s to typical kids in order to max out test scores. Different thing.

It is so dang hard to get accommodations for kids who need them that lots of these kids end up leaving the system so they can get access to an education. If kids who need it can't get it, I simply don't believe that kids who don't need it are getting it so easily that there is wide spread abuse. I can only asusume that you have never been in this situation and so imagine it must be easy to abuse.

It really depends on the accommodation. Plus you are missing that this conversation is around abuse by wealthy or very well resourced parents whose kids are actually fine. They can abuse the system because they have the resources to do so. Think of the difference between a family who can hire a lawyer to address their IEP versus one who cannot, and how you think schools respond differently to them?

Also the milder the disability (or, as the case may be, "disability"), usually the cheaper and easier the intervention. Extra testing time is free, as opposed to like a 1:1 aide or pull outs for therapy, which are not. Now, the time of the teacher who has to administer that IEP for extra test time is not free, but the parents pushing for it don't care about that teacher's time and don't care that administering their IEP will necessarily take time away from other kids (including kids with special needs). On some level, they believe they are entitled to more of that teacher's time because they think their kid matters more than other kids.

[Anonymous]

No, they think their kid should have just as much access to an appropriate education as yours.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Integration is very important to me and I am engaged in it, but it is generally overtaken by other priorities on this board.

I'd say mostly, this board wants differentiation and to not have children of board participants in the same schools as students with behavior problems. Those goals do not go well with generalized integration.

There are also more general segregation/race and class relations issues, with a major one being a distribution of income and educational attainment that is at the edges with nobody in the middle (we have a bunch of high income advanced degree holders and HS-or-worse educated low income parents, nothing in between in DC).

If you actually think this, it's a reflection of your own limited social circle. It's wrong. DC has plenty of families that are middle income. Lots of people just have college degrees and no advanced degree, plus plenty of fields offer steady income but not high income. We can afford to own homes (condos or houses in part so the city outside the most gentrified neighborhoods, and also if you bought before rates went up) and care about education, but also money is tight because this is an expensive city and it gets more expensive all the time. On the other hand, living in the city often gives us the ability to live without a car or with just one car, living in small homes keep us from accumulating so much stuff, and there are real cost savings to being close in to work and lots of free entertainment. So a lot of us are loathe to move out of the city where we might get cheaper housing and food but more expensive and longer commutes and a host of other expenses just by virtue of living far away from things.

I regularly feel completely invisible in discussions about education in the city because so many people think as you do. That there are only two kinds of people in the city: (1) rich, mostly white people with advanced degrees, and (2) poor black and hispanic people with a HS education or less. I'm sure your in group #1 and it's actually an embarrassment to your education that you are so ignorant of the many many families of every race in this city that are dual income, have college degrees, are not rich, can still pay our bills, and obviously send our kids to public schools because where the hell else are we going to send them?

What's funny is that we send our kids to school with rich people and poor people, and people just lack the observational skills or common sense to understand that we are middle class. Some of the rich people at our school just assume we are also rich, because we wear professional clothes and have read books, and they seem confused when we don't have opinions on whether Colorado or Vermont is better for New Year's skiing. Other rich people at our school just group us in with the poor people. The poor people all think we are rich, which is fair, because compared to them we are. Literally no one cares if our family's needs are being met by the school system.

Eh--while there are definite divides between income/wealth amongst the college educated and above class--fundamentally everyone in this group is well-educated and want their kids to be well-educated. How are they not aligned on educational priorities? They both want better public schools. Isn't that the common ground. What does it matter that some can afford luxury hobbies/travel and some can't.

IME, rich people often have different educational priorities than me, a well-educated middle class person. They don't have the same worries about their kids being left behind or failing to acquire necessary skills for HS, college, or the job market, because they have enough money not to have to worry about it. There are lots of culture clashes between the rich parents at our school and those who are middle class, even when the middle class parents are actually better educated. If anything, college-educated middle class people have the most anxiety about education because they (we) have the least stable class status and have the most to lose in the AI revolution and the K-shaped economy.

Can you provide some examples? We are talking about public schools here, the ultra rich are all in privates.

Examples:

- Getting hung up on a public school inconvenience that middle class parents just accept and move on from, and wanting to dedicate resources to it. For instance, throwing a fit over DCPS absence policies when they conflict with international travel, and hijacking PTA meetings to discuss it.
- Expecting the school to provide tutoring to help on-grade-level kids become above grade level, and not understanding why that's different from tutoring kids who are lagging behind grade level.
- Assuming families can always spend extra money to provide the kids with something. For instance advocating for programming that can't be subsidized by PTA funds and expecting all families to kick in $50 or $100 to supplement it. This is often accompanied by a promise to pay the fee for at risk or low-income kids, without understanding that middle class families don't fall in that bucket and that more families might struggle with a fee like that then they realize.
- Pushing for programming based on status markers or upper class ideals that they don't understand aren't important to middle class kids or get in the way of practicalities, like pushing for French or Mandarin over Spanish.

These are good examples. Add to it "required" PTO donations of hundreds of dollars and telling parents that it's cheaper than sending your kids to private school. And focusing effort on improving the playground or getting a new gym when existing facilities are adequate.


I disagree with the above grade level point though. Kids should be challenged and offering those opportunities to at risk and middle class kids is a better investment than offering it to upper middle class kids. But supporting below grade level students is so a priority (that's not a place you have to choose)

Yes all kids should be challenged but it is very common for the UMC parents to suck up all the air in the room demanding special attention to their above average kid (sometimes in the form of elaborate 504s or IEPs) as opposed to realistically understanding what is good for the majority. Sometimes the UMC parents have actually caused the issues by advocating against teaching methods that don’t conform to Dr Becky or whatever (like being against homework or drilling math facts).

The abuse of the IEP/504 system to secure advantages for kids who do not need them drives me nuts. It also impacts every level of the school. It changes how teachers and administrators interact with all parents, including those of us who are not trying to exploit the system. Having even a handful of parents in a school who are constantly angling for any advantage for their kids makes all parents suspect.

Yes it's a scandal IMO. I remember how shocked I was as a private school teacher and realized just how many of the students had extended time. We also moved to a school with a privileged student body and it was offered to our child to maximize their score on one very specific section of the CAPE, even though he is a completely typical kid who does well on all other assessments. This is how Standford ends up with a student body where 40 percent of them have a "disability."

As a college professor it’s a pre/post covid thing. Went from 1-2 per semester per section to like 20 of 30.

During Covid a lot of kids had parents see how little they pay attention. Or how they struggled socially. Or how they really can’t read and there seems to be a dysfunction. Not sure where you teach but it’s depressing to me that you assume you have a classroom full of liars.

PP here. It’s not my place to judge whether someone is “actually” disabled.

People get basically the same score they would regardless of the time they would take. 4 question test from a bank of 30 or so questions and be developed over the years, median score is about a 40%, curve to an 80, about the same number of people trying to cheat (I have a light canary trap, not a really intense one). Pre and post COVID there’s not a change in score distribution.

If it's important to know how many questions a student can get correct in a certain amount of time, then changing the time for some doesn't make sense as an accommodation. If it's not, it would be more fair to give everyone the time they need.

DCPS de facto gives everyone extra time and sets the number of questions to the accommodation level. If you ever move your kid to a parochial shcool, you will realize this.

Parochial schools are so bad. I always shake my head when I read comments like this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this feels like a place where we should be lifting up Black and Latino voices, not white voices (which is the majority of DCUM). My answer is some mix of I don't know and it depends.

I am white - I do want my kids to go to a diverse school. For me, that means a school that has a good percentage of Black and Latino students, and at least enough white students that my kid doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - I think sending a kid to a school, in America, where there are only a single digit number of kids of their race in the whole school, no matter what race that kid is, is asking a lot of someone really young. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, Garrison and John Lewis are the kinds of schools I want my kid to attend (and we're attempting to lottery to both of them this year).

As to whether DC Prep should try to diversify, or whether schools EOTR should try to diversify, that's a question for the Black community, not a question for me.

It does seem to me like the place where integration is a reasonable goal is places where inbound participation is very low for particular races. There are plenty of white families inbounds for Cleveland, for HD Cooke, for Tubman - why aren't they attending? That's a worthwhile question to ponder. And if there are schools, for example, WOTP that are 70% white and aren't seeing inbound participation from families of color, that's worth digging in to as well. So I do tend to agree with a previous poster that inbound buy in is valuable, and broadly considered to be valuable (even by people like me who are opting out of our IB) and often in DC increases school integration.

Why are you opting out of your IB?

I'm not going to answer detailed questions about this because it would make me pretty identifiable, but I'll say in general terms: Lack of academic peers for my advanced kids, and some social challenges.

But I will say that my experience in having my kids at a DCPS, evaluating schools, learning about the DC school landscape, and navigating this with my own family has shown me that NONE of these issues, in DC at least, are simple, and there are no easy answers. And the only people claiming there are easy answers ("well if DC just did X, everything would be better") generally live in the suburbs (like the Bethesda guy quote upthread). These issues are incredibly complex.

In other words, you don't want your kids going to school with the blacks.

I’m not the person who wrote the original comment, but as a Black parent, I find this kind of response reductive and unfair.

It’s entirely possible for a family to be talking about academic peers and social fit without it being code for “not wanting to be around Black kids.” In fact, in my own case, we moved our son into a predominantly African-American Catholic school that is also high-performing.

One reason? At his previous school, he had essentially no Black male peers in his same socioeconomic band — not one. That matters more than people want to admit. Belonging isn’t just about race. It’s about shared expectations, family context, academic norms, and social environment.

Many white families in DC can reasonably expect that most of the same-race peers around their kids will also be in a similar SES band. That’s not always true for Black families. When it isn’t, the social dynamics can be isolating in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve seen it up close.

Reducing complex conversations about peer groups and school culture to “you just don’t want your kids around Black people” shuts down nuance and ignores how class and race intersect in real ways.

I'm the one who wrote the snarky/trolling comment you responded to, but I must say, all kidding aside, your response is spot on, and I appreciate you took the time to type it up. In my experience with kids a a Title I DPCS school, I've seen the same dynamics at play. I've always wondered how this whole race/class thing in DC would look if the city had a meaningful population of poor white people. We just don't, which is rather unique among major cities in this country.

Hell, if we had just normal middle/working class white folks. But “we” don’t really want those kids either to be honest.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Integration is very important to me and I am engaged in it, but it is generally overtaken by other priorities on this board.

I'd say mostly, this board wants differentiation and to not have children of board participants in the same schools as students with behavior problems. Those goals do not go well with generalized integration.

There are also more general segregation/race and class relations issues, with a major one being a distribution of income and educational attainment that is at the edges with nobody in the middle (we have a bunch of high income advanced degree holders and HS-or-worse educated low income parents, nothing in between in DC).

If you actually think this, it's a reflection of your own limited social circle. It's wrong. DC has plenty of families that are middle income. Lots of people just have college degrees and no advanced degree, plus plenty of fields offer steady income but not high income. We can afford to own homes (condos or houses in part so the city outside the most gentrified neighborhoods, and also if you bought before rates went up) and care about education, but also money is tight because this is an expensive city and it gets more expensive all the time. On the other hand, living in the city often gives us the ability to live without a car or with just one car, living in small homes keep us from accumulating so much stuff, and there are real cost savings to being close in to work and lots of free entertainment. So a lot of us are loathe to move out of the city where we might get cheaper housing and food but more expensive and longer commutes and a host of other expenses just by virtue of living far away from things.

I regularly feel completely invisible in discussions about education in the city because so many people think as you do. That there are only two kinds of people in the city: (1) rich, mostly white people with advanced degrees, and (2) poor black and hispanic people with a HS education or less. I'm sure your in group #1 and it's actually an embarrassment to your education that you are so ignorant of the many many families of every race in this city that are dual income, have college degrees, are not rich, can still pay our bills, and obviously send our kids to public schools because where the hell else are we going to send them?

What's funny is that we send our kids to school with rich people and poor people, and people just lack the observational skills or common sense to understand that we are middle class. Some of the rich people at our school just assume we are also rich, because we wear professional clothes and have read books, and they seem confused when we don't have opinions on whether Colorado or Vermont is better for New Year's skiing. Other rich people at our school just group us in with the poor people. The poor people all think we are rich, which is fair, because compared to them we are. Literally no one cares if our family's needs are being met by the school system.

Eh--while there are definite divides between income/wealth amongst the college educated and above class--fundamentally everyone in this group is well-educated and want their kids to be well-educated. How are they not aligned on educational priorities? They both want better public schools. Isn't that the common ground. What does it matter that some can afford luxury hobbies/travel and some can't.

IME, rich people often have different educational priorities than me, a well-educated middle class person. They don't have the same worries about their kids being left behind or failing to acquire necessary skills for HS, college, or the job market, because they have enough money not to have to worry about it. There are lots of culture clashes between the rich parents at our school and those who are middle class, even when the middle class parents are actually better educated. If anything, college-educated middle class people have the most anxiety about education because they (we) have the least stable class status and have the most to lose in the AI revolution and the K-shaped economy.

Can you provide some examples? We are talking about public schools here, the ultra rich are all in privates.

Examples:

- Getting hung up on a public school inconvenience that middle class parents just accept and move on from, and wanting to dedicate resources to it. For instance, throwing a fit over DCPS absence policies when they conflict with international travel, and hijacking PTA meetings to discuss it.
- Expecting the school to provide tutoring to help on-grade-level kids become above grade level, and not understanding why that's different from tutoring kids who are lagging behind grade level.
- Assuming families can always spend extra money to provide the kids with something. For instance advocating for programming that can't be subsidized by PTA funds and expecting all families to kick in $50 or $100 to supplement it. This is often accompanied by a promise to pay the fee for at risk or low-income kids, without understanding that middle class families don't fall in that bucket and that more families might struggle with a fee like that then they realize.
- Pushing for programming based on status markers or upper class ideals that they don't understand aren't important to middle class kids or get in the way of practicalities, like pushing for French or Mandarin over Spanish.

These are good examples. Add to it "required" PTO donations of hundreds of dollars and telling parents that it's cheaper than sending your kids to private school. And focusing effort on improving the playground or getting a new gym when existing facilities are adequate.


I disagree with the above grade level point though. Kids should be challenged and offering those opportunities to at risk and middle class kids is a better investment than offering it to upper middle class kids. But supporting below grade level students is so a priority (that's not a place you have to choose)

Yes all kids should be challenged but it is very common for the UMC parents to suck up all the air in the room demanding special attention to their above average kid (sometimes in the form of elaborate 504s or IEPs) as opposed to realistically understanding what is good for the majority. Sometimes the UMC parents have actually caused the issues by advocating against teaching methods that don’t conform to Dr Becky or whatever (like being against homework or drilling math facts).

The abuse of the IEP/504 system to secure advantages for kids who do not need them drives me nuts. It also impacts every level of the school. It changes how teachers and administrators interact with all parents, including those of us who are not trying to exploit the system. Having even a handful of parents in a school who are constantly angling for any advantage for their kids makes all parents suspect.

Yes it's a scandal IMO. I remember how shocked I was as a private school teacher and realized just how many of the students had extended time. We also moved to a school with a privileged student body and it was offered to our child to maximize their score on one very specific section of the CAPE, even though he is a completely typical kid who does well on all other assessments. This is how Standford ends up with a student body where 40 percent of them have a "disability."

As a college professor it’s a pre/post covid thing. Went from 1-2 per semester per section to like 20 of 30.

During Covid a lot of kids had parents see how little they pay attention. Or how they struggled socially. Or how they really can’t read and there seems to be a dysfunction. Not sure where you teach but it’s depressing to me that you assume you have a classroom full of liars.

PP here. It’s not my place to judge whether someone is “actually” disabled.

People get basically the same score they would regardless of the time they would take. 4 question test from a bank of 30 or so questions and be developed over the years, median score is about a 40%, curve to an 80, about the same number of people trying to cheat (I have a light canary trap, not a really intense one). Pre and post COVID there’s not a change in score distribution.

If it's important to know how many questions a student can get correct in a certain amount of time, then changing the time for some doesn't make sense as an accommodation. If it's not, it would be more fair to give everyone the time they need.

DCPS de facto gives everyone extra time and sets the number of questions to the accommodation level. If you ever move your kid to a parochial shcool, you will realize this.

Parochial schools are so bad. I always shake my head when I read comments like this.

Why are they bad? I see them as the last line of defense against the accommodations mania.

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Anonymous wrote:Honestly, this feels like a place where we should be lifting up Black and Latino voices, not white voices (which is the majority of DCUM). My answer is some mix of I don't know and it depends.

I am white - I do want my kids to go to a diverse school. For me, that means a school that has a good percentage of Black and Latino students, and at least enough white students that my kid doesn't stick out like a sore thumb - I think sending a kid to a school, in America, where there are only a single digit number of kids of their race in the whole school, no matter what race that kid is, is asking a lot of someone really young. Everyone has different priorities, but for me, Garrison and John Lewis are the kinds of schools I want my kid to attend (and we're attempting to lottery to both of them this year).

As to whether DC Prep should try to diversify, or whether schools EOTR should try to diversify, that's a question for the Black community, not a question for me.

It does seem to me like the place where integration is a reasonable goal is places where inbound participation is very low for particular races. There are plenty of white families inbounds for Cleveland, for HD Cooke, for Tubman - why aren't they attending? That's a worthwhile question to ponder. And if there are schools, for example, WOTP that are 70% white and aren't seeing inbound participation from families of color, that's worth digging in to as well. So I do tend to agree with a previous poster that inbound buy in is valuable, and broadly considered to be valuable (even by people like me who are opting out of our IB) and often in DC increases school integration.

Why are you opting out of your IB?

I'm not going to answer detailed questions about this because it would make me pretty identifiable, but I'll say in general terms: Lack of academic peers for my advanced kids, and some social challenges.

But I will say that my experience in having my kids at a DCPS, evaluating schools, learning about the DC school landscape, and navigating this with my own family has shown me that NONE of these issues, in DC at least, are simple, and there are no easy answers. And the only people claiming there are easy answers ("well if DC just did X, everything would be better") generally live in the suburbs (like the Bethesda guy quote upthread). These issues are incredibly complex.

In other words, you don't want your kids going to school with the blacks.

I’m not the person who wrote the original comment, but as a Black parent, I find this kind of response reductive and unfair.

It’s entirely possible for a family to be talking about academic peers and social fit without it being code for “not wanting to be around Black kids.” In fact, in my own case, we moved our son into a predominantly African-American Catholic school that is also high-performing.

One reason? At his previous school, he had essentially no Black male peers in his same socioeconomic band — not one. That matters more than people want to admit. Belonging isn’t just about race. It’s about shared expectations, family context, academic norms, and social environment.

Many white families in DC can reasonably expect that most of the same-race peers around their kids will also be in a similar SES band. That’s not always true for Black families. When it isn’t, the social dynamics can be isolating in ways that are hard to explain unless you’ve seen it up close.

Reducing complex conversations about peer groups and school culture to “you just don’t want your kids around Black people” shuts down nuance and ignores how class and race intersect in real ways.

Thank you for this. My (non-white kid) also moved from a Title 1 school to a high performing school and now has friends of different races, but they all are middle class or UMC and ALL have parents who value education.

When I see someone write something like "you don't want your kids in school with the blacks" I know this is a white mom at a Title 1 school who thinks she is performing an act of social justice by sending her kid there, and doesn't see her own racism.

Not bad points. But as a white mom with a kid in a T1 MS, I can also conclude that for white parents who disparage and won’t even consider the school, I do think there is racism at play. As for black MC/UMC kids, I think the issue is in some ways the same as for the white academically on track kids - the school is rightfully geared towards serving the 90% of kids that make up its main population and so advanced academics is not the #1 concern. That said I personally find the teachers and admins at our school to be very, very good and my kid has learned a ton. I wonder if a black MC would fall through the cracks a bit because everyone would assume they were “high risk” instead of EG pushing them into the advanced math class. At a school where grade level or beyond performance was expected then the median standard would be higher for all kids including black kids.

A mind reader, everyone.

Lots of convuluted thinking going on. "When UMC black families choose a good school, it's because they want a good education for their child. When UMC white families choose a good school, its because of racism."

The two families are not equivalent in their motivations and beliefs, obviously.

Also - there is a difference between chosing a school and disparaging a school. The latter is where the implied or even unconscious racial bias plays out. If I hadn’t lived through the process myself I wouldn’t be so aware of it.

LMAO if you think the UMC Black families don't disparage the bad schools. What bubble do you live in. Do you even know your neighbors? Why don't you know this? Could it be a racial bias?

Black people can also be biased toward white supremacy.

"White supremacy"

You live in Washington D.C., where there are basically zero Republicans, and you are not in daily battle with the Ku Klux Klan. Get a grip.

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Anonymous wrote:No, they think their kid should have just as much access to an appropriate education as yours.

Seriously! These people insisting they know the disabilities of other children and that "wealthy" parents are hell-bent on gaming the system are so bizarrely smug and confidant in their fact-less beliefs.

Pro tip: there are very few wealthy families in DCPS. There are UMC families, and probably what you'll find is a disproportionate number of UMC families struggling to afford private because DCPS won't implement their child's IEP or 5504

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No, they think their kid should have just as much access to an appropriate education as yours.

They should have as much “access” or perhaps even “greater” access resource-wise depending on need.

But their access needs shouldn’t meaningful impact or inform the Tier 1 academic instruction and delivery to students writ large.