This American Life about desegregation in schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a question even though it might sound dumb. PG County has many educated middle class, upper class AA families, why have their schools consistently ranked low inspite of the good demographic? I don't want to sound mean but this intrigues me. In real life, I have worked with and met tons of smart, educated, brilliant AA folks who actually live in PG, why haven't the schools done better?

A lot of those families send their kids to private schools. 75% of the families I know like you described send their kids to private schools (including religious). So many of the public schools have tipped into majority poverty status. It's the same process that happened in DCPS in the 60-80s.

As followup, it's partially the lower home values that allow them to do this. An $800,000 home in a good school district in MCPS is $650,000 is PG County (approximate, of course). So they take the money they save on the mortgage and put it towards private schools.

And I know I risk opening up a can of worms saying this, but the PG schools problem is the primary reason that so many Maryland residents send their children to DC schools...using a relative's or friend's address to establish residency. These families are smart enough to know they don't want to risk their children's one shot at education with a questionable or even failing school, but they can't really afford private either.

But a lot of the DC schools estimated to have the highest number of maryland cheaters are just as crappy as PG county schools. I guess if two schools are equally crappy, go for the one with the free preschool and cheap aftercare.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a question even though it might sound dumb. PG County has many educated middle class, upper class AA families, why have their schools consistently ranked low inspite of the good demographic? I don't want to sound mean but this intrigues me. In real life, I have worked with and met tons of smart, educated, brilliant AA folks who actually live in PG, why haven't the schools done better?

A lot of those families send their kids to private schools. 75% of the families I know like you described send their kids to private schools (including religious). So many of the public schools have tipped into majority poverty status. It's the same process that happened in DCPS in the 60-80s.

As followup, it's partially the lower home values that allow them to do this. An $800,000 home in a good school district in MCPS is $650,000 is PG County (approximate, of course). So they take the money they save on the mortgage and put it towards private schools.

And I know I risk opening up a can of worms saying this, but the PG schools problem is the primary reason that so many Maryland residents send their children to DC schools...using a relative's or friend's address to establish residency. These families are smart enough to know they don't want to risk their children's one shot at education with a questionable or even failing school, but they can't really afford private either.

But a lot of the DC schools estimated to have the highest number of maryland cheaters are just as crappy as PG county schools. I guess if two schools are equally crappy, go for the one with the free preschool and cheap aftercare.

+1 And the one where grandma or auntie lives two blocks away and can do pick-up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
This is exactly what those 1,000 kids were trying to do in Normandy. They cared but couldn't afford to get out

Bs. They cared about education, but they failed all tests at their school and didn't attend? A school is rated failing based on the current failing tests and lack of attendance.

These were not all honor students. They probably thought "hey, if I get my kid on the bus to a better school, the school will do the work for me and turn my failing kid into a better student." The schools don't make the students, it's the students who make the school.

So you've just confirmed that you didn't listen to the story. The reporter followed an honors student around for an entire day and it was the teachers who failed to show up.

But please, stick hard to your personal responsibility mantra. It's provided a fascinating first-hand account of how people can be convinced to vote for charlatans who say the government shouldn't be held accountable for anything.

Just wondering, do you expect your public school to be staffed by professional teachers who actually show up to work, or do you think your stellar parenting would suffice to bring your child(ren) to success?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: It's like let's blame them for not taking personal responsibility on one hand, and then on the other hand, let's cripple their chances of making it.

No, the chances are out there. Immigrants are taking those opportunities. You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink. AA are sabotaging themselves all the time.

go f*ck yourself!

THERE - I feel better!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
how is that a success story? Her kids are in jail.

Well, she can't change the past. But she could be on drugs herself at this point and on welfare. Instead she lives in a home she paid for herself, drives a car, in a better relationship, and hopefully her kids will benefit from her new situation as well.

It's just a weird anecdote to post in this thread about whose responsibility it is to educate kids - schools/society (as many people are arguing in the belief that the schools are bad because society doesn't care about this population and their families are completely overwhelmed financially and emotionally) or the kids and their parents (as some people are arguing in the belief that the schools are bad because the kids/families are lazy and don't care about education).

So here we have a mom who completely failed (imo, you have one job to do once you become a parent - everything else is just noise) but after her kids and completely were grown and completely lost human beings on drugs and in jail, she was able to buy a house and car by being a house cleaner. Well, ok then

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to a catholic school with underpaid teachers, no playground- we played on the parking lot, school books that were clearly very used, a school gym from the 1950s and hadn't been updated since, an antiquated science lab (only in high school), 33 childten per class with one teacher-i could go on. There was a waiting list to get in!
If the parents aren't enforcing discipline at home, and the students come to school not ready to learn and follow directions, of course it's a recipe for failure. Why can't majority minority schools be a place were people want to come? If the students are performing at high levels, they will come.

I went to school in Soviet Russia. We were poor. I had one uniform I would wear all year long. Shoes were a birthday present. We didn't have toiletries like shower gels or tampax. We wore second hand clothes from previous generations, like my grandmother's, mothers. We didn't have a car. My parents would save all their life to buy some basic cheap particleboard furniture. Food was hard to come buy, you hand to stay in long lines for a chance to buy some meat.

The school was very modest. We did not have a playground, no labs, no library, no snacks, no field trips, no fancy supplies like markers, just pens and pencils, no fancy posters on the walls. Our books were second hand from previous classes. We also had 30 kids in a class and 1 teacher. Some teachers were terrible. Homework took hours. Yet we didn't have a single drop out. All my class went to college.

This was the not the worst. My mother had a much worse situation after the end of the WWII, when Russia was ruined and poverty was unbelievable. Her whole generation was one of the best educated in the world, they all had degrees.

My grandmother also had even worse. She had to hike 4 miles through the woods to the nearest school starting age 6, they lived out in the country. I'm not even going to go into how poor she was when the WWII started. She was always hungry and sleep deprived. She finished college. So did her generation and they sent people to space and made amazing technological progress.

So I find it hard to accept poverty as an excuse for AA students' situation.

You are forgetting some pretty salient points here, the most important being that, poverty notwithstanding, the USSR offered a roughly equal education to all children from Vladivostock to Chisinau. Yes, some areas were poor and yes, the kids of apparatchiks in Moscow probably had better schools and books, but they were a minority. Teacher quality was also a lot less uneven than in the United States. Teachers didn't choose their assignment - they were told to pack up for Cherkassy or Minsk or Chelabinsk and off they went. Finally, and critically, university was free.

So, yes, you escaped grinding poverty and soul-crushing authoritarianism. You deserve plaudits and praise. But you don't deserve to cast stones at people whose situation is totally different from yours.

BWAHAHA, have you actually been to USSR??? equal education my a***. let me tell you that education we got in Moscow region (not Moscow) and my peers in Eastern Ukraine (I spent summers there) were completely different (by grade levels).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

But ....parents in ALL neighborhoods should invest in their kids education and make learning a priority in their own homes and neighborhoods. That means turning tv off. Reading to your child.

Thanks for the lecture, sanctimonious mom.

I never read to my children. They're all reading at about six levels above grade. The oldest is eight and a level X. Since we are upper middle class, no one lectures me about this. To my face, anyway. Learning is a priority for EVERYONE. I wish you could just freaking understand that.

no it isn't a priority for EVERYONE. thats what you need to understand. There are plenty of parents who expect the schools to be the parent, do all the teaching, provide three meals a day, social services, winter coats etc. These same parents never ever show up to anything. These same parents are the ones I see everyday yelling "get your fucking ass in the car" at their elem aged kids at the school across the street. Those parents do NOT CARE and I am not convinced they have the mental capacity to even love their kids. That kind neglect, poverty and abuse actually damages young brains and the fanciest newest school building isn't going to change that. That poor kid getting screamed at in public at age 6 is going to be raging against the world by age 11 and also three grades behind. And that's why the parents who do care bail on the public school by 4th grade.

Learning is not a priority for everyone, if this was the case we would have no failing school districts, no bad schools because everyone wants to learn, so that argument right the is DUMB. I have worked hard to be in a certain school district, I pay enough in taxes to support gazillion welfare programs, on top of that I don't need to start supporting the education of your kids by "making sure they are with the higher achieving kids". This is life, it is survival of the fittest[b]. Just to make my point clear, if my family and I were to fall on hard times, I know we will be in a bad school district too but there's not much we will be able to do about it, we surely won't be blaming anyone, it's life. It's time for personal responsibility, you can argue till you are blue in the face but nothing short of personal responsibility will change the situation.

Living in a society means it is not survival of the fittest. In a busing situation, the kids in your school would not be harming yours in any way (the white kids scores did not drop in Missouri while the AA kids scores rose) AND you'd have less tax money to spend for welfare programs in the long run. Plus your city and life would be safer. It really is win win.

[Anonymous]

Here are links to the episodes for those who didn't listen:

(Part one) http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with

(Part two) http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/563/the-problem-we-all-live-with-part-two

Transcripts are also available on those pages.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

It still isn't a life I would want to have but it is far from the grinding poverty of a third world country.

In the sense that there are no open sewers, I suppose you're right. But it is far from the life that my grandmother and her siblings had... and they grew up picking cotton in California's Central Valley. And yet... every one of them was able to go to college and prosper there because the high school in their poor farm town actually taught them well.

So, you may ask--did my grandmother become rich? Did she live the American dream?

Not really. She raised three kids with a husband in the merchant marine (before he died) and they were still pretty damn poor. But they read a lot of books. And being poor was not a crime then. It still isn't. It is not even a moral failing, despite the fact that so many of you seem hell bent on making it one.

My husband is from a third-world country. He has frail bones and teeth that sometimes break off (despite being in his 30s) because he was so severely malnourished as a child.

His family lived in a tin shack and it would get so hot inside that they had to spend most of the day outside. Everyone he knew had worms.

And yet, he came here as a minority refugee, his parents worked super hard (2-3 jobs at a time EACH) and put him and his 3 siblings through school. He got a scholarship to a small college, a scholarship to a better grad school, and now he's a professional and supports his parents.

I sort of scratch my head when AAs claim that there's no way to overcome the poverty and lack of opportunities. Of course there is. But I do feel super strongly that we need to be using tax money to support parents, daycares, preschools, schools, fund school lunches, etc. No one should have to have it as hard as my husband did. But I do also think everyone should be trying hard, it's not fair when people start feeling entitled to advantages.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: So maybe 2/3rds of the school cared less. Maybe 1/3rd cared not at all. That is still 1/3rd of a school who care and yet can't get an education because of a failing school. In this case 1,000 students.

Deal and Chevy Chase High would be so lucky to have these 1/3rd kids.

Where are 3,000 student schools? Average size of a school in US is 1,000 students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
So you've just confirmed that you didn't listen to the story. The reporter followed an honors student around for an entire day and it was the teachers who failed to show up.

But please, stick hard to your personal responsibility mantra.

I'm sorry, but are you implying that in 73 failing schools in AL all the teachers don't show up? And they only don't show up at black schools? Really? So teachers only show up where they feel they make a difference? Or are the teachers trying to fail AA as some kind of conspiracy?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here is a thought exercise. For the last couple of posts. If you said I am a white person instead of an AA the whole forum would be up in arms about racist this racist that.
Such bs and double standards.

No, it's about experience. I don't try to comment on the experience of having a penis, PP, because I don't have one. Same goes for this.

+1. It's possible to have a conversation about race, even about racism, that doesn't turn mean and accusatory, but you have to make sure to do a couple of things very deliberately and carefully. The bottom line is, speak from your own experience. Don't try to project your experience onto other people's experience, and don't try to claim experience you don't have. I send my white daughter to a Title 1 school in our neighborhood, so I can claim and speak credibly about the experience of being a white parent at a majority minority school, but I cannot claim or speak credibly about the experiences of my child's low income minority classmates or their parents. There are other people on this thread who can speak to those experiences credibly, because they've been those kids. Me, I was a poor white kid in a poor white school district, but I still recognize that my experience of poverty is objectively different than the experiences my daughter's friends have. Urban vs. rural. 2015 vs. 1990. Black vs. white. There are some experiences of poverty and low expectations that are going to be fairly universal, like the stigma of never having clean clothing or getting crappy school lunch when everyone else brought nice stuff from home, but there are some things that are never going to translate. Most of all? No one ever assumed that I was poor because my parents were lazy or didn't care about education. When white people are poor, people generally assume that they fell on hard times, had some kind of expensive emergency, or whatever. When black people are poor, people are very quick to assume that they did or did not do something to create the situation and that they can just as easily do or not do something in order to resolve the situation. Those assumptions are based in white privilege.

Thank you....and in total agreement.

[Anonymous]

I think that the only way for AA students to succeed is to be taken out of their environment. Because what really fails them is not the government, but their own families and community.

Their families make very bad choices like getting pregnant in high school, end up living in poverty, unable to take care of the kids, unable to educate them. Kids grow up among neglect, abuse, bad role models and lack of education values. And no school can fix it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: So maybe 2/3rds of the school cared less. Maybe 1/3rd cared not at all. That is still 1/3rd of a school who care and yet can't get an education because of a failing school. In this case 1,000 students.

Deal and Chevy Chase High would be so lucky to have these 1/3rd kids.

Where are 3,000 student schools? Average size of a school in US is 1,000 students.

You clearly didn't listen to the podcast. The Normandy school had 3,000+ students. Can people please listen to the story before commenting here?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think that the only way for AA students to succeed is to be taken out of their environment. Because what really fails them is not the government, but their own families and community.

Their families make very bad choices like getting pregnant in high school, end up living in poverty, unable to take care of the kids, unable to educate them. Kids grow up among neglect, abuse, bad role models and lack of education values. And no school can fix it.

Are you suggesting that all Black kids should be taken away from their parents?

I very much hope not, but that's what it sounds like.