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

[Anonymous]

Ok, so all the folks posting on here about how not attending your neighborhood school based on test scores or poverty makes you racist-- I suggest that your greatest act of social justice warrioring would be to enroll YOUR kid in a high poverty school where 75% of kids are below grade level. You want integration, send your kids outside of upper NW. tons of space at Brookland Middle, MacFarland, Ballou (brand new facilities! Yall love that), Dumbar (also shiny and new!).

Oh wait, now come your arguements about "well the commute is too much for us" --

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So now the Brookland inbounds schools are "poorly-performing" - Burroughs is a 4-star school, higher than the greatly-discussed Stokes PCS. By "poorly-performing" do you mean mostly Black? Or do you have some other metric to dismiss Burroughs as poorly-performing?

If it's only about charter vs inbound, then how come the majority-Black charters (like the 4-star DC Prep) in Brookland aren't discussed here?

Guess what? According to the report, Burroughs gets discussed here almost as much as Shining Stars. So there is interest in the higher-performing schools. How much time have you spent discussing low-performing schools outside your neighborhood? I don't know a lot about DC Prep but I thought that it had a specific mission to provide for underserved communities, which doesn't really describe our user base.

"almost as much" ha ha

"underserved communities, which doesn't really describe our user base" yeah that's the whole point

What's the whole point? That some suit at Brookings thought DCUM was a valid snapshot of all parents in DCPS and their opinions of schools based on a randomized, context-free word counts? Or was the whole point their false assumption that every anonymous poster here lives in DC, has kids in DCPS, is rich, and white, and is not trolling?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ok, so all the folks posting on here about how not attending your neighborhood school based on test scores or poverty makes you racist-- I suggest that your greatest act of social justice warrioring would be to enroll YOUR kid in a high poverty school where 75% of kids are below grade level. You want integration, send your kids outside of upper NW. tons of space at Brookland Middle, MacFarland, Ballou (brand new facilities! Yall love that), Dumbar (also shiny and new!).

Oh wait, now come your arguements about "well the commute is too much for us" --

The people you are trolling are the 16% (up from only 1000 students 20 years ago) who actually send their kids to DCPS, instead of moving across the street or river to a real state with good schools and in state college tuition or using one of the many excellent private schools like the Mayor's education associate does.

What is your point?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Ok, so all the folks posting on here about how not attending your neighborhood school based on test scores or poverty makes you racist-- I suggest that your greatest act of social justice warrioring would be to enroll YOUR kid in a high poverty school where 75% of kids are below grade level. You want integration, send your kids outside of upper NW. tons of space at Brookland Middle, MacFarland, Ballou (brand new facilities! Yall love that), Dumbar (also shiny and new!).

Oh wait, now come your arguements about "well the commute is too much for us" --

We're doing it over here in Ward 4, would love it if you did too.

[Anonymous]

I love that "dad" shows up on the graph of "Selected Terms Associated with High-Attention Elementary Schools
Compared to Other Commonly-Discussed Elementary Schools" -- and that it's probably all about that one toe-shoe dad!

Poor Brookings researchers probably missing out on all the humor in their word collection.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok, so all the folks posting on here about how not attending your neighborhood school based on test scores or poverty makes you racist-- I suggest that your greatest act of social justice warrioring would be to enroll YOUR kid in a high poverty school where 75% of kids are below grade level. You want integration, send your kids outside of upper NW. tons of space at Brookland Middle, MacFarland, Ballou (brand new facilities! Yall love that), Dumbar (also shiny and new!).

Oh wait, now come your arguements about "well the commute is too much for us" --

We're doing it over here in Ward 4, would love it if you did too.

For middle school? How is it going? (I mean that genuinely, like "oh, interesting, cool, how is that going?", not "oh yeah, and how is THAT going for you?")

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:This is their conclusion:

The conversations on DC Urban Moms illustrate what other research has also shown: When privileged parents choose, they tend to choose segregation

This is an extremely unfair characterization that completely misses the nuanced and complex reality. It is extremely disappointing to see such drivel presented as serious research.

Whether it’s the case on DCUM or not, this is a fundamental finding of several studies. And seems consistent with what I’ve see in DC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:This is their conclusion:

The conversations on DC Urban Moms illustrate what other research has also shown: When privileged parents choose, they tend to choose segregation

This is an extremely unfair characterization that completely misses the nuanced and complex reality. It is extremely disappointing to see such drivel presented as serious research.

Whether it’s the case on DCUM or not, this is a fundamental finding of several studies. And seems consistent with what I’ve see in DC.

I don't think anyone besides Mathematica has looked at DC lottery data for this. These are the full paragraphs about what they said on it. It would be really misleading to describe this as privileged parents choosing segregation.

"For those applying to enter elementary school, White choosers tended to prefer schools with greater percentages of students who were from their same race/ethnic group. Also, for White choosers, the preference was strongest for schools where their children would be in a small majority (up to 60%), with a slight decline in this preference among the few schools with a higher proportion of White students, as evidenced by the curvature of the relationship between own-group percentage and utility shown in the top panel of Figure 1. For Hispanic choosers, the relationship was more nearly linear, although these coefficients were not statistically significant (individually as coefficients on linear and quadratic terms or jointly). Meanwhile, African American choosers essentially showed indifference for own-group racial composition of schools.

The picture looked different for those applying to middle school entry grades (see Figure 1, middle panel), where all but the Hispanic group of applicants had a pronounced own-group preference and a slight preference for diversity, evidenced by curvature and a peak within the data at 50%. The bliss point, or optimal own-group percentage, was 26% for White applicants to middle school and 47% for African American applicants. In each figure, the curves are intentionally truncated, to avoid extrapolating beyond the range of observed own-group percentage for each group. The results for applicants to high school are shown in the bottom panel of Figure 1, which makes it clear that there was even less diversity of schools in terms of racial composition."

[Anonymous]

The study is interesting, but it neglects the city's role in creating a situation of oversized overly white schools. The city chose to renovate mostly northwest schools, it also failed to plan enough space when it renovated them and failed to address overcrowding issues. Because of overcrowding schools cannot take out of boundary students. The people who love in the neighborhood are white. The city also treats out-of-boundary students as a lower status when they get to the school (e.g. need to lottery for pre-K and to have siblings attend). My kids go to an overcrowded school, and we lament the lack of diversity. Also the larger the school size the more hits it would likely have, and the "high attention" schools are large. Also, a renovated school will attract attention, and many low attention schools are in decrepit buildings. I disagree that only white elite parents post on dcum. It needs to be considered that most participants in the lottery are people of color, and that they too research and compare schools. Also, the charter schools that have high attention, such as basis, latin, SWW and others are diverse. It is the special offerings that attract parents AND the opportunity for diversity as opposed to the desire to segregate racially. DCPS could try harder to meet the needs that these charters address to bring more diversity to its own schools. I think that the findings definitely are interesting but do not tell the whole story.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The study is interesting, but it neglects the city's role in creating a situation of oversized overly white schools. The city chose to renovate mostly northwest schools, it also failed to plan enough space when it renovated them and failed to address overcrowding issues. Because of overcrowding schools cannot take out of boundary students. The people who love in the neighborhood are white. The city also treats out-of-boundary students as a lower status when they get to the school (e.g. need to lottery for pre-K and to have siblings attend). My kids go to an overcrowded school, and we lament the lack of diversity. Also the larger the school size the more hits it would likely have, and the "high attention" schools are large. Also, a renovated school will attract attention, and many low attention schools are in decrepit buildings. I disagree that only white elite parents post on dcum. It needs to be considered that most participants in the lottery are people of color, and that they too research and compare schools. Also, the charter schools that have high attention, such as basis, latin, SWW and others are diverse. It is the special offerings that attract parents AND the opportunity for diversity as opposed to the desire to segregate racially. DCPS could try harder to meet the needs that these charters address to bring more diversity to its own schools. I think that the findings definitely are interesting but do not tell the whole story.

How do schools treat OOB students differently? All students have to lottery for PK, in bounds or not.

[jsteele]

Here is my first attempt at a response. Please help me edit it:

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/961661.page

[Anonymous]

I feel like the authors are trying to paint DC parents like the NYC parents who were fighting rezoning, which isn’t fair because it’s a different city with a different everything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:Another huge flaw. On page 23 there is a section specifically looking at Brookland. It says this:

The conversations about Brookland schools on DC Urban Moms illustrate one mechanism by which this self-segregation occurs. Nearly three thousand forum conversations, almost one-fifth of the total, mention at least one Brookland elementary school, and total attention to these schools has grown over time. But DC Urban Moms participants focus heavily on a few schools in the neighborhood. On average, elementary schools in Brookland that are less than 50 percent Black are mentioned more than four times as often per year as schools that are more than 50 percent Black. Figure 8 plots this correlation.

On the face of it, this supports the argument that DCUMers are a bunch of Klan members. But, then look at which schools are being discussed. The frequently-mentioned schools are all charters. Charters are open to students regardless of where they live in the District. So, any of our posters might be interested in those schools. The less-talked-about schools are public and therefore have residency restrictions. Fewer of our posters have a reason to discuss those schools.

This data simply cannot be taken seriously.

Except that in Brookland, most of the in-bounds schools have enough open spaces to accept many if not most external applicants, so, while I totally and completely agree that this study is terrible, this particular point doesn't quite hold up.

But not for PK, when the majority of posters are looking if you browse threads.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Exactly. And I do think there is definitely some nuance in what makes UMC white parents think a school is acceptable. When you dig into it, you see that Beers Elementary and Miner Elementary have very, very similar PARCC scores. And yet, Beers is a total unknown to DCUM and most white parents wouldn't even consider it as an option, frankly in large part because it is black and in Ward 7. Whereas Miner is commonly discussed here as an acceptable option for ECE. Or is the lack of acceptance of school like Beers because there is no discussion of it on DCUM compared to Miner, which might actually indicate that the Brookings research is onto something?

This is an example of where the obvious explanation is simply missed. Miner is in a neighborhood where we have a lot of posters whereas Beers is in a neighborhood from which we have very few users. People simply talk about their local schools. Not a surprise.

100%. We sold our house in the Miner IB to a developer for almost $1 million. Miner is one of those totally non-gentrified schools with almost entirely gentrified areas within its boundary. Of course it gets a lot of discussion in this forum: it’s an IB for lots of forum users & it’s a school whose test results are concerning to such parents. It is *exactly* the school that people come to the forum to discuss.

FWIW I think the study misses the mark in discussing the Ward 6 schools more than almost any other topic. There is no recognition that the schools it clusters together are equivalent to the best schools in the city test scores/ratings wise (see Maury’s OSSE rating last time or SWS as one of the hardest schools in the city to get into) and some of very bad (see Miner and E-H that got focus $$ based on its horrendous first OSSE stars rating). They’re all discussed as though they’re one similar set of schools like the 145 Charters or the UNW IBs. It just totally misses the point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:This is their conclusion:

The conversations on DC Urban Moms illustrate what other research has also shown: When privileged parents choose, they tend to choose segregation

This is an extremely unfair characterization that completely misses the nuanced and complex reality. It is extremely disappointing to see such drivel presented as serious research.

Whether it’s the case on DCUM or not, this is a fundamental finding of several studies. And seems consistent with what I’ve see in DC.

So if other people are saying it, it must be true? This seems kind of nutty. It suggests that rich white people are choosing to send their kids to inferior schools simply because they are predominantly white. That just seems obviously wrong, and actively misleading. First of all, aside from private schools, is there a single public school in DC that is predominantly white? Second, the reality is that DC has a few good public high schools and lots and lots of really bad ones. It shouldnt be surprising that lots of people are trying to not go to the bad ones.