This American Life about desegregation in schools
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Anonymous
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The issues people are raising are definitely big-brother stuff, but they are definitely (depressingly) real.
Imagine a legal regime under which any parent who has two opiate-related convictions immediately has their parental rights revoked and any subsequent children will not be placed in their custody. Such a parent would have to petition the courts to restore those rights. I would bet, sadly, that this would very likely create better society-wide outcomes for these children. On the other hand, it is way across the line in a society based on freedom and family. If you can't do things like this - what do you do? Essentially, you try to make the parents better people, better at being parents and give them skills to earn more, which generally makes everything better. For the kids you try to help mend the harm and make them see the broader world and that there are ways out of the situation they are in. For society, you break up concentrated poverty by encouraging mixed neighborhoods, mixed schools. And don't forget, we somehow need to bring down the percentage of white people who don't want to live with with non-white people above percentage X, Y, or Z, when it's clear that this is leading to self-segregation and conversely concentration of poverty AND social groups at the same time. I don't know why people don't see this as worth gazillions of dollars and crazy effort at things like school integration (WHICH WORKS!!!!). They should! If you take someone and bring them up to their potential, they are productive and bring us all up. If you let them fester and fail, that isn't just a lack of productivity, it's a loss - so there's a double cost there. So, I know i am coming in way down the discussion thread after a lot has already been said, but thanks, now I have said my piece. |
Anonymous
That's an interesting comparison between foster payments and TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a form of welfare). It's worth noting that DC has made some improvements to TANF recently. These are supposed to improve the success rate of the program in transitioning families to paid work, which was its original intent (the T stands for "Temporary"). This is being done by recognizing the different levels of readiness. For example some people are very close to employable and just need resume and job search help, whereas others need more basic help to organize their lives before they begin to think about looking for a job. Anyway don't want to derail OP's thread about school segregation but it's an interesting issue. There is some evidence that the financial benefit is one incentive (not the only!) for taking a kid into one's home, and this is not ideal. Plus, many families taking kids are borderline poor themselves. It's not the picture of foster parenting that people have ingrained in their minds from so many Disney and made for TV movies, with the lonely, childless rich couple bringing a ragamuffin into their Upper East Side mansion. |
Anonymous
Ok, but again, did you listen to the show or read the transcript? Why do you immediately jump to the discussion of a family in which both parents are heroin addicted? What relation does that have to the kids that were the main subjects of the show? Don't you get it that there are a lot of responsible, sober black parents whose kids are screwed because they live in a school district that has been abandoned by the government (that is to say, abandoned by all of us)? Sure, heroin addiction is a pretty big barrier to effective parenting and in some cases, many cases, will require coercive government intervention of one kind or another, but that's a tiny minority of people. Immediately focusing on this most extreme example is a convenient way of ignoring the racism that puts up barriers for the children of very responsible African American parents, who despite their responsibility, are poor, and/or are shut out from living in high performing school districts. That is the point of this story and this thread, the incredible systemic racism, not the admittedly difficult question of what to do with drug addicted or abusive parents of any race. |
Anonymous
PP here again, I should have added, it is great to see you in favor of integration, and maybe I was one sided in my criticism, and should have directed it at other PPs who have focused ad nauseum on the worst situations as opposed to the generalized racism. I think the first couple paragraphs of your post were just the last in a string of those kinds of comments. |
Anonymous
Mr. Coates' writing was also a turning point in my own burgeoning understanding of race and opportunity in the US. Growing up in a poor and overwhelmingly white area, I thought I understood poverty and opportunity and privately shared many of the feelings expressed on this thread ("Why can't they just.....") Ahead of the big article about reparations, Coates wrote many smaller articles about the same topic and those articles fundamentally changed my view of my own experience and privilege. So many of the opportunities that allowed my family to escape poverty were a combination of luck and government programs that were not available for Black Americans. None of the reading I did about privilege or "invisible knapsacks" was as helpful to my own understanding of privilege as the realization that my own family moved into the middle class as part of a massive effort during my grandparents' generation that was largely closed to Blacks (GI Bill, FHA mortgages, Social Security). |
Anonymous
This is PP you're replying to (I think), problem was that I took too long to deliver the point of the setup - if we want better outcomes for kids suffering from effects of racism and concentrated poverty and can't just steal them from their homes, what do you ACTUALLY do? |
Anonymous
I'd like to imagine a world where the enormous amounts of money spent on the Drug War (which is not working) go instead to treatment so that these parents can get treatment for their addiction. It's not all that easy to get adequate treatment if you don't have the money. |
Anonymous
I lived in Africa for a bit after college while in the Peace Corps. It's easier to put America in perspective once you give it some distance. My race also stuck out for the first time in my life and I was even more aware of the advantages I was afforded in Africa for being white. When I returned, I was much more comfortable neighborhoods with a larger percentage of people of color than I would have been otherwise and somewhat uncomfortable in non-integrated white areas, because I had a better understanding of why they hadn't changed much in terms of housing policy. I also became a lot more aware of coded language. |
Anonymous
I'm glad to see a discussion here about the TAL piece (though a bit disappointed it's devolved into the usually racially-tinged bickering). DC & DCPS is pretty much unique situation in the United States. The TAL program focused on cross-school district integration--between Hartford city school district and suburban school districts. All under the Connnecticut state BOE. That's not the situation in DC. In the US, VA schools, MD schools, and DC schools have absolutely nothing to do with one another. (This is by design, btw.) In the TAL piece, the suburban school districts are something like 80% white; Hartford city school district something like B 95% minority. If you look at DC (DCPS & DCPCS) in isolation, something like 80% of all students are poor. If you focus on DC and your integration efforts are limited to that student population, in the best case what you will end up with is not an integrated school system, but a system in which every school's student population is around 85% poor and 15% middle class. There is literally no school in the country with that SES makeup that is successful. We won't end up with a "best case" because if DCPS were to be fully integrated, we'd suffer a massive outflux of middle-class students--black and white. Let me put it another way: If what you're trying to do is generate an integrated school population consisting entirely of the current DCPS/DCPCS student population, the result will be uniformly failing schools. The only conceivable solution to the problem of failing DCPS schools (barring some sort of retrocession of DC to MD or VA) is integration of DC's poor students with the suburbs. That can take one of two forms: The first scenario is that MD and VA voluntarily agree to reciprocal busing with DCPS. The second is that, over time more middle-class families move into DC radically changing the demographics of DC. (i.e. more poor people live in the suburbs and more middle-class people live in the city.) Guess which of those two scenarios is more likely to happen? |
Anonymous
"There is literally no school in the country with that SES makeup that is successful." Not true, there are several in DC alone that are successful with this level of poverty or higher, and many across the country. See, for example: DC Prep. Also, the stats you quote are public school stats, not DC student stats. If you include the DC resident students attending DC or MD private schools, the poverty rate drops considerably. As for your prediction, I agree, the long term end game is the Manhattanization of most of the District. Movement to the DC suburbs is one part of that, but also to different parts of the country, especially the south (the great reverse migration). But that will take another 20-30 years. We need to integrate more in the meantime. Simply waiting for this demographic shift and allowing generations of poor black students to receive poor educations as we wait, is not an acceptable policy prescription. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/census-great-migration-reversal/21818127/ |
Anonymous
| In terms of integration of DC's non-integrated neighborhoods with the suburbs - you just have to change your mindset. DC west of Rock Creek Park IS THE SUBURBS YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. Integrating Woodland Terrace and Tenleytown is the solution. We don't need to bus to Rockville to make this happen. |
Anonymous
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And yes the "Manhattanization" argument is the reality. The DC area of 2050 will have two ghetto areas, in my worst nightmares:
1. The worst will be a miserable stretch of "Ward 9" between Southern Avenue and the Beltway. 2. The second will be Ward 8, furthest away from transportation nodes. |
Anonymous
Just curious, what is your end goal there -- what would it look like? |
Anonymous
| Doesn't SF have a citywide lotto? |
Anonymous
Essentially. And, it leads to a much more segregated public system than DC. |