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

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OSSE used to do more cross-tabulation of student metrics. Using the metric that includes the most students (90% attendance) in the most recent year I could find (2018) and using metric percentages and totals to back out total population numbers, breakdown of at-risk among racial groups was follows:

White 4% at-risk
Asian 12%
Two or more races 23%
Hispanic/Latino 34%
Black/African-American 65%

This is unsurprising but doesn't really tell us about middle class people in DC public schools. At risk students are usually, by definition, not middle class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OSSE used to do more cross-tabulation of student metrics. Using the metric that includes the most students (90% attendance) in the most recent year I could find (2018) and using metric percentages and totals to back out total population numbers, breakdown of at-risk among racial groups was follows:

White 4% at-risk
Asian 12%
Two or more races 23%
Hispanic/Latino 34%
Black/African-American 65%

This is unsurprising but doesn't really tell us about middle class people in DC public schools. At risk students are usually, by definition, not middle class.

I think it might be surprising for the innumerate people a few pages back who seem to think black = at risk.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OSSE used to do more cross-tabulation of student metrics. Using the metric that includes the most students (90% attendance) in the most recent year I could find (2018) and using metric percentages and totals to back out total population numbers, breakdown of at-risk among racial groups was follows:

White 4% at-risk
Asian 12%
Two or more races 23%
Hispanic/Latino 34%
Black/African-American 65%

This is unsurprising but doesn't really tell us about middle class people in DC public schools. At risk students are usually, by definition, not middle class.

I think it might be surprising for the innumerate people a few pages back who seem to think black = at risk.

I’d be careful who I’m calling innumerate, if I were you. A model that’s right 70% of the time is a pretty good model.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OSSE used to do more cross-tabulation of student metrics. Using the metric that includes the most students (90% attendance) in the most recent year I could find (2018) and using metric percentages and totals to back out total population numbers, breakdown of at-risk among racial groups was follows:

White 4% at-risk
Asian 12%
Two or more races 23%
Hispanic/Latino 34%
Black/African-American 65%

This is unsurprising but doesn't really tell us about middle class people in DC public schools. At risk students are usually, by definition, not middle class.

I think it might be surprising for the innumerate people a few pages back who seem to think black = at risk.

I’d be careful who I’m calling innumerate, if I were you. A model that’s right 70% of the time is a pretty good model.

DP. That is easy to say if you are not black. Now try being one of the 35% of DC public school student who are black but not at risk, and travel through life knowing that most people who interact with you assume you are at risk.

It appears a decent percent of posters on here have been approaching their public school communities assuming all the black kids are living in poverty and all the white kids have parents making 300k. And this is... wrong!

[Anonymous]

This thread has gone completely off the rails

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Wealthy in DC today gets = typical middle class life of 30-40 years ago.

Nope, but many of us are aware this is what you tell yourself to justify calling yourself middle class when you are not.

I think part of the problem is that a lot of people grew up being told they were middle class by their parents, who were also not middle class. Like maybe they were for a minute when their parents were really young, but these are people with white collar parents who bought real estate and invested in the stock market in the 80s and now have a lot of money. None of their family is middle class. But they cling to this self perception of being middle class because they remember eating TV dinners when they were 6 and their dad was still a resident, or their parents didn't have real money until they were 14 or 15 and vacations went from road trips to the jersey shore to multi-week European vacations. It's like a weird self-delusion.

Yes there are richer people and those people do NOT send their kids to DCPS. But this idea that you are middle class because you don't own a vacation home in Aspen is freaking weird. Some of you need some perspective.

There are relatively few middle class people in DC. We have a ton of rich people and a ton of poor people and not many in the middle. If you live West of the park, and don't live in a tiny apartment, you almost certainly are not middle class.

There are plenty of actual middle class people in DC. It's just that people struggle to look past race to see it.

Middle class black and hispanic families (there are tons) are viewed as poor by most white people. But they aren't. I know many such families with HHIs in probably the 90-150k range. Solidly middle class.

Middle class white families are often just assumed to be wealthier than they are, by other white families and by black and hispanic families. But they have similar incomes to the middle class black and hispanic families. I'd say on average the middle class white families probably have a little more money than the middle class black/hispanic families (maybe 130-190k). But, again, solidly middle class.

These are people who, like my family, live in apartments or less expensive housing in neighborhoods far from metro, or east of the river. Some of us were able to purchase real estate (condos or east of the river homes) before rates went up, so we are building wealth, but our homes are not appreciating the way the homes of wealthier people in the area, plus we are dealing with 30 yr mortgages and lower incomes so we pay a larger portion of our incomes to housing. We mostly have cars by necessity (a major difference between us and poor and working class families in DC, many of whom must rely on public transit even from neighborhoods that are poorly served). We take basic vacation, save for college but in a much more modest way than the rest of you, and MUST send our kids to public schools -- there is no other option.

We know we are often invisible to you at school. Either because you misperceive our socioeconomic status (again, assuming if we are black or brown then we must be poorer than we are, and assuming if we are white then we must be richer than we are) or because of that specific kind of situational blindness privileged people have where they only really "see" other privileged people because that is who you consider a peer and therefore the only sort of person you compare yourself to or view yourself in league with.

Ok, well, as an empirical matter, DC has a lot of people with very low incomes (one-fifth of the city get food stamps) and a lot of people with very high incomes (we have proportionately the most people in the country with at least $5 million in assets) so our middle class is smaller than what you typically see elsewhere.

Uh, if you want to be empirical about it, you are going to have to provide actual numbers because I do not actually believe that DC has a smaller middle class than other cities. I think that's just a self serving argument for people who want the public school system to cater to the needs of poor people and the whims of rich people and ignore everyone in between.

Do you even live here? DCPS makes no secret of the fact that it focuses on kids at the very bottom. A lot of families who aren't rich or poor find that very frustrating because they feel like the school system ignores their kids' needs.

DCPS doesn't do jack for poor kids either, and it has the test scores to prove it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OSSE used to do more cross-tabulation of student metrics. Using the metric that includes the most students (90% attendance) in the most recent year I could find (2018) and using metric percentages and totals to back out total population numbers, breakdown of at-risk among racial groups was follows:

White 4% at-risk
Asian 12%
Two or more races 23%
Hispanic/Latino 34%
Black/African-American 65%

Sad.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OSSE used to do more cross-tabulation of student metrics. Using the metric that includes the most students (90% attendance) in the most recent year I could find (2018) and using metric percentages and totals to back out total population numbers, breakdown of at-risk among racial groups was follows:

White 4% at-risk
Asian 12%
Two or more races 23%
Hispanic/Latino 34%
Black/African-American 65%

This is unsurprising but doesn't really tell us about middle class people in DC public schools. At risk students are usually, by definition, not middle class.

I think it might be surprising for the innumerate people a few pages back who seem to think black = at risk.

I’d be careful who I’m calling innumerate, if I were you. A model that’s right 70% of the time is a pretty good model.

Yeah, that's not how conditional probabilities work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OSSE used to do more cross-tabulation of student metrics. Using the metric that includes the most students (90% attendance) in the most recent year I could find (2018) and using metric percentages and totals to back out total population numbers, breakdown of at-risk among racial groups was follows:

White 4% at-risk
Asian 12%
Two or more races 23%
Hispanic/Latino 34%
Black/African-American 65%

Sad.

A lot of factors at play here but a major reason for this is that huge numbers of working and middle class black families left DC (many for PG county) in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. I personally don't see this trend happening anymore and even know people whose parents moved them to PG in the 90s but they've recently moved back to the city and plan to raise kids here, but it changed the demographics of DC a lot. Being black and middle class is really hard in DC, not least because so many people think you're a unicorn or don't actually exist at all.

Charters and the improvement of schools on the East side have made it easier though. Lots of middle class black families at schools on the Hill and the popular NE charters. You also see a strong contingent of middle class black parents working to improve schools like JO Wilson, Payne, Burroughs. From the outside, people often only see the white familes deciding to choose these schools in higher numbers, and the increasing numbers of MC black families making the same choice are invisible because of assumptions about black students generally.

[Anonymous]

Here's some on incomes in DC. https://www.dcfpi.org/all/inequality-remained-extreme-in-2024-as-dc-backslid-on-poverty/

The median income of $60,591 for Black households (statistically unchanged from 2023) was just over one-third of the $168,800 median household income for white, non-Hispanic households (also statistically unchanged from 2023).

The discussion about middle class families is interesting, because it seems to depend on what income levels make you 'middle class.' The poverty line here is supposedly in the $30K range. So $60K median puts black families in that range. The white household median income puts them in the top quarter of household income in the U.S. (above $165K).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Here's some on incomes in DC. https://www.dcfpi.org/all/inequality-remained-extreme-in-2024-as-dc-backslid-on-poverty/

The median income of $60,591 for Black households (statistically unchanged from 2023) was just over one-third of the $168,800 median household income for white, non-Hispanic households (also statistically unchanged from 2023).

The discussion about middle class families is interesting, because it seems to depend on what income levels make you 'middle class.' The poverty line here is supposedly in the $30K range. So $60K median puts black families in that range. The white household median income puts them in the top quarter of household income in the U.S. (above $165K).

I would consider 60k on the lower end of middle class especially if it was a one-parent household. I'd consider 168k on the upper end of middle class. Also those are just medians, so there are plenty of people on either side. Which means plenty of black families with an HHI above 60 and plenty of white families with an HHI under 168k, and I would consider most of the families in between as middle class. That's also all households, not limited to households with kids, which is a wildcard and it's hard to know how that would change these numbers.

I am very confused by the arguments on here that there are very few middle class families in DCPS. It seems transparently false, based on both the statistics and my personal experience. Like I'm still reeling from the person who posted the they believe the "median" income for families at their Ward 6 elementary is 300k, which I actually do not think is possible even at a school like Maury or Brent where yes there does tend to be a higher percentage of wealthy parents. If there are people who really believe that, it is absolutely impacting the culture of the school and the way an integrated (racially and socioeconomically) school will operate.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here's some on incomes in DC. https://www.dcfpi.org/all/inequality-remained-extreme-in-2024-as-dc-backslid-on-poverty/

The median income of $60,591 for Black households (statistically unchanged from 2023) was just over one-third of the $168,800 median household income for white, non-Hispanic households (also statistically unchanged from 2023).

The discussion about middle class families is interesting, because it seems to depend on what income levels make you 'middle class.' The poverty line here is supposedly in the $30K range. So $60K median puts black families in that range. The white household median income puts them in the top quarter of household income in the U.S. (above $165K).

I would consider 60k on the lower end of middle class especially if it was a one-parent household. I'd consider 168k on the upper end of middle class. Also those are just medians, so there are plenty of people on either side. Which means plenty of black families with an HHI above 60 and plenty of white families with an HHI under 168k, and I would consider most of the families in between as middle class. That's also all households, not limited to households with kids, which is a wildcard and it's hard to know how that would change these numbers.

I am very confused by the arguments on here that there are very few middle class families in DCPS. It seems transparently false, based on both the statistics and my personal experience. Like I'm still reeling from the person who posted the they believe the "median" income for families at their Ward 6 elementary is 300k, which I actually do not think is possible even at a school like Maury or Brent where yes there does tend to be a higher percentage of wealthy parents. If there are people who really believe that, it is absolutely impacting the culture of the school and the way an integrated (racially and socioeconomically) school will operate.

I hear you on the “middle class families exist in DCPS” point. I agree that some of the rhetoric on here (“there are very few middle class families in DCPS,” or claims like a $300k median at a neighborhood elementary) can get exaggerated and ends up warping how people talk about integrated schools and what’s realistic.

As a Black parent, I’ll also be transparent about where my own family sits. We tend to think of ourselves as upper-middle class, but by DC income/wealth standards we’re probably “upper class” on paper. I mention that only because it shapes what options are actually available to us—and it also shapes what tradeoffs we’re willing to make for our kids.

In principle, I genuinely want more schools that are truly integrated racially and socioeconomically and are well run—schools where the floor is solid, the ceiling is high, and kids from different backgrounds can thrive together. I want that to be normal. But speaking purely as a practical matter, we found it’s hard to get that model right at scale in DC in a way that worked for what our kids needed day-to-day.

We did the diverse public/charter route in Ward 6 for years. There were many good people and good intentions. But the wider the spread of needs in a school, the more “triage” can become the dominant operating mode—behavior management, remediation, uneven standards, and a lot of energy spent just keeping the system functioning. That’s not a moral critique; if anything, those schools have the hardest job. It’s just a recognition that a school with an “easier job”—a tighter band of behavioral needs, more stable expectations, and fewer competing crises—is often more able to deliver coherent instruction and consistent accountability.

In our case, that kind of school simply happened to be a private/parochial school. I don’t take that as a universal statement about public vs. private; it’s just what worked for our family. And in hindsight, I’m honestly a little surprised we stayed as long as we did—many Black families we know who are similarly situated socioeconomically made the move to private/parochial much earlier.

I still want DC to have more integrated public schools that can pull it off at scale. We just couldn’t keep gambling on that timeline for our own kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here's some on incomes in DC. https://www.dcfpi.org/all/inequality-remained-extreme-in-2024-as-dc-backslid-on-poverty/

The median income of $60,591 for Black households (statistically unchanged from 2023) was just over one-third of the $168,800 median household income for white, non-Hispanic households (also statistically unchanged from 2023).

The discussion about middle class families is interesting, because it seems to depend on what income levels make you 'middle class.' The poverty line here is supposedly in the $30K range. So $60K median puts black families in that range. The white household median income puts them in the top quarter of household income in the U.S. (above $165K).

I would consider 60k on the lower end of middle class especially if it was a one-parent household. I'd consider 168k on the upper end of middle class. Also those are just medians, so there are plenty of people on either side. Which means plenty of black families with an HHI above 60 and plenty of white families with an HHI under 168k, and I would consider most of the families in between as middle class. That's also all households, not limited to households with kids, which is a wildcard and it's hard to know how that would change these numbers.

I am very confused by the arguments on here that there are very few middle class families in DCPS. It seems transparently false, based on both the statistics and my personal experience. Like I'm still reeling from the person who posted the they believe the "median" income for families at their Ward 6 elementary is 300k, which I actually do not think is possible even at a school like Maury or Brent where yes there does tend to be a higher percentage of wealthy parents. If there are people who really believe that, it is absolutely impacting the culture of the school and the way an integrated (racially and socioeconomically) school will operate.

There are a ton of trolls on this thread, like the one insisting that there are $7mil and lots of $5mil houses in bounds for Janney, even though a quick google search disproves that silliness.

[Anonymous]

So, back to the question at hand: how do the policy people at OSSE or DCPS define "intergrated."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So, back to the question at hand: how do the policy people at OSSE or DCPS define "intergrated."

And how much of their definition is confounded by outcome measures like test scores.