This American Life about desegregation in schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

DC is heavily segregated and seems to be following the national model in terms of dismantling most steps that lead to integration.

What the TAL program showed is that if you don't mandate it and enforce it by law, white people prefer segregation...and the only thing that improves the outcomes for black students is integration.

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?

"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/

If what you mean is we need to integrate regionally--and nationally--I agree with you. If what you mean is that

I'm curious if you truly believe that DC Prep is a viable general model for DCPS, why the urgency to integrate? You seem to be of two minds. You say "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."

But any form of integration that leads to 80% high-poverty schools in DC is going to percipitate a wholesale evacuation of middle-class families from DCPS.

Is your prescription "DC Prep For All", or what's the plan?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: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.

As PP mentioned, what percentage of those kids are private school kids. What percentage of those kids will be private school kids when they're bused out of JKLM to SE?

DC West of the park is suburban, true. But there just aren't enough kids there, even if they were all somehow legally forced to attend DCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Doesn't SF have a citywide lotto?

Essentially.

And, it leads to a much more segregated public system than DC.

I don't have any first-hand knowledge, but I do know of two families who moved out of SF when their kids reached middle-school age. Things may have changed, but the way it was described to me was that there's a citywide lottery, but it's set up so that the educational acheivement of the mother is weighted negatively. IOW, if you're mother has an advanced degree, you're significantly more likely to be sent to one of the cities worst schools.

[Anonymous]

No way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

"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/

If what you mean is we need to integrate regionally--and nationally--I agree with you. If what you mean is that

I'm curious if you truly believe that DC Prep is a viable general model for DCPS, why the urgency to integrate? You seem to be of two minds. You say "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."

But any form of integration that leads to 80% high-poverty schools in DC is going to percipitate a wholesale evacuation of middle-class families from DCPS.

Is your prescription "DC Prep For All", or what's the plan?

I think you forgot to finish the sentence in your first paragraph, but I am guessing you were going to ask me if I meant that there should be integration within DC also, in addition to regionally and nationally. My answer is yes, as much as possible.

I am curious if you have lived elsewhere or are familiar with schools elsewhere in the developed world, in Europe, Canada?

The US is at the extreme end in terms of segregation, difference in quality across school districts, and so on. It also has the lowest personal income taxes of any developed country of reasonable size (i.e., other than the tiny tax havens).

My point about DC Prep was just that you seemed to be making an ignorant blanket statement that is often made by people in these arguments, that high poverty schools always fail. I was telling you that you were wrong, and not only are you wrong, but your belief in this falsehood probably unconsciously prevents you from seriously considering integration as an option. Did I misinterpret what you were trying to say? If so, my bad, sorry.

Basically my plan would be:

1) raise taxes and make equalizing payments so that there is a much smaller difference in school admin quality, teacher quality, facilities, everything, across neighborhoods, cities, states, and nationwide. In other words, make it impossible to have schools like the one in the NPR story. No matter how poor or dark-skinned the neighborhood, the neighborhood school is decent and will give students the chance to succeed in life even if their parents have stumbled or are otherwise disadvantaged. This is how it is in pretty much every other rich country.

2) possibly impose burdens on private schools, to disincentivize their establishment and use, within the limits of what the constitution allows.

3) provide moral leadership (President, mayors, senators, council members, etc) for voluntary integration, like Carter sending his kids to public school.

4) as a temporary measure, encourage methods used by DC Prep and others to reach kids in segregated environments, so we don't have any more lost generations. This can be done in DCPS, not only charters. This year DC is piloting an extended day program for high poverty DCPS schools, which is the main tool that DC Prep uses.

(yes, to answer your question, the DC Prep model can work anywhere, it is mostly an extended day model, that is the crucial difference between it and DCPS, combined with some other philosophical and pedagogical aspects that would be easy to emulate in DCPS. The main obstacle to this in DCPS is the teacher's union contract, but that's another discussion, and as far as I am concerned, we should agree to pay teachers a lot of overtime for such work.)

those first four are what we should do through government. and finally, what we can all do personally:

5) voluntarily integrate. Live in a diverse neighborhood and send your kid to your neighborhood school.

6) if you don't have kids or your kids are grown, volunteer in a high-poverty school.

I am an idealist but I am not naive. I have studied and worked enough to know that people will often act selfishly and even irrationally, and good policy takes this fact of human nature into account. However I would like there to be more of a moral conversation. I would like people to see this as a moral issue. Just as it has become unacceptable to make sexist remarks, and it has become unfashionable to belong to "men-only" clubs that do not allow women members, I would like it to become unacceptable for people to say stuff in social settings like "yeah, we're moving to the suburbs, too many poors in our local school". I would like this to become a shameful remark in polite society, with the moral expectation being that you will try to integrate as much as you can, obviously not to the point of damaging your kid's life, but as much as you can.

[Anonymous]

State and local governments are partially to blame by not placing subsidized housing in wealthier neighborhoods. If that were done, low-income families with a desire to be surrounded by higher-SES citizens would probably make the choice to move. Their children would benefit from the better schools in the higher SES-neighborhoods.

But make no mistake: many low-income families would prefer to stay in their low-SES neighborhoods, even if the government offered them different choices for residency.

And, of course, as a prior person stated, people with the means to choose where they live should choose to live in diverse (meaning racially as well as income diverse) neighborhoods because that's good for society. But make no mistake: a lot of what is going on is not structural racism, but the result of choices. The fact that many people who live in low-SES neighborhoods are low income only partially explains why those low-SES neighborhoods are not racially diverse.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

"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/

If what you mean is we need to integrate regionally--and nationally--I agree with you. If what you mean is that

I'm curious if you truly believe that DC Prep is a viable general model for DCPS, why the urgency to integrate? You seem to be of two minds. You say "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."

But any form of integration that leads to 80% high-poverty schools in DC is going to percipitate a wholesale evacuation of middle-class families from DCPS.

Is your prescription "DC Prep For All", or what's the plan?

I think you forgot to finish the sentence in your first paragraph, but I am guessing you were going to ask me if I meant that there should be integration within DC also, in addition to regionally and nationally. My answer is yes, as much as possible.

I am curious if you have lived elsewhere or are familiar with schools elsewhere in the developed world, in Europe, Canada?

The US is at the extreme end in terms of segregation, difference in quality across school districts, and so on. It also has the lowest personal income taxes of any developed country of reasonable size (i.e., other than the tiny tax havens).

My point about DC Prep was just that you seemed to be making an ignorant blanket statement that is often made by people in these arguments, that high poverty schools always fail. I was telling you that you were wrong, and not only are you wrong, but your belief in this falsehood probably unconsciously prevents you from seriously considering integration as an option. Did I misinterpret what you were trying to say? If so, my bad, sorry.

Basically my plan would be:

1) raise taxes and make equalizing payments so that there is a much smaller difference in school admin quality, teacher quality, facilities, everything, across neighborhoods, cities, states, and nationwide. In other words, make it impossible to have schools like the one in the NPR story. No matter how poor or dark-skinned the neighborhood, the neighborhood school is decent and will give students the chance to succeed in life even if their parents have stumbled or are otherwise disadvantaged. This is how it is in pretty much every other rich country.

2) possibly impose burdens on private schools, to disincentivize their establishment and use, within the limits of what the constitution allows.

3) provide moral leadership (President, mayors, senators, council members, etc) for voluntary integration, like Carter sending his kids to public school.

4) as a temporary measure, encourage methods used by DC Prep and others to reach kids in segregated environments, so we don't have any more lost generations. This can be done in DCPS, not only charters. This year DC is piloting an extended day program for high poverty DCPS schools, which is the main tool that DC Prep uses.

(yes, to answer your question, the DC Prep model can work anywhere, it is mostly an extended day model, that is the crucial difference between it and DCPS, combined with some other philosophical and pedagogical aspects that would be easy to emulate in DCPS. The main obstacle to this in DCPS is the teacher's union contract, but that's another discussion, and as far as I am concerned, we should agree to pay teachers a lot of overtime for such work.)

those first four are what we should do through government. and finally, what we can all do personally:

5) voluntarily integrate. Live in a diverse neighborhood and send your kid to your neighborhood school.

6) if you don't have kids or your kids are grown, volunteer in a high-poverty school.

I am an idealist but I am not naive. I have studied and worked enough to know that people will often act selfishly and even irrationally, and good policy takes this fact of human nature into account. However I would like there to be more of a moral conversation. I would like people to see this as a moral issue. Just as it has become unacceptable to make sexist remarks, and it has become unfashionable to belong to "men-only" clubs that do not allow women members, I would like it to become unacceptable for people to say stuff in social settings like "yeah, we're moving to the suburbs, too many poors in our local school". I would like this to become a shameful remark in polite society, with the moral expectation being that you will try to integrate as much as you can, obviously not to the point of damaging your kid's life, but as much as you can.

Not sure why you're taking such a personal tone, but I'll ignore the bait.

Anyway, a couple of quick thoughts:

My point about DC Prep was just that you seemed to be making an ignorant blanket statement that is often made by people in these arguments, that high poverty schools always fail.

Many reputable education researchers have serious questions as to whether schools like DC Prep "scale". That's great that one school is getting results with a particular highly motivated charter school group of kids. Sure my claim that "high poverty schools always fail" should have come with caveats (there are isolated, rare exceptions). But I was basically repeating the position that the NYT reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones took in the TAL piece that was the subject of the thread.

I was telling you that you were wrong, and not only are you wrong, but your belief in this falsehood probably unconsciously prevents you from seriously considering integration as an option. Did I misinterpret what you were trying to say? If so, my bad, sorry.

This doesn't seem to follow at all. If you're right, and the success of high poverty schools is just a matter of a few tweaks, then you've removed the urgency that drives the need for integration. If DC Prep is the answer, just roll out DC Prep for the poor kids, and we can all call it a day. They'll all get a great education and we'll solve the issue of multi-generational poverty.

The one argument that gives integration its moral urgency is that high-poverty schools are failing schools. If you're arguing that high poverty schools aren't necessarily going to be failing schools, you've essentially undercut the argument for integration. Poor kids don't need integration, they just need better schools. You're letting anti-integration folks off the hook.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:State and local governments are partially to blame by not placing subsidized housing in wealthier neighborhoods. If that were done, low-income families with a desire to be surrounded by higher-SES citizens would probably make the choice to move. Their children would benefit from the better schools in the higher SES-neighborhoods.

But make no mistake: many low-income families would prefer to stay in their low-SES neighborhoods, even if the government offered them different choices for residency.

And, of course, as a prior person stated, people with the means to choose where they live should choose to live in diverse (meaning racially as well as income diverse) neighborhoods because that's good for society. But make no mistake: a lot of what is going on is not structural racism, but the result of choices. The fact that many people who live in low-SES neighborhoods are low income only partially explains why those low-SES neighborhoods are not racially diverse.

Low SES neighborhoods are high-crime neighborhoods with bad schools. While some poor folks stay in low SES neighborhoods in such conditions because of their social network, many, many poor folks stay because they have no other options.

Programs like Section 8 were supposed to address this, and allow the urban poor to escape to middle-class neighborhoods, but housing vouchers are underfunded, and often not accepted in neighborhoods where middle-class people live.

http://www.shelterforce.org/article/special/1043/P2/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:State and local governments are partially to blame by not placing subsidized housing in wealthier neighborhoods. If that were done, low-income families with a desire to be surrounded by higher-SES citizens would probably make the choice to move. Their children would benefit from the better schools in the higher SES-neighborhoods.

But make no mistake: many low-income families would prefer to stay in their low-SES neighborhoods, even if the government offered them different choices for residency.

And, of course, as a prior person stated, people with the means to choose where they live should choose to live in diverse (meaning racially as well as income diverse) neighborhoods because that's good for society. But make no mistake: a lot of what is going on is not structural racism, but the result of choices. The fact that many people who live in low-SES neighborhoods are low income only partially explains why those low-SES neighborhoods are not racially diverse.

People are making choices about where to live, but there is no question at all that housing patterns as they exist were established via structural racism.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

DC is heavily segregated and seems to be following the national model in terms of dismantling most steps that lead to integration.

What the TAL program showed is that if you don't mandate it and enforce it by law, white people prefer segregation...and the only thing that improves the outcomes for black students is integration.

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?

"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/

There are plenty of high-poverty schools that cherry-pick via parental self-selection, and that push out the few problem kids who do manage to make it through the door. Not exactly a general recipe for a school district.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/do-self-selection-and-attrition-matter-in-kipp-schools/2011/06/13/AG1sQeTH_blog.html

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:State and local governments are partially to blame by not placing subsidized housing in wealthier neighborhoods. If that were done, low-income families with a desire to be surrounded by higher-SES citizens would probably make the choice to move. Their children would benefit from the better schools in the higher SES-neighborhoods.

But make no mistake: many low-income families would prefer to stay in their low-SES neighborhoods, even if the government offered them different choices for residency.

And, of course, as a prior person stated, people with the means to choose where they live should choose to live in diverse (meaning racially as well as income diverse) neighborhoods because that's good for society. But make no mistake: a lot of what is going on is not structural racism, but the result of choices. The fact that many people who live in low-SES neighborhoods are low income only partially explains why those low-SES neighborhoods are not racially diverse.

People are making choices about where to live, but there is no question at all that housing patterns as they exist were established via structural racism.

e

Ridiculous. PG county, as one non-isolated example, was 100% white not too long ago. Folks of all races make choices where to live. Those with less means, across all races, have more limited choices. Those with no means have no choice at all.

The government needs to step in with policies to help those with limited or no housing choices.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

"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/

If what you mean is we need to integrate regionally--and nationally--I agree with you. If what you mean is that

I'm curious if you truly believe that DC Prep is a viable general model for DCPS, why the urgency to integrate? You seem to be of two minds. You say "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."

But any form of integration that leads to 80% high-poverty schools in DC is going to percipitate a wholesale evacuation of middle-class families from DCPS.

Is your prescription "DC Prep For All", or what's the plan?

I think you forgot to finish the sentence in your first paragraph, but I am guessing you were going to ask me if I meant that there should be integration within DC also, in addition to regionally and nationally. My answer is yes, as much as possible.

I am curious if you have lived elsewhere or are familiar with schools elsewhere in the developed world, in Europe, Canada?

The US is at the extreme end in terms of segregation, difference in quality across school districts, and so on. It also has the lowest personal income taxes of any developed country of reasonable size (i.e., other than the tiny tax havens).

My point about DC Prep was just that you seemed to be making an ignorant blanket statement that is often made by people in these arguments, that high poverty schools always fail. I was telling you that you were wrong, and not only are you wrong, but your belief in this falsehood probably unconsciously prevents you from seriously considering integration as an option. Did I misinterpret what you were trying to say? If so, my bad, sorry.

Basically my plan would be:

1) raise taxes and make equalizing payments so that there is a much smaller difference in school admin quality, teacher quality, facilities, everything, across neighborhoods, cities, states, and nationwide. In other words, make it impossible to have schools like the one in the NPR story. No matter how poor or dark-skinned the neighborhood, the neighborhood school is decent and will give students the chance to succeed in life even if their parents have stumbled or are otherwise disadvantaged. This is how it is in pretty much every other rich country.

2) possibly impose burdens on private schools, to disincentivize their establishment and use, within the limits of what the constitution allows.

3) provide moral leadership (President, mayors, senators, council members, etc) for voluntary integration, like Carter sending his kids to public school.

4) as a temporary measure, encourage methods used by DC Prep and others to reach kids in segregated environments, so we don't have any more lost generations. This can be done in DCPS, not only charters. This year DC is piloting an extended day program for high poverty DCPS schools, which is the main tool that DC Prep uses.

(yes, to answer your question, the DC Prep model can work anywhere, it is mostly an extended day model, that is the crucial difference between it and DCPS, combined with some other philosophical and pedagogical aspects that would be easy to emulate in DCPS. The main obstacle to this in DCPS is the teacher's union contract, but that's another discussion, and as far as I am concerned, we should agree to pay teachers a lot of overtime for such work.)

those first four are what we should do through government. and finally, what we can all do personally:

5) voluntarily integrate. Live in a diverse neighborhood and send your kid to your neighborhood school.

6) if you don't have kids or your kids are grown, volunteer in a high-poverty school.

I am an idealist but I am not naive. I have studied and worked enough to know that people will often act selfishly and even irrationally, and good policy takes this fact of human nature into account. However I would like there to be more of a moral conversation. I would like people to see this as a moral issue. Just as it has become unacceptable to make sexist remarks, and it has become unfashionable to belong to "men-only" clubs that do not allow women members, I would like it to become unacceptable for people to say stuff in social settings like "yeah, we're moving to the suburbs, too many poors in our local school". I would like this to become a shameful remark in polite society, with the moral expectation being that you will try to integrate as much as you can, obviously not to the point of damaging your kid's life, but as much as you can.

Not sure why you're taking such a personal tone, but I'll ignore the bait.

Anyway, a couple of quick thoughts:

My point about DC Prep was just that you seemed to be making an ignorant blanket statement that is often made by people in these arguments, that high poverty schools always fail.

Many reputable education researchers have serious questions as to whether schools like DC Prep "scale". That's great that one school is getting results with a particular highly motivated charter school group of kids. Sure my claim that "high poverty schools always fail" should have come with caveats (there are isolated, rare exceptions). But I was basically repeating the position that the NYT reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones took in the TAL piece that was the subject of the thread.

I was telling you that you were wrong, and not only are you wrong, but your belief in this falsehood probably unconsciously prevents you from seriously considering integration as an option. Did I misinterpret what you were trying to say? If so, my bad, sorry.

This doesn't seem to follow at all. If you're right, and the success of high poverty schools is just a matter of a few tweaks, then you've removed the urgency that drives the need for integration. If DC Prep is the answer, just roll out DC Prep for the poor kids, and we can all call it a day. They'll all get a great education and we'll solve the issue of multi-generational poverty.

The one argument that gives integration its moral urgency is that high-poverty schools are failing schools. If you're arguing that high poverty schools aren't necessarily going to be failing schools, you've essentially undercut the argument for integration. Poor kids don't need integration, they just need better schools. You're letting anti-integration folks off the hook.

PP here. I wasn't being personal toward you. I don't know you, your values or your situation. My comment on morality was directed at all of us. For me this is a moral issue, as the NPR story and the events of this past year should have made clear by now. Amoral social science or education policy perspectives are necessary but no longer sufficient. We all need to take responsibility.

Based on what you write, I think we have some shared values. Although, if you truly believe that the ONLY moral or practical argument for integration is that high-poverty schools fail, then we disagree on that. To me, the benefits of integration, racial and economic, go well beyond that. Integration is better for everyone, and is part of the way that we begin to address Ferguson, Baltimore.

But regarding the specific question of the quality of education for the poorest kids, integration is a very cheap way to achieve success, or more accurately, it is a way to achieve it using private dollars and private effort versus tax dollars and government effort, the latter pair being very unpopular in the US right now. I am quite sure that DC Prep, KIPP, and others are scaleable, but as I explained in my post, it's very expensive when scaled up. Your post focuses on the motivated students but the secret is actually the admin and teachers (how many kids of any economic class are "motivated" or "unmotivated" in PK?). These extended day charters hire young, non-unionized teachers, make them work maybe 2 hours more per school day plus meetings, lesson prep and training, pay them a low wage (especially when calculated hourly), put a lot of performance pressure on them, and tend to burn them out.

If you want to expand this intense extended day environment across an entire school system and make it sustainable, you can do it, but you'll end up spending a lot more money on education than what people in the US seem to be willing to tolerate politically. This goes to the first of my numbered suggestions, to increase taxes and improve schools across the board. It is a distinctly American idea that, in order to solve the problem of failing public schools, we should open charters that try to reach poor students with LESS money. In the other rich countries I know of, they accomplish this by spending more money on education (and public daycare, and maternity and paternity leave, and many other services directed at infants and children), not less.

Anyway, you asked for a plan and I gave you 6 ideas. What are your thoughts on them? Would you vote for 1-4? Would you do 5-6?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:State and local governments are partially to blame by not placing subsidized housing in wealthier neighborhoods. If that were done, low-income families with a desire to be surrounded by higher-SES citizens would probably make the choice to move. Their children would benefit from the better schools in the higher SES-neighborhoods.

But make no mistake: many low-income families would prefer to stay in their low-SES neighborhoods, even if the government offered them different choices for residency.

And, of course, as a prior person stated, people with the means to choose where they live should choose to live in diverse (meaning racially as well as income diverse) neighborhoods because that's good for society. But make no mistake: a lot of what is going on is not structural racism, but the result of choices. The fact that many people who live in low-SES neighborhoods are low income only partially explains why those low-SES neighborhoods are not racially diverse.

People are making choices about where to live, but there is no question at all that housing patterns as they exist were established via structural racism.

e

Ridiculous. PG county, as one non-isolated example, was 100% white not too long ago. Folks of all races make choices where to live. Those with less means, across all races, have more limited choices. Those with no means have no choice at all.

The government needs to step in with policies to help those with limited or no housing choices.

I think you may have misunderstood. "[T]hat housing patterns as they exist were established via structural racism" is completely incontrovertable.

[Anonymous]

I'm not buying this argument that people have no choice.

In AL they do have a choice where to live, there is no big gap in real estate prices. You can live in a trailer and go to a very good school. If you live in a failing school zone you have the option of transferring to any school of your choice.

And we still have the same problem. The black schools are failing and only black schools.

It's a personal choice. The government cannot make you make the right choices.

[Anonymous]

I thought the series was interesting from a human interest perspective, but was very much simplified the issues. I found it problematic that CT was spending tons of resources and money recruiting white suburban children (who could get a perfectly fine education in their own towns) to come to magnet schools while minority families couldn't get admission to those same schools because then they wouldn't be integrated. Sorry, but that's really screwed up.

I couldn't even imagine that happening in this area. It's different because it's not one state, but let's imagine that DCPS decides to pour resources into opening a brand new magnet HS in Anacostia. Gorgeous building, all the resources you could possibly want. Rather than allow underprivileged children from that neighborhood attend, it instead spends $$$ recruiting white, privileged children from MoCO to attend, thereby taking up spaces that DC kids could have had.