Integration and DC Schools -- A high priority? Yay or nay?
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Anonymous
You keep saying this like there are like 10 middle class families in DC so it's fine to ignore them. There are tens of thousands of middle class families in DC. They ALL send their kids to public school because they have no other choice (unlike UMC and wealthy families, who have many other choices). There are middle class families at your school. Many! I know your preference is to ignore them because acknowledging that your income and priorities are not "the norm" is hard for you. There are more middle class families in public schools in DC than UMC and wealthy families. I know you are certain that can't be the case because "everyone" you know is UMC or above. You are blind to your own biases. |
Anonymous
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I don't know what we're disagreeing about - perhaps the percentage and number of black DC residents that have incomes above median of $60,000?
Those are real people, and just talking off the cuff, they are probably roughly half of the black population, like 43 percent of DC. So we've got what, 700,000 people, 49 percent of 43 percent above 60K income, about 150,000 black people in DC with a household income above $60,000. That's a lot of people. Too many to be invisible. On the other hand, it's only about 20 percent of DC residents. Another about 20 percent of DC residents are white people with incomes above $168,000. So are we talking about middle income black households existing? Are we talking about very large race-sorted income gaps? It seems like both. If both types of households think of themselves as somewhere in the "middle class" but there are large disparities, I can see how the perceptions mix. My household is two federal employees with long tenure, two DCPS kids. We have a rowhouse and an old car. This does not feel like a TV show with Robin Leach. But we earn like $300,000 a year. If we earned $70,000 between us, I am sure that we would do just fine. Frankly we live on little and save most of our income. But we probably wouldn't own the house and frugality wouldn't be an option and college would be determined by need-based aid and retirement would be late and pension-driven, not savings-driven. On schools, we are choosing DCPS because we think it's good enough for our kids and valuable experience for them. Based on our backgrounds, we do not want them to acculturate to Stone Ridge or Gonzaga or whatever. It's cultural preference, though of course it's great that we are only paying taxes to send our kids to school. I can entirely understand the reverse, families where exposure to the opportunities available through St. Anselms or NCS can be a generational human capital gain. So each of us is differently situated. And I'm sorry some folks feel invisible. And I guess I don't quite know what invisible means? Does it mean that as a white person I act like every black person around me has dramatically lower income than me? I hope that I don't manifest that. Mostly I just go to work and home, museums or kid sports on the weekend, so I hope I'm not demeaning someone on the Metro or bus with a look or some kind of misstatement. I hope that I don't mistreat the people I meet even if we argue a little rough here enjoying the luxury of being anonymous. |
Anonymous
You make an awful lot of assumptions, most of which are wrong. |
Anonymous
| What DCPS needs is higher academic standards. The city seems to be trying to erase any differences when it comes to race & achievement by making school as easy as possible. |
Anonymous
This is a national trend, sadly. |
Anonymous
The good charters (BASIS, Latin, etc) will give your kids F's all day long. |
Anonymous
Raising standards would fix a lot of problems with DCPS. Too bad it's a nonstarter with our elected leaders. |
Anonymous
And then the SJW complain that standards aren't fair to kids who can't meet them. Cannot make this stuff up. |
Anonymous
They can send their kids to DCPS and watch them get A's for reading bullet point summaries of novels. |
Anonymous
They will give Fs to the kids who refuse to do the work, or who are completely unprepared, but the typical reasonably smart kid who completes the work but does the bare minimum will not get an F; they will get Bs and maybe the occasional C. As least that's my child's experience. However, it's true that the bare minimum varies a lot by school. |
Anonymous
Not at Latin. They hand out a whole lotta Fs. |
Anonymous
I've seen very smart kids get occasional Ds or Fs on tests .. maybe because they were unprepared but sometimes because they failed to meet a high standard. The grade will average out if they are otherwise keeping up with the class but I think it's great to see high standards. |
Anonymous
| The income distribution for dcps public school students is not bimodal. There is a large number of economically at-risk students and then there are students spread across just about every single income step above that all the way up to very wealthy. It is a pretty wide spectrum - lots of not at-risk but mostly just getting by families, lots of true middle class families, lots of economically secure but 150k does not go so far in major urban areas type families. Lots of variations in the educational status of the parent(s). Lots of variations in things like housing costs. |
Anonymous
This. The people who think it's just some very poor families and then everyone else is very well off are just very ignorant (and likely only interact with families in their same socioeconomic position and therefore don't think about or consider that anyone else exists). |
Anonymous
Or they can look at the distribution of income in DC from every source, see the barbell and make the appropriate inference. |