Integration and DC Schools -- A high priority? Yay or nay?
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Anonymous
I haven't seen a single chart showing this barbell referenced. |
Anonymous
Got my cleats on to go to wherever you put the new post https://ggwash.org/view/41080/heres-incomes-have-changed-in-dc-since-2000 |
Anonymous
You would be wrong. We are a high net worth (7-figure HHI) family and have kids at JR and Deal. We toured different private schools at various points in our kids’ education and have always found the public school kids to be just as impressive as their peers in the private schools. We saw no reason to make the switch when our kids are happy and thriving where they are. We are also big believers in public education and were uncomfortable with the idea of paying $50k a year when the main benefit seemed to be just making sure your kid was only around other rich people. |
Anonymous
While interesting, two things: 1) Those graphs are 10 years old. It's not a big deal, you can pull the more recent census data and it shows similar trends, but it might have been nice to go ahead and do that. And, 2) While this does show a barbell distribution for households in DC, it does not show a barbell distribution for families in DC, nor public school families in DC, nor public school families at specific schools. Not every household has kids, and not ever household with kids sends their kids to public school. This particularly impacts households on the right side of the barbell -- while you can assume that every family (or nearly every) under a certain threshold sends their kids to public school (because they cannot afford private nor do they have the resources to homeschool), you cannot make this assumption about the highest income households, many of whom will choose private. What percent? No idea, but it's more than zero. Which means that for public school families specifically, this may be more of a one sided barbell, with an inverse chart that would show income distribution for private school families. And on a school by school basis, there are even more variables. Even if you could show that public school families had a barbell distribution in DC (something that has not been shown yet), this is across the entire system. Specific schools have different distributions based on neighborhood and lottery patterns. A lot of schools are majority at risk, including some schools where the number is over 90%, and those schools absorb a lot of the students on the left side of the barbell. There may be a handful that have a majority of families over say 250k, but I think for that you are talking about a TINY number of upper NW schools in very wealthy neighborhoods with major IB buy in, absorbing kids at that end of the barbell. Private schools also absorb a lot of those kids. What's left? Middle class kids. Lots of public schools in DC are full of middle class kids. |
Anonymous
But JR is the only boundary HS in the city where you would feel comfortable sending your kids, right? And Walls likely the only application HS. I buy that there are some very wealthy families in the JR pyramid, and that some of them plus maybe some from Hardy and feeders send kids to Walls. I also assume DCI and Latin absorb some wealthy families, BASIS also. And I know for a fact there are some wealthy black families who send their kids to Banneker or would be comfortable sending kids there in the future. But that's it. I don't know wealthy families comfortable with any other public pyramids in the city. So it's really a limited number of public schools where rich people are willing to send their kids. Even in neighborhoods with lots of homes selling for over a million (Capitol Hill, Brookland, Shaw, etc.) you won't find any very wealthy families at the IB high school. |
Anonymous
NP. You are correct. I will also say that PP above with the 7 figure income is an outlier at JR and not the norm. Families with that income are sending their kids to private. |
Anonymous
| Not necessarily. In some of the best suburban schools in this area you find children of 7-figure income families because parents didn't want them in the cocoon environment of private schools that are too diverse. You don't see these families in DC because public schools here aren't nearly as good. We know rich families who've moved from DC to MoCo for this reason. |
Anonymous
Meh my guess is they move because they want a more suburban lifestyle in general (bigger house and yard) and likely settled in McClean before they even had kids. But there is a subset of people who just prefer city living and have money and find JR to be just fine. |
Anonymous
Seems pretty easy to look at the Title I data to see how many kids are middle class. |
Anonymous
How? Title 1 data will only tell you if a kid is designated at risk. There's no reliable, statistical way to differentiate the socioeconomic status of any other kid in the system. "Not at risk" could mean a family with an HHI of 120k, or a family with an HHI of 500k. Same bucket. And you can't use race as a proxy for income except in broad buckets (income distribution in DC means that few white families are poor and few black families are high income, but they cross at middle class which means that group is racially diverse). You can't even look at the Title 1 designation for telling you how many kids at a school are middle class. It depends on the income of the surrounding neighborhood, the current state of gentrification, availability of charters desirable to high income parents, and the reputation of the school among wealthier families. Some Title 1 schools have very few or zero UMC or wealthier families in their "not at risk" ranks. Others have quite a few UMC/wealthy families, which will become especially obvious in a few years when the school is no longer Title 1 (this is often the first sign that Title 1 status is going to go away -- buy in from high income families). But this is only something you can observe and guess at based on perceived incomes and the culture of the school. There is no data on it. I don't think DCPS even collects income data on families outside of the at risk designation (which is linked to SNAP and TANF qualifications, or the student being unhoused or part of the foster care system -- hard data that doesn't requiring estimating or guessing at a family's income or finances). I don't know how you'd cross-section census data against the public school system either, because the census data doesn't get into utilization of public schools, much less whether a family is using an IB or OOB school, or a charter versus DCPS. |
Anonymous
McClean might have some big houses and large lots [particularly outside the beltway]. But if you are starting with JR catchment, then how do you distinguish the suburban feeling around JR from moving a mile or two further out into MoCo? or moving into North Arlington which is potentially a better commute into Downtown? |
Anonymous
| Plessy |
Anonymous
Somebody keeps sticking this case name in here like it's relevant. We're way past formal separate but equal. We're dealing with residential segregation, people voting with their feet (e.g., white and black flight), de facto segregation, the interaction between public schools, charters, and private schools, race, and class. We're at a point where nothing can plausibly be done by the courts to fix the problem. The Supremes are UNDOING the Voting Rights Act before our eyes. Are they really going to say, DC, you get to have an all-Metro-area blind lottery and mass busing? No. And without those kinds of macro-solutions, we start to come up with more practical, smaller scale solutions. So don't come around just writing the name "Plessy." Maybe I should just write "Milliken" and we can move on. |
Anonymous
DC spends a gargantuan amount of money on schools and yet has SO MANY schools where almost none of the kids are at grade level in anything. We have bigger fish to fry than academic arguments about integration. |
Anonymous
I’m not an expert in the housing stock but I think it is easier and more affordable to get a house in MoCo than in NW DC. And MoCo has a lot of other suburban amenities too (access to sports and music classes etc). |