This American Life about desegregation in schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
You keep harping on this $600 a month rent in a great school boundary, so let's do some math together.

Our hypothetical family is a single mom and her two children, ages 2 and 6. Mom works 50 hours per week making the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour (you said you're in the south so I'm going to assume that your state doesn't have a higher minimum wage). She makes $362/week, pre-tax (for the purposes of our exercise we won't worry about taxes). She works 52 weeks a year since she doesn't have any time off, so she makes an untaxed $18,850 per year. Her $600 rent is $7200 per year. Daycare for her youngest is $100/week since you are in a low COL area, or $5200/year. She's spending $12,400/year on rent and daycare. That leaves $6,450 left. That breaks down to $537/month to cover food, all bills, transportation, insurance (her minimum wage job obviously isn't providing insurance), before and aftercare, and everything else that she might need for her family to survive.

So no, that $600 a month rent in the best school boundary no longer seems so affordable. It's all relative.

What a bs numbers.

Low income single mothers get free day care, WICs and other forms of financial support. Possibly free housing because we have free public housing and someone is living there.

I have a niece who's a single mother of two. She doesn't even work, both of her kids get free daycare, she receives food stamps, and other benefits. She also is eligible for free college education, but is she getting it? No. I think we all know why. Because it's a question of motivation.

[Anonymous]

New poster here

Here is the elephant in the room

Why do many Asian and African immigrants generally break the poverty cycle in one generation while other populations don't

It's not SES because most immigrants arrive at the bottom of the SES stack so they have to attend a "crappy" school with parents working crappy long jobs but somehow the students make it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's Huntsville, AL, but what's the point of relocating? The city started re-integration program because the black students fail, despite everything being offered.

People expect what once were the best schools (majority white) will be ruined by the influx of below average students. The white families are buying houses outside of the city, in the white thriving suburbs that don't have this problem.

Just for the sake of this discussion I went through half of the list of the failing schools in Alabama. And they're all 80-100% black schools.

I didn't bother with the entire list, because it's obvious.

It's not a conspiracy against the black people. It's not that someone secretly decided that these 74 schools will get the worst teachers and no supplies.

It's what you made of it.

Black schools do get the worst teachers and no supplies. The entire point of the npr piece is that if there are not enough white kids in a school, the school will never get the kind of resources and quality teachers and attention it needs. The example of the influx of 1,000 failing kids into that 85% white school is that the school didn't fail (blacks kids scores went up, white kids scores didn't go down).

The question I have is whether there are enough decent schools to absorb kids from failing school (or black kids). Not in DC, unfortunately, and bussing white kids into a black school is nonstarter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:New poster here

Here is the elephant in the room

Why do many Asian and African immigrants generally break the poverty cycle in one generation while other populations don't

It's not SES because most immigrants arrive at the bottom of the SES stack so they have to attend a "crappy" school with parents working crappy long jobs but somehow the students make it

Yes, it is SES. The average African and Asian immigrant to the US is more likely to have a college degree than the average American. This fact is easily viewed in the census data. Some Asian immigrants may be working in jobs that don't use their skills, because they don't speak English, and it's hard to learn as an adult. My college roommate's dad was a teacher in CHina, but ran a small grocery store in the US,because he couldn't speak English. nevertheless, he could help my roommate and her sisters with math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:New poster here

Here is the elephant in the room

Why do many Asian and African immigrants generally break the poverty cycle in one generation while other populations don't

It's not SES because most immigrants arrive at the bottom of the SES stack so they have to attend a "crappy" school with parents working crappy long jobs but somehow the students make it

This is not an elephant - this is just the narrative white folks use to keep their privileges intact. Half of you white folks need a white privilege workshop - STAT!

http://www.mtv.com/shows/white-people/white-people-full-episode/1736982/playlist/#id=1736982

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Black schools do get the worst teachers and no supplies. The entire point of the npr piece is that if there are not enough white kids in a school, the school will never get the kind of resources and quality teachers and attention it needs.

Why do black schools get worst resources? I'm sure they don't open a school with this in mind. Because students fail, no one wants to invest into failure, waste resources.

I remember a story I read or heard about a program designed by Harvard educators where they took kids from impoverished neighborhood by lottery and put them through this rigourous program with best teachers. The kids improved significantly. But only as long as they were in the program. When they graduated and went to colleges most of them dropped out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
You keep harping on this $600 a month rent in a great school boundary, so let's do some math together.

Our hypothetical family is a single mom and her two children, ages 2 and 6. Mom works 50 hours per week making the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour (you said you're in the south so I'm going to assume that your state doesn't have a higher minimum wage). She makes $362/week, pre-tax (for the purposes of our exercise we won't worry about taxes). She works 52 weeks a year since she doesn't have any time off, so she makes an untaxed $18,850 per year. Her $600 rent is $7200 per year. Daycare for her youngest is $100/week since you are in a low COL area, or $5200/year. She's spending $12,400/year on rent and daycare. That leaves $6,450 left. That breaks down to $537/month to cover food, all bills, transportation, insurance (her minimum wage job obviously isn't providing insurance), before and aftercare, and everything else that she might need for her family to survive.

So no, that $600 a month rent in the best school boundary no longer seems so affordable. It's all relative.

What a bs numbers.

Low income single mothers get free day care, WICs and other forms of financial support. Possibly free housing because we have free public housing and someone is living there.

I have a niece who's a single mother of two. She doesn't even work, both of her kids get free daycare, she receives food stamps, and other benefits. She also is eligible for free college education, but is she getting it? No. I think we all know why. Because it's a question of motivation.

Actually, most working poor make just a little too much to receive benefits. It's a conundrum for many. The damned if they try to work and pull themselves out of poverty, and damned and considered shiftless if they don't work and get the beanies.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

You are 100% wrong about the value that poor people place on education because the vast majority realize it's the most reliable path to a better life. You're also wrong that they're not entitled to it - it's in the Constitution.

Teacher: Please tell me you aren't teaching history or social studies or civics to anyone over the age of about 5?

NP. It is in the Constitution, although not explicitly. The 14th Amendment states that the government cannot privilege certain citizens. The Supreme Court has held that to mean that if it educates one citizen, it must educate all. That's why special ed students get IEPs, and it's why states must admit all children to their schools, regardless of their parents' immigration status.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:New poster here

Here is the elephant in the room

Why do many Asian and African immigrants generally break the poverty cycle in one generation while other populations don't

It's not SES because most immigrants arrive at the bottom of the SES stack so they have to attend a "crappy" school with parents working crappy long jobs but somehow the students make it

Yes, it is SES. The average African and Asian immigrant to the US is more likely to have a college degree than the average American. This fact is easily viewed in the census data. Some Asian immigrants may be working in jobs that don't use their skills, because they don't speak English, and it's hard to learn as an adult. My college roommate's dad was a teacher in CHina, but ran a small grocery store in the US,because he couldn't speak English. nevertheless, he could help my roommate and her sisters with math.

yep - middle class in their home countries. They come with emotional and social capital that those stuck in generations of poverty, racism, and oppression don't have. A better comparison is latino immigrants because many do come from lower, oppressed classes. However, like the kids who got on the bus to travel 10 miles to a different h.s., you are dealing with the ones with enough know-how to get themselves out. Plus there is so much poverty in these countries that it is economic deprivation without the social oppression because the majority not the minority are oppressed - that has to make a difference in your sense of self. Still, I imagine the hardworking, value education latino immigrant stereotype comes from the immigrants who had more in their home country than the poor poor ones. Getting out of poverty is hard, nearly impossible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:New poster here

Here is the elephant in the room

Why do many Asian and African immigrants generally break the poverty cycle in one generation while other populations don't

It's not SES because most immigrants arrive at the bottom of the SES stack so they have to attend a "crappy" school with parents working crappy long jobs but somehow the students make it

In all honesty, I hear this question over and over again. I know many Africans from different countries. I was an active member of African Society Union in college. I have never met one African immigrant who was impoverished. They may not have come to this country rich, but they were not impoverished in their home countries. The Africans who make it to the U.S. and Canada are not the poor Africans you think you know. They are not the Africans you see when you go outside your gated resort and walk and drive around the countryside.

Now I will readily admit that I don't know very many Asians, but surely the Asians who are paying thousands of dollars to get here to send their kids to TJ while another parent stays in the home country to work cannot be considered a poor immigrant. Where are these poor immigrants, outside of the Central Americans, that you speak?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
You are 100% wrong about the value that poor people place on education because the vast majority realize it's the most reliable path to a better life. You're also wrong that they're not entitled to it - it's in the Constitution. But if parents are making efforts to instill that lesson at home, then the lesson that sinks in at a failing school is this: you are not going to find that path here. Yeah, there are some extraordinary kids who are able to overcome the psychological barrier that a failing school puts up every day - where just walking in feels like punishment - but by the definition of the word, everyone can't be extraordinary. Kids as young as first grade know when they're in a shitty school (I know, my students told me). The ones who can get out do so; the ones who can't are riding on a vicious cycle of low expectation that starts early and transcends generations.

The lesson in the TAL episode is that if kids can see the path, they're MUCH more likely to get on it. And yeah, that's simplistic but empirically true.

Can you please explain then the situation I quoted earlier? I live in a city in the South where every student in a failing school has a right to go to any other public school or some private ones for free. We also have magnet schools.

Also, in my city the real estate is very cheap, we don't have the situation like in DC where you can't afford to live in a good school district. You can. You can rent an apartment in the best school area for $600, the houses are very affordable. Right now I can buy a house in the best school district for $135,000. Median income is around $50K.

Yet, we still ended up have with the same result. Failing schools are black. Thriving schools are white.

How do you explain this? Please do.

I'm the PP you're addressing. I don't know much about how schools are funded where you are, but providing families with the option to leave a school typically creates a Catch-22: when a school's enrollment numbers fall, so do allocated dollar amounts. So if a parent is unable to send their kid to a better school - because say, they don't have reliable transportation - then they're stuck where they are, with other students who have similar challenges and a school with fewer resources to meet them. There are countless factors, all very much about race and not going away any time soon, exacerbating that problem. Housing and employment discrimination are just a couple of entrenched factors that keep poor minorities trapped right where they are, but charters and school voucher programs are also siphoning funds from public schools where they're needed most.

People on this forum love to say parents just need to invest in home reading and get involved with fundraising. But what happens when there are no books? How do you raise funds from people who have none to give? How do you get more parent involvement from people working 2-3 jobs just to pay rent?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:New poster here

Here is the elephant in the room

Why do many Asian and African immigrants generally break the poverty cycle in one generation while other populations don't

It's not SES because most immigrants arrive at the bottom of the SES stack so they have to attend a "crappy" school with parents working crappy long jobs but somehow the students make it

Yes, it is SES. The average African and Asian immigrant to the US is more likely to have a college degree than the average American. This fact is easily viewed in the census data. Some Asian immigrants may be working in jobs that don't use their skills, because they don't speak English, and it's hard to learn as an adult. My college roommate's dad was a teacher in CHina, but ran a small grocery store in the US,because he couldn't speak English. nevertheless, he could help my roommate and her sisters with math.

yep - middle class in their home countries. They come with emotional and social capital that those stuck in generations of poverty, racism, and oppression don't have. A better comparison is latino immigrants because many do come from lower, oppressed classes. However, like the kids who got on the bus to travel 10 miles to a different h.s., you are dealing with the ones with enough know-how to get themselves out. Plus there is so much poverty in these countries that it is economic deprivation without the social oppression because the majority not the minority are oppressed - that has to make a difference in your sense of self. Still, I imagine the hardworking, value education latino immigrant stereotype comes from the immigrants who had more in their home country than the poor poor ones. Getting out of poverty is hard, nearly impossible.

Agree with all of this. There's no elephant in the room. What there is, is a huge selection bias in terms of immigrants who have the wherewithal to make it out of their current circumstances and settle in the U.S. Also, black and Asian immigrants are not a monolith--plenty of them still live in humble circumstances in the U.S. Many work in service industries and live in mostly immigrant neighborhoods--they're not all living in Mclean and Potomac.

-child of black and Asian immigrants

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Black schools do get the worst teachers and no supplies. The entire point of the npr piece is that if there are not enough white kids in a school, the school will never get the kind of resources and quality teachers and attention it needs.

Why do black schools get worst resources? I'm sure they don't open a school with this in mind. Because students fail, no one wants to invest into failure, waste resources.

I remember a story I read or heard about a program designed by Harvard educators where they took kids from impoverished neighborhood by lottery and put them through this rigourous program with best teachers. The kids improved significantly. But only as long as they were in the program. When they graduated and went to colleges most of them dropped out.

wow to the first statement. Your second example even shows these students wouldn't fail? They don't get the resources because they are poor and black and there is no one to demand that they get the resources they deserve (and they don't have the political or social or cultural capital to successfully demand it themselves).

There is a lot of research to answer the second statement - stuff about lack of financial resources, lack of emotional support from overtaxed families, difficulty envisioning the path ahead because no one in their community ahs walked it; first generational college students face certain hardships whether they are black or white, and they are much less likely to finish no matter their ability The reason these students drop out is not that they don't give a shit about education.

[Anonymous]

I don't like the way this is going

What is the solution here????

Thats what really matters

Is it going to take mass replication of KIPP or the Harlem Project?
Would we better off gutting entire city AND rural areas and giving them to a bunch of urban planners/private backers?
DC is basically halfway there.... Should we just dismantle the rest of the DC public school system. We spend a ridiculous amount of money for the return on investment

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't like the way this is going

What is the solution here????

Thats what really matters

Is it going to take mass replication of KIPP or the Harlem Project?
Would we better off gutting entire city AND rural areas and giving them to a bunch of urban planners/private backers?
DC is basically halfway there.... Should we just dismantle the rest of the DC public school system. We spend a ridiculous amount of money for the return on investment

The TAL episodes posit that integration has a lot of positive research supporting it as a key tool in closing the achievement gap. But the political dynamics in this country don't allow discussion of integrating schools by government fiat- people hear about integration plans, think about busing, and don't allow it. So one proposed solution was the magnet school model put in place in Hartford. In some ways its a similar variation on the language immersion charters and other "HRCS"- create a program that will appeal to middle and upper income people, but with open enrollment and lotteries you will get a good cross section of the city. A similar program was put in place in Kansas City and ended up failing badly.

There are no magic bullets in a country which is so segregated, by race, by income, by educational background, you name it. You do have to wonder if our system of generally small local school districts, supported primarily by property taxes (so the richer areas get more, generally), wasn't set up on purpose.