School Segregation and the Boundary Issues
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Anonymous
Not the PP but someone with a similar family history on both sides. Immigrant grandparents & great-grandparents who worked like dogs to give their kids stability and an education. The "you" means parents. Parents must prioritize their family structure. Their children need to be the focus. I don't care if mom and grandma are educated (my grandmothers were not) but they took care of the children/family and made home a solid, calm, favorite place to be with good food and warm interactions. My immigrant grandmas (from two different cultures) always told us kids how smart we are and how imortant it was to read and study and be proud of ourselves. If kids come from stable, solid homes, they will be ready and available to learn at school. |
Anonymous
Well Duh. Though some in this thread don't want to admit it, that is unfortunately the first game of lottery in life. |
Anonymous
Exactly -- and there are a lot of kids in this city (and elsewhere) who unfortunately haven't have that stability. Also unfortunately, the recent reform effort denied that home stability was a factor in the ability of schools to provide excellent education. Therefore DCPS spent a lot of wasted time and effort demonizing teachers and principals to prove their point. They were horribly wrong, as some people knew from the beginning. I don't recall many middle class parents protesting much at the time though. I'm glad to see that's changing and that more parents are starting to understand that public education problems in DC aren't simple and don't have a simple answer - like moving kids around the city like widgets or assessing teachers as if they are producing widgets all made from the same raw material. |
Anonymous
| It was called "No Excuses" reform and to suggest that anything besides a good teacher was needed to raise scores to high levels was to admit that you thought that poor children can't learn. |
Anonymous
| It isn't that poor children can't learn. It is that poor parenting produces poor learners. DC first and foremost has a colossal parenting problem. It is considered racist and classist to point out that obvious fact, but it is the truth. |
Anonymous
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And a big part of the parenting problem has to do with parents' ability to make a livable income. Guess where that ability starts?
Yes, there are choices to be made but if those choices are harshly limited, you have to be a pretty extraordinary person to just find out what better choices are out there, let alone make them. For a lot of parents, the right choice is getting their kid out of their immediate neighborhood. That's more and more difficult to do with housing choices, so school is a start but we're cutting that off, too. For more on the history of federal-level policymaking that created housing segregation, listen to the "House Rules" episode of This American Life that features the research of Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was also in the NPR story in the original post on this thread. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/house-rules If you can't give up a whole hour, just listen to the 5 minute prologue about the girl whose mother went to jail for sending her daughter to a school in a different neighborhood. |
Anonymous
The people with really bad parenting skills don't know or care how to get their kids to a good school in a different neighborhood. There are charters in DC that don't have lotteries because they are in neighborhoods where the charter is the most convenient school to go to and no one from across town would want to go there. The neighborhood school may have closed. So the kids just go to the charter. A parent who cares about their children's education, AND has transportation AND time to check out the better charters MIGHT get their kids in a good charter school IF they win the lottery. This is no way to run a public school system with a responsibility to provide education for all. |
Anonymous
Whenever I hear bootstrapping stories or people talk about their favorite model minority du jour (Vietnamese boat people?!) I want to always point out that most of these poor families were usually stable and the families supported and encouraged the kids in going to school. The children were not being abused or neglected at home. I've seen it firsthand. A lot of the poorest students in DC are also dealing with trauma - being abused, being neglected, being abandoned by a parent, having a parent incarcerated, being removed from your family, and put into foster care, parents on drugs, homelessness. I've seen parents who neglected their kids and it was the kids's job to get up in the morning and go to school because their parents were asleep. Kids whose parents wouldn't wash their clothing or take care of their hair. All of that creates is trauma in the poor kid's brain. I remember one kid specifically who was dealing with both abuse and neglect.(going to be rather vague to hide the details) Although the student had a phenomenal teacher (who later got recruited to a JKLMM school) the student was just not able to sit in class and learn and would often have emotional breakdowns. The student was not able to learn. The best thing the teacher did for the student was get social services involved. The following year, the student was removed from living in a neglectful and abusive home. Even though the student was not in the best classroom the student still made huge advances in reading and math and went from being two years behind to being on grade level. Another issue I'd see all the time was just bad parenting. Although the child's physical needs were being kept the parent just had no idea how to raise a kid and teach them right from wrong or that actions have consequences. It is very hard to give a child boundaries at school when they are used to getting whatever they want or just being spanked or whipped with a strap when they misbehave. Anyway what I'm trying to say is that while I understand politically that you can't say "High expectations for some" until DC is able to change the entrenched poverty situation, the schools will still have a lot of students who are just dealing with too much trauma to be function well in school. |
Anonymous
| to 9:27 - yes, what what you say is quite logical and easy to understand if thinking more with logic than emotion or unbased hope. Unfortunately the DCPS administration has not been using much logic. Hopefully, that is changing. |
Anonymous
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Children in crisis is not in just DC. My sister had three kids removed from parents when she was teaching because of meth and that was in SLC, UT. She also said it felt awful because these kids struggled to learn anything and she did not know how to reach them.
I think most teachers in any SES stressed area will find 5-10% of kids are in circumstances where learning is that compromised. What I found with some volunteering experiences in South East is that these children disproportionally took over the class with behavioral problems because it was the only method they had to demand the world pay attention to their internal crisis. The majority of children in these classrooms can learn and do well if teachers have the supports for the other children. That takes money, organization and priorities. There are plenty of single parents who want their kids to learn, work really hard at low wage jobs and pull together a respectable life, but their children's lives and opportunities are compromised by the pathologies of the neighborhood. The last 30 years have been about stripping services out of these neighborhoods, yes even here in liberal DC. The general rate of inflation nationally may be low, but for the poor it has been very high in the core products they consume- housing, fuel, food. Then you go back to who teaches in these hard schools, the newest, least experienced or just as often, burned out, pushed out, just waiting for a pension. There are a handful of amazing teachers in many of these schools, but cumulative years of poor teachers are difficult to make up. Now let's look at your kids- Probably both parent, probably grandparents, solid schools, at least one or more educational camps over the summer, generally pretty good nutrition, even if not whole foods- fruits and vegetables at most meals. Your vocabulary because you have at least a bachelor's if not a masters is about 10 times the single mom above who has a high school degree. You make sure to read to your kid, your home has a selection of interesting reading material from a bookstore or library and your children see you read. If you are the single mom, maybe you go to the library, but you worry all the time your kid will loose a book and you will have to pay so you limit them to two books and you go less often to the library. Sometimes you buy books for you kid but your selection is limited to what is available at the grocery store and Target or Walmart. There are not bookstores East of 16th street going all the way into Prince Georges County. You have video games, but you limit them, you buy educational games like minecraft. If you are the single mother you have a DS for your child because you saved for it, but you certainly not focusing on educational games and you may be thinking a lot less about the trade off with reading. It doesn't take long to see how there are several years difference in attainment by the time a kid reaches 6th grade even for the average single mom that really cares, through in a parent that really doesn't have it together and you get the 7th grade that reads at 2nd grade. None of these problems is ever solved, many can be mitigated, but it takes more than "no excuses" slogans, it take more than the Union constantly fighting, it takes more than rich people saying my poor immigrant uncle. It takes a societal shift that says these kids matter, how do we change the trajectory. |
Anonymous
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Thank you 11:00 - now if only you and others like you could have some real influence on DCPS leaders.
It's hard to let go of a mindset, though, especially when you're not directly challenged on it by your superiors or by the community you supposedly serve. |
Anonymous
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To 9:27 and 11:00: I say thank you. Some of us just don't get it. Even I, someone who should know better, fall into the Horatio Alger trap when thinking about this issue of poverty.
There will always be exceptional people who can manage to overcome horrific circumstances, but most of us are successful or not due to our environment and nurturing. |
Anonymous
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Thank you 9:27 and 11:00 for your beautiful, insightful responses. I am a teacher (who previously taught in SE), and most of the conversations that I see in DCUM are heartbreaking and frustrating because of narrow minded, selfish responses. Great teachers and great schools cannot overcome systemic inequities that are plaguing the lives of so many students in DC.
It also makes me really sad because most of the people who are on this board (I'm going to make an assumption, probably ignorant) are likely have the class privilege and racial privilege that make institutions pay attention to their needs. If these families invested in neighborhood schools that might not be as attractive as JKLM schools, perhaps the needs of the surrounding community would actually be addressed. I currently work at a Title I school as an Early Childhood teacher, so I have the amazing luxury of having a class of students that is racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse. The community within the classroom, and the relationships we have been able to build are some of the most powerful that I've experienced, and I genuinely believe it's because of the demographic of my class. My kids have been able to see each other as human beings, and have learned the value of what it means to truly live and function in an authentic, multicultural environment that seeks to promote the well being of all people. Yet I fear that some of my affluent families will be leaving my school, because although they've told me that I'm a great teacher, they don't know if they can put their trust in other teachers because our school's test scores aren't high enough. If only those students and families would stay and invest in their community, what I've been able to accomplish (and what other teachers are accomplishing in DCPS citywide), wouldn't be lost. |
Anonymous
| If the handful if whites left the DCPS school system it wouldn't make a dent in the services or benefits for education. Really you want blacks to believe that blacks who are running the majority of DCPS are only doing so because a droplet of whites attend DCPS. That's not segregation but speculation. |
Anonymous
That's an interesting P.O.V. In that scenario, who's f*cking up here? |