Should MCPS start busing or open enrollment?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
You do realize that the whole country's school system, tax structure, property values, etc are based the same way. On where you live (rent or buy).

Good luck pontifying on changing the whole entire system just because you don't make as much income as someone else with and entirely different human capital earnings function.

Yes, I do realize this. I also realize that it's unjust for children to have unequal educational opportunities based on how much money their parents have.

But then you can extend this argument to the entire state. Taxes in Mont Cty are proportionally inconsistent with how much the state allocates to the county. Why should someone who lives in PG or Balt City have an unequal education. You receive a diploma from the state of Md not from the county of Montgomery.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
You do realize that the whole country's school system, tax structure, property values, etc are based the same way. On where you live (rent or buy).

Good luck pontifying on changing the whole entire system just because you don't make as much income as someone else with and entirely different human capital earnings function.

Yes, I do realize this. I also realize that it's unjust for children to have unequal educational opportunities based on how much money their parents have.

But then you can extend this argument to the entire state. Taxes in Mont Cty are proportionally inconsistent with how much the state allocates to the county. Why should someone who lives in PG or Balt City have an unequal education. You receive a diploma from the state of Md not from the county of Montgomery.

Yes, you can. Indeed, why should someone who lives in Prince George's County or Baltimore City receive an unequal education? The state allocates more money to school systems that need it more, just as the county does -- as they should. But as long as there's residential segregation by income, that will never solve the problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

But currently the public school that you attend is based in where you live. Many people on here are saying they would like to live in the W districts for the schools but cannot afford to do so. They feel that just because try cannot afford to live in the area, their children should still be able to attend the W district schools.

I think school achievement is a function if parent involvement.
Schools that have higher parent involvement have students that do better academically. One suggestion might be to over haul parent involvement in the local schools.

That is your opinion. The fact is that school achievement is a function of the parents' socioeconomic status.

And again, if access to a public school is restricted to the children of people who can afford to live in the neighborhood, to what extent is it actually a public public school?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My husband and I made a lot of sacrifices to be able to afford a house in a W cluster. Needless to say, I would be extremely upset if the county decided to bus our children to another school because they wanted to "improve" the other school. Quite frankly, it is not my children's responsibility (or mine) to add stability to a school three towns over. The parents in that area are just as capable of engaging and working to improve their school as I am. I recognize that my opinion is not popular on this board, but my job is to parent my children not an entire school district.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

This. We can debate the point at which the %FARMS starts to become counterproductive, but what to do to make the theory into reality? On some other thread someone explained how school choice worked in another state -- the county published lists of schools with open slots and parents could apply for those spaces, but would need to reapply at the next stage (MS or HS) and were responsible for their own transportation. That's more or less the way that DC works, and those of us who had kids in DC and who lived through this process can attest to how chaotic it can be. We got into our first choice out of the block, and with sibling preferences, we were set for ES. But many people applied every year (and sometimes mid-year) to try to get into a school, drove their kids all over town in the meantime, and we all missed out on the concept of a neighborhood school, school friends you could visit on foot or by bike, and the simple pleasure of not spending 2 hours a day in transit. I can see where open enrollment can, on the margins, even out some places like the Cold Spring/Ritchie Park imbalance pointed out elsewhere, but it's no silver bullet for county-wide imbalances, especially in a county as big as Montgomery.

Agreed. We don't know at what point the % of FARMS becomes counter-productive for low-income kids, but the report is completely correcting that housing policy is school policy.

The problem is that this is a feature, not a bug. Housing policy reflects the desire of people with money to live over here, as far as possible from the poor people over there. And part of the reason for that desire is schools.

But isn't it really which came first, the chicken or the egg? What makes the schools in the red zone bad? Is it the teachers and curriculum? Or the students? As far as I know, MCPS curriculum is standardized, and there are good and bad teachers at all schools. So, it's the students. The poor students. And a high percentage if them scares people.

FWIW my kids go to a school with a high number of FARMS kids, have only a handful of white, upper MC kids in their entire grade, and are learning just fine. The bigger issue is social, but that's another story.

[Anonymous]

Maybe the answer is charters. Isn't this the same argument that the DC public school forum is having--- that kids in NW get to attend a better performing school than someone who lives in SW?

[Anonymous]

Folks, we live in a democracy. As a result, there will be a wide variety of incomes and the choice to live where you want. If you want to dictate how much someone earns and where they live this really isn't the country for you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

But isn't it really which came first, the chicken or the egg? What makes the schools in the red zone bad? Is it the teachers and curriculum? Or the students? As far as I know, MCPS curriculum is standardized, and there are good and bad teachers at all schools. So, it's the students. The poor students. And a high percentage if them scares people.

FWIW my kids go to a school with a high number of FARMS kids, have only a handful of white, upper MC kids in their entire grade, and are learning just fine. The bigger issue is social, but that's another story.

Which came first? Housing policy. Specifically, post-World War II housing policy, which was specifically designed to keep poor people and black people out of the suburbs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Folks, we live in a democracy. As a result, there will be a wide variety of incomes and the choice to live where you want. If you want to dictate how much someone earns and where they live this really isn't the country for you.

This reminds me of the quote by Anatole France: La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain. Translated as: The infinite majesty of the law, which forbids rich and poor like to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal bread.

That fact is that we actually don't all have the choice to live where we want. Only some of us do. Guess which ones?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

But isn't it really which came first, the chicken or the egg? What makes the schools in the red zone bad? Is it the teachers and curriculum? Or the students? As far as I know, MCPS curriculum is standardized, and there are good and bad teachers at all schools. So, it's the students. The poor students. And a high percentage if them scares people.

FWIW my kids go to a school with a high number of FARMS kids, have only a handful of white, upper MC kids in their entire grade, and are learning just fine. The bigger issue is social, but that's another story.

Which came first? Housing policy. Specifically, post-World War II housing policy, which was specifically designed to keep poor people and black people out of the suburbs.

^^^Another thing to remember is that MCPS was segregated by law until the early 1960s. (After that it was just de facto segregation.)

[Anonymous]

No, we don't all have the choice to live where we want. In fact, the majority of us can't live where we want. Bussing kids around the county isn't going to change that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The reality is that the MCPS system is one of the best in the country and a student can get a solid education- if they want one- in any of the schools in the district.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No, we don't all have the choice to live where we want. In fact, the majority of us can't live where we want. Bussing kids around the county isn't going to change that.

Busing kids around the county is not going to allow us to live where we want, that is true. But then "not being able to live where we want" is not the problem that busing is supposed to fix. Busing is supposed to fix the problem of school segregation.

(Whether busing actually would fix school segregation is a separate question.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

But currently the public school that you attend is based in where you live. Many people on here are saying they would like to live in the W districts for the schools but cannot afford to do so. They feel that just because try cannot afford to live in the area, their children should still be able to attend the W district schools.

I think school achievement is a function if parent involvement.
Schools that have higher parent involvement have students that do better academically. One suggestion might be to over haul parent involvement in the local schools.

That is your opinion. The fact is that school achievement is a function of the parents' socioeconomic status.

And again, if access to a public school is restricted to the children of people who can afford to live in the neighborhood, to what extent is it actually a public public school?

I don't think parent SES is the determinative factor. I think it's parent educational attainment, which might correlate with SES, but doesn't have to. We all want high-functioning local schools, and I think a big part of what makes the W cluster schools high-performing are the children and the involvement of the parents, not the facilities, and not the PTAs. And, frankly, the educational attainment of the parents has a bigger effect than the parents' SES. Not to say that parents in other districts don't also have PhDs and the like, but I think places like Bethesda have unusually high concentrations of people with post-graduate degrees. It has an impact on the children when their parents and all their friends' parents expect -- not just want -- their kids to go to college and beyond. I know this because we work with children in DC who grow up in communities where people may not even expect to graduate from high school. Cycles repeat themselves.

It's hard not to see these inequalities wholly through the lens of money, but at least for us, moving to a "W" district was not about wanting SES purity. The biggest difference between our kids' experience in DC public schools and MCPS is that our kids have way more peers at advanced academic levels. Whereas in DC our kids would be in reading groups of one and hope that teachers would remember to do something with them beside toss a book at them, in their MCPS ES, they have an entire reading group to work with, which has had a very beneficial effect on their excitement about learning. A lot has been made of the big budgets of the PTAs in W schools, but (not to take away from the hard work of those PTAs), most of the funding goes to extras that, if they didn't exist, I don't think would matter that much to my kids' day-to-day academic experience. You could take my kids and their peers and stick them into a crumbling classroom, and it wouldn't be great, but they would still learn and push each other along.

This peer group effect (which has been magnified in HGC) is what I was looking for -- a classroom full of nerdy kids like mine who won't tease them for their Target and church bazaar clothes and their tendency to ramble on about whatever non-pop-culture thing they're into these days. I don't care what color their classmates are, and I don't care how much money they have. I actually prefer my kids DON'T have rich friends, because it's just a headache for me when they want to know why so-and-so has something and they don't. We loved the diverse environment of our kids' school in DC, but they were alone academically -- that is the only reason we left. If their current peer group can be propagated and sustained everywhere in MCPS through forced busing, then great. But I am pretty sure what I want for my kids is not what everyone else wants -- people complain all the time even in the W clusters that school is too much of a pressure cooker. And given what everyone is saying on DCUM about these inequalities, I am guessing it's not easy to replicate and sustain. So I don't think the answer is that the resources of the W schools have to be redistributed county-wise to even it all out, so that no school is higher-performing than another. If we went down that path, you'd see W school parents going private (if they can afford it), or moving to Fairfax. Maybe it's selfish not to agree to provide my child as a resource to another school, but you get that way when it comes to your kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My husband and I made a lot of sacrifices to be able to afford a house in a W cluster. Needless to say, I would be extremely upset if the county decided to bus our children to another school because they wanted to "improve" the other school. Quite frankly, it is not my children's responsibility (or mine) to add stability to a school three towns over. The parents in that area are just as capable of engaging and working to improve their school as I am. I recognize that my opinion is not popular on this board, but my job is to parent my children not an entire school district.

That is the point. There are no towns here. This is ONE LARGE COUNTY. ONE school district. We are all entitled (yes, ENTITLED) to the same degree of support, resources, education from our ONE school district.