Reply to Janney PTA raised $1.4 million in one year

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Reply to "Janney PTA raised $1.4 million in one year"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]I've observed DC politics for over two decades, and there is a persistent theme that I'll call "DC Exceptionalism." It's the opposite of American Exceptionalism, it's the belief that things that work in other places can't work in DC because, well, thing are different here.

If you look at the list of income by state, not only does DC have higher per-capita income than Massachusetts, it has higher per-capita income than every one of the fifty states. We're number one. Yet somehow forty-six states that are poorer than us manage to turn out kids with higher SAT scores. Only Louisiana, Maine, Alabama and West Virginia have lower scores. And somehow, people cling to the belief that the reason is that our city is poor. Our city isn't poor. We have lots of poor people, but we have lots of rich people too. Overall, we're the richest jurisdiction in the country.[/quote]

I suspect this happens because DC is the first place that these people have lived in close proximity to poor folks, and therefore think DC is somehow exception in having poor people.

I mean, I can see how it happens.  You spend your whole life in Shaker Heights or Bloomfield Hills, only coming into the city for baseball games, and you are never really forced to deal with poor people.  Because DC is more compact, suddenly these folks are shocked to find poverty existing alongside ludicrous wealth, and they think DC is somehow special.  [/quote]

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