Reply to Did the Takoma MS magnet got MORE white this year?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t feel sorry for the kids, I feel sorry for the parents who put all their egg in the basket thinking that if only billy can get in our house choices won’t come back to bite him.[/quote]

I....don't think that's the case here. You are positing that middle class families in economically diverse neighborhoods were "putting all of their egg(s) in the magnet basket."

However, it isn't families in racially and economically diverse neighbohoods that are howling this year. It is families in highly segregated neighborhoods who never got a chance to tell the committee that Billy is on Suzuki Book 8, and never had a chance to write a carefully crafted letter about how Susie's academic needs simply cannot be met at Hoover, Pyle, Cabin John, etc.

When you cast a wider net, test kids who otherwise might not have been identified, and get rid of the parts of the application that are just a proxy for class, you have a better and more equitable system.

As someone who lives in an integrated neighborhood, let me tell you something you may not be able to see from Potomac: My kids' classmates are smart and hard-working, but I can SEE the institutional barriers that made CES and magnet middle school admissions harder for those kids in the past. A lack of knowledge of the test, challenging transportation logistics, no resources to pad the resume with private robotics lessons and all of the other things that people use to "prove" how gifted their child is.

So those kids are doing all of the after school clubs they can at the school, sticking around to study in the library, and genuinely doing their best within an unfair system that has been stacked against them since the start.

Trust me, it isn't those of us on the west side of the county that are upset about this. We know how necessary the changes were becuase it is our kids' friends who should have a chance at the brass ring, and who may have a slightly better chance now that the net is bigger and the extra parts of the application have been abolished. 
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