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[quote=Anonymous]One problem that a few people are hinting at but not highlighting is that there is an extreme gap in parental educational achievement in DC.

DC has EXTREMELY high numbers of advanced degree holders, educational overachievers and formerly gifted students.  Throw a brick and you'll hit a parent who was a high school valedictorian, a national merit scholar or someone who got a 1400 on the SAT at 12.  These are primarily among the elites - newcomers, not black/poor, but there are plenty of them in our city.  In contrast with many cities it's actually kind of striking that among the white parent population you have very, very few people who are not educational overachievers (go to Baltimore or Philly for example to compare).

By contrast, among the poor black population, whose children are the majority in our school systems, school achievement is a reflection of the failure of urban education systems along with all aspects of urban services and life in DC for decades, much as it has been in many American cities.

Children's educational outcomes, per research, seem to take parental achievement as a starting point.  It's a sad thing for a country that believes in bootstraps and inequality being a mindset, etc., but it's real.

So we have a situation where if DC were normed against the rest of the country, we'd have divergent cohorts of children: many very likely to fit into the top 20%, many very likely to sit in the bottom 20%, and practically no one in the middle.

What approach to that is educationally appropriate, democratic, egalitarian, or best for our future is hard to say. I am not the person who has settled how to Make America Great Again or Finally Great or Whatever (though I'm pretty sure it doesn't involve a Wall in Texas).

BUT I believe generally that our rich kids are gonna be OK. Ward 3 is not going down the tubes.  I am not going to care about gifted education - my kids are going to get jobs at some point, and they might even do good things with their lives.  It's going to happen.

What I don't want to see any more is kids who aren't educable to a level that can see them employed and living with self-respect.  Those kids are opportunities we are throwing away at every poorly educated grade, and honestly these are the people who are going to smoke their lives away, misdirect their energy toward misguided notions of masculinity and authenticity like crime, and hold DC back when we should be a powerhouse regionally and worldwide. We all know this stuff, but we think about our own kids and their 6th grade algebra class first.

I'm just asking that everybody widen their horizons a little.[/quote]

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