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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No One is ignoring that acps is mostly serving underprivileged/under performing students. It’s widely known and accepted. It has been that way for decades and isn’t worthy of note. [/quote]

And soon it will be true of south Arlington as well.[/quote]

What has changed in south Arlington?[/quote]

Bifurcation. Housing prices have gone way up. Way up. And at the same time, more and more CAFs. Thus what you get are very wealthy who can afford a SFH, and the very poor who can only afford to live here through large subsidies.

The wealthy also can afford to send their kids to private instead of a public school in which 6 or 7 kids out of 10 don’t speak English and live in poverty. It’s not that these parents are “racist” it’s that they know in a classroom situation like that is triage and the teachers are going to put most of their time and effort to the kids that need the most help. And that’s not the kid living in a 850k reno, and TBH shouldn’t be. And when the rich kids bail, the imbalance gets worse, and the worse the imbalance is, the more it repels UMC and MC families who would consider a 40 or 50 percent FRL school but not a 70 or 80 percent one.[/quote]

Ah yes. That.
- former south Arlington homeowner[/quote]

It's not racism, it's opportunity hoarding. (And it's not just families in south Arlington, it's the whole system, including people that insist on "neighborhood" boundaries that don't cross route 50---or Lee Highway.) There's no sense that everyone has some civic responsibility to improve the public school system for all kids. No one wants to walk the walk. [/quote]

Bailing on an underperforming high poverty school is not “opportunity hoarding.” It’s leaving to find opportunity.[/quote]

How do you bring opportunity to those schools? I think most of us are worried about sacrificing our kids' education for kids who have to start from so far behind? I'm all for integration, but what do you do when 2/3s of your kids' class is learning in English for the first time, can't read, and didn't attend school until recently? It's great that they've made it, but how do you catch them up so that all the kids are at the same level? How can you be sure your kid is still learning? It's the same argument over and over. No one has come up with a solution that works across the board. Which just makes everyone paranoid.[/quote]

There is a solution that works across the board: busing. Integration and inclusion. Separate isn't equal so anything that separates students will end up unequal. What's lacking isn't evidence, but the political will, esp since everyone who bought before Amazon is now sitting in a gold mine (or so they think).

A few thoughts about your question though. First, what is your description based on? Are you looking at tables and doing mental math about what these classrooms must be like, or are you going from what you know they are like?  Second, just how bad for your particular kid is the scenario you describe, being in a setting with people of varying experience, and if that is harmful for your kid, why?  People fight to get kids into Montessori because kids of differing abilities teach each other there, so why is it undesirable in this context? Why do you see education as a zero-sum game of the teacher's attention, esp since (going out on a limb here) your kid gets the attention of two educated parents at home to compensate, and is almost never absent?

I have a kid at Carlin Springs w a disability, so I know the administration there is extremely inclusion-minded and open to meeting all students where they are, for whatever reason that they are there. As Title 1 schools, the SA neighborhood schools aren't without resources. The option system is strong in SA IMO to assuage the concerns of parents like you (and me, TBH, my other kid is at an option school) by giving us a path to an environment that's NA-like without us having to move. [/quote]

Busing would be great, but the school board has been so resistant to it. We could easily have socioeconomic schools that way.

My descriptions are based on statistics from schools in Arlington and what I have seen and been told by other parents. If you have a school with 60% ESL kids, some of whom we know are new arrivals and new to school in general, that poses an educational issue that doesn't seem like its been adequately addressed. Otherwise, APS wouldn't be dealing with claims that it is under serving the population. I'm well aware that there are people of varying experience (I count myself as one of them). I did question what my kid could be learning while most of the class is focused on catching up. It's one thing when it's a couple of kids - it's another when it's most of the class - that's a huge disparity to overcome.

Education isn't a zero sum game when it comes to attention, but I don't think its unreasonable to expect that your kid will learn at school, not written off as being okay. I don't want to compensate, I want to enrich. I want to be part of a diverse school, which is why we live in SA. Majority-minority is not diverse (I went to a school like that). And the choice system clearly is a lottery - not everyone gets a spot. Differentiation is supposed to answer some of this by teaching to different skill levels, but it's not perfect; with all of those resources, those schools still have half the student body that can't pass the tests. Maybe the scores should be broken down further into how long those kids have been in school, but I question how does school system plan to remedy that gap? 
[/quote]
 You can't compare a 16 yr old kid who crossed the border reading at a 4th grade level against an UMC kid who was raised by highly educated parents. I don't understand why the school systems in this area can't face this reality. How about we work on educating each child to the best of their ability instead of expecting everyone to be the same.[/quote]

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