Reply to New opposition petition to the Maury-Miner boundary proposal from DME

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm in-bound for Miner and wholeheartedly support the proposal to pair the schools. I get why Maury parents would oppose it - you paid a premium for your rowhomes with a specific understanding that you could send your children to a majority-white and high-SES elementary school and here comes DME wanting to essentially reverse the gentrifying effects that made Maury the school it is today and throw open the gates to the grandkids of the starburst crowd. I'd be gnashing my teeth too, but that doesn't mean this doesn't make sense for the neighborhood as a whole, or for the children in our little pocket of Northeast as a whole, which is where DME's greatest duty lies.

I've never been one for the "In this house we believe..." signs like many of the folks blowing a gasket over this proposal, but hoo boy y'all's opposition to this (especially in that 140+ page thread, which was locked by the time I finished reading it) has led to a lot of hysterics and bizarre takes.

Imagine my surprise in that first thread to hear that my neighborhood is "controlled by gangs" and "might as well be Baltimore." Yes, the concentrated poverty and crime in Azeeze-Bates and the Pentacle Apartments is unfortunate, but the bottom line is that this proposal is the best option for the neighborhood as a whole. The neighborhood is not scary and the starburst doesn't really intersect with the comings and goings at Miner. It's on the other side of a four lane road and a world away. The schools are not far apart - hearing all this woe-is-me stuff about terrible commutes is comical, as well as these preposterous proposals to do a public housing gerrymander or foist Miner's kids on faraway Ludlow-Taylor instead. Then in desperation y'all say "just throw money at it, just hire a superstar principal, [I]anything[/I] but putting my kids in the same building with [I]them.[/I]

I believe the ugly truth is that a lot of these low-SES at-risk children are beyond saving. No amount of money spent on smart boards or tutoring or enrichment is going to cure what ails them, because it's bone deep. It's a cyclical tragedy and a Gordian knot I don't pretend to be qualified to dissect. There is, of course, some variation in performance between schools with lots of at-risk kids, but on the whole I'd argue that schools like Maury or LT didn't improve just because the parents just [I]cared so very much[/I] more than Miner parents or what have you...it's because the students of yesteryear got body-snatched and replaced with high-SES, Type-A-mommy, white kids.

The biggest benefit of this proposal to me is - unfortunately somewhat dependent on to what degree y'all pack up your yard signs and catch the next D6 to the Palisades  - that it has the potential to massively increase buy-in from in-bound Miner UMC parents who otherwise generally lottery their kids into a charter or nearby DCPS elementary school in the upper grades. If that happened, you get a truly diverse student body that still has a solid percentage of UMC parents and theoretically less OOB students coming in from EOTR. That isn't going to "fix" education for most of the in-bound at-risk kids growing up in Ward 7 without fathers and/or who never get spoken to unless it's a yell or a slap, but it can be a rising tide that lifts all ships and perhaps set a few of those unfortunates on a better path and leads to a student body that isn't just concentrated poverty. Every other idea I've seen proposed here really just boils down to Maury protectionism and keeping Miner's plight out of sight out of mind. [/quote]

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