Reply to SF and Boston votes on changing admissions criteria for magnet schools this week

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Why 20%?

Do you want to allot 80% of doctors, writers, mathematicians, physicists... by zip code?[/quote][/quote]

Sorry. Long quote. Here it is again.

Because most people won’t be in the top 20% and everybody understands that. So, most kids in the class will get in by lottery. It will cut down on the whispering. At the same time, 20% is broad enough to capture the brilliant, incandescent kids. Because it is by zip,code, there’s some hope for economic diversity, at least this year. It’s miles better than a straight lottery. The one downfall is all the pushy parents who will be mobbing the teachers, angling to get their kids ranked higher than their best friend. They will need to institute major protections.

This is another way to come close to what MCPS has done by dividing their schools into three SES groups and ranking student magnet test scores against only the students within their Similar SES Set of MCPS schools. Except you just compete in your zip code.[/quote]
Boston's Chinatown's zip code 02111 is one of the poorest zip codes in the city of Boston, with a median household income of $40,870 per year.

They normally send about 25 kids per year to the Exam Schools, these poor restaurant workers and new immigrants who don't speak English. Using the new rules, without exam and with allocation by zip code, they will send about 7-8, one third of their normal total.

Why do they use zip code in Boston? Why don't they simply give advantage to families in poverty?

I'll tell you why.

If they give advantage to poor people, they will get more poor Asians from Chinatown.

Asians are concentrated in a small number of zip codes. When they allocate by zip code, they will force the Asians to compete with each other. They use zip code to limit the number of Asians admitted.

They ran simulations behind closed doors (they said so in the meeting). Their only goal is proportional representation by skin color.

Don't tell me this is to achieve geographic parity.

Don't tell me this is equity.

We are not that stupid.[/quote]

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