Reply to McKinley Tech - a great school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK, so why isn't this great school far more diverse? Why is it 3% white in a city where whites are more than 40% of the population these days? Just poor PR? Serious question.

Glad your teens are happy there thus far but I'm skeptical. You can shout "strong public options!" all you want. But the inconvenient truth is that few UMC families are convinced.  [/quote]

Original poster here.  I had not wanted to get into this but feel I need to address this.  As a UMC white mom myself, i was struck that my white friends had almost no info/personal insights on the school while all my AA friends highly recommended it, and rightly so.  The only thing I can think, sadly, is the a) frankly bigoted and sadly engrained assumption/fear of being singled out as the “only white kid” has kept white people away and the racist view that majority black schools in NE aren’t safe/good and b) so many kids want to only go to schools with their friends and there is a clustering effect around the same public and charter schools.  I’m sorry to be that blunt but otherwise I struggle to understand a rationale that makes sense.  Certainly it’s a STEM school and that doesn’t attract all kids.  But I struggle to see that as the key reason for the demographic composition.

Overall I just think the school (and the kids that attend) deserve recognition and I had wanted to just flag it for parents who struggled as I did to get sufficient information on it in this forum.[/quote]

This +100. And it’s true of many other schools in DC. Schools get stuck in a chicken or egg scenario of there aren’t enough white kids, so white parents wont send their kids there, so then there’s never “enough” white kids for those families to feel comfortable. Meanwhile, they’re adding hours to their commute or paying private school tuition when they likely would have had a good experience at that school—as well as gaining the benefits of a stronger local school community and having your kid exposed to a broader range of people. As a UMC white mom of a child at another predominantly Black school, the amount of conversations I have with white parents who say “we wish we could go there, it’s just not there yet” is tiresome. [/quote]

I think this is a WOTP/EOTP thing too. I live east of the park in an UMC milieu and plenty of people are talking about McKinley as an option, and I know white and black UMC people who send their kids there.

Maybe WOTP people don't and simply can't imagine that it's a good option?[/quote]

And WHY is that? Read the reasons OP posted. Lets stop running around the bush and call a spade a spade. [/quote]

Why?  Test scores.  That's the complicating factor.[/quote]

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