Reply to Integration and DC Schools -- A high priority? Yay or nay?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Integration and DC Schools -- A high priority? Yay or nay?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Integration is very important to me and I am engaged in it, but it is generally overtaken by other priorities on this board.

I'd say mostly, this board wants differentiation and to not have children of board participants in the same schools as students with behavior problems. Those goals do not go well with generalized integration.

There are also more general segregation/race and class relations issues, with a major one being a distribution of income and educational attainment that is at the edges with nobody in the middle ([b]we have a bunch of high income advanced degree holders and HS-or-worse educated low income parents, nothing in between in DC[/b]).[/quote]

If you actually think this, it's a reflection of your own limited social circle. It's wrong. DC has plenty of families that are middle income. Lots of people just have college degrees and no advanced degree, plus plenty of fields offer steady income but not high income. We can afford to own homes (condos or houses in part so the city outside the most gentrified neighborhoods, and also if you bought before rates went up) and care about education, but also money is tight because this is an expensive city and it gets more expensive all the time. On the other hand, living in the city often gives us the ability to live without a car or with just one car, living in small homes keep us from accumulating so much stuff, and there are real cost savings to being close in to work and lots of free entertainment. So a lot of us are loathe to move out of the city where we might get cheaper housing and food but more expensive and longer commutes and a host of other expenses just by virtue of living far away from things.

I regularly feel completely invisible in discussions about education in the city because so many people think as you do. That there are only two kinds of people in the city: (1) rich, mostly white people with advanced degrees, and (2) poor black and hispanic people with a HS education or less. I'm sure your in group #1 and it's actually an embarrassment to your education that you are so ignorant of the many many families of every race in this city that are dual income, have college degrees, are not rich, can still pay our bills, and obviously send our kids to public schools because where the hell else are we going to send them?

What's funny is that we send our kids to school with rich people and poor people, and people just lack the observational skills or common sense to understand that we are middle class. Some of the rich people at our school just assume we are also rich, because we wear professional clothes and have read books, and they seem confused when we don't have opinions on whether Colorado or Vermont is better for New Year's skiing. Other rich people at our school just group us in with the poor people. The poor people all think we are rich, which is fair, because compared to them we are. Literally no one cares if our family's needs are being met by the school system.[/quote] Eh--while there are definite divides between income/wealth amongst the college educated and above class--fundamentally everyone in this group is well-educated and want their kids to be well-educated. How are they not aligned on educational priorities? They both want better public schools. Isn't that the common ground. What does it matter that some can afford luxury hobbies/travel and some can't.  [/quote]

IME, rich people often have different educational priorities than me, a well-educated middle class person. They don't have the same worries about their kids being left behind or failing to acquire necessary skills for HS, college, or the job market, because they have enough money not to have to worry about it. There are lots of culture clashes between the rich parents at our school and those who are middle class, even when the middle class parents are actually better educated. If anything, college-educated middle class people have the most anxiety about education because they (we) have the least stable class status and have the most to lose in the AI revolution and the K-shaped economy.[/quote]

Can you provide some examples? We are talking about public schools here, the ultra rich are all in privates. [/quote]

Examples:

- Getting hung up on a public school inconvenience that middle class parents just accept and move on from, and wanting to dedicate resources to it. For instance, throwing a fit over DCPS absence policies when they conflict with international travel, and hijacking PTA meetings to discuss it.
- Expecting the school to provide tutoring to help on-grade-level kids become above grade level, and not understanding why that's different from tutoring kids who are lagging behind grade level. 
- Assuming families can always spend extra money to provide the kids with something. For instance advocating for programming that can't be subsidized by PTA funds and expecting all families to kick in $50 or $100 to supplement it. This is often accompanied by a promise to pay the fee for at risk or low-income kids, without understanding that middle class families don't fall in that bucket and that more families might struggle with a fee like that then they realize.
- Pushing for programming based on status markers or upper class ideals that they don't understand aren't important to middle class kids or get in the way of practicalities, like pushing for French or Mandarin over Spanish.[/quote]

These are good examples.  Add to it "required" PTO donations of hundreds of dollars and telling parents that it's cheaper than sending your kids to private school.  And focusing effort on improving the playground or getting a new gym when existing facilities are adequate.

I disagree with the above grade level point though.   Kids should be challenged and offering those opportunities to at risk and middle class kids is a better investment than offering it to upper middle class kids.  But supporting below grade level students is so a priority (that's not a place you have to choose)

[/quote]

Yes all kids should be challenged but it is very common for the UMC parents to suck up all the air in the room demanding special attention to their above average kid (sometimes in the form of elaborate 504s or IEPs) as opposed to realistically understanding what is good for the majority. Sometimes the UMC parents have actually caused the issues by advocating against teaching methods that don’t conform to Dr Becky or whatever (like being against homework or drilling math facts). [/quote]

The abuse of the IEP/504 system to secure advantages for kids who do not need them drives me nuts. It also impacts every level of the school. It changes how teachers and administrators interact with all parents, including those of us who are not trying to exploit the system. Having even a handful of parents in a school who are constantly angling for any advantage for their kids makes all parents suspect.[/quote]

Yes. I’m not sure it’s knowing abuse but it’s definitely parents who believe in extracting every possible benefit. My kid actually has an IEP but I try to avoid the IEP team as much as possible lol. With some very small exceptions the bulk of support has come from people not on the IEP team. I find that if I ask for things my kid obviously needs it’s very easy. Everything else slides. [/quote]

This strikes me as so odd. It’s such a horrible process to get an IEP, and every psychologist we saw immediately saw my kids as having xyz disability. I would not wish this on anyone. Yet I am sure the average uninformed person doesn’t understand why it is in place and thinks it’s something like the abuse described above. But the reality is that you’re not a psychologist and this type of thinking just make an it so much harder to get the services and accommodations some students need. My students 5th teacher made our life miserable and our report explained in detail why we needed what we needed.[/quote]

This is not about kids who need IEPs, but schools and parents offering 504s to typical kids in order to max out test scores. Different thing.[/quote]

Is it really that surprising? If you say on DCUM "sometimes my kid is bored in class," you will get 10 responses about how the kid needs to be immediately seen by a specialist because they surely have ADHD and dozen other things they heard about Tik Tok. [/quote]

Lots of people like to diagnose strangers, including other people’s kids. Ignorant. [/quote]

We live in a period when everyone thinks they're a victim of something. If you think you have some unavoidable disadvantage, you're going to demand special accommodations in the name of "fairness."[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics