Reply to Study: "Discussions of D.C. public school options in an online forum" (yes, this one)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

[b]Another aspect is the unrelenting escalation of parenting in general.  In the past, a school where 25% of the kids are on-target in test scores might be considered just fine.  Your kid will be at the top of the class, maybe a little bored, NBD.  It's ELEMENTARY school[/b]. Now on DCUM you have parents insisting that "my kid has got to be in a cohort of high performers by 3rd grade!!!111!!!"  I don't think that sentiment is largely or even mostly based on race (although there is some of that), but rather on the intensive parenting culture we have now and the sense that we have to fight for every single advantage.  Where I disagree with the thrust of the Brookings paper is that this attitude by the privileged is somehow always harmful to the underprivileged.  And if it is, how is policy going to effectively intervene? [b]Unless you make giant societal interventions that make parents less anxious, like, say making college and housing actually affordable for the middle class ... [/b]

There are micro-moments where the "must maximize" culture of DCUM does probably hurt the underprivileged.  Most notably, in boundary discussions where parents "lose" the school they believe they are entitled to.  The collective freak-out over the idea of clustering Maury, Miner, and Payne was another one that surely did not reflect well on a group of parents that likely otherwise claim to be progressive.  But that's the highly local exception, not the rule.  Even if Maury parents could be browbeaten into clustering with Miner and Payne, that's THREE schools out of a total of how many?  How is that going to help Wards 7 and 8?  [/quote]

Great points.  If you go back in US history, post-WWII, American government made significant interventions to massively increase opportunities for the working/middle class (let's be honest, most of that was aimed at white people and a lot of it explicitly or implicitly attempted to keep out black people).  You had the GI Bill.  You had big investments in basic research, which filtered down to state universities, allowing them to massively expand and serve a growing middle class.  These things fed into each other.  Now it's the opposite- you have much smaller investments, you have state governments DECREASING funding to state universities, so what do they do?  They concentrate more and more on students who can pay full boat, and sure as hell aren't increasing class sizes to let in more kids from poor homes.

All of this feels like people who are understandably anxious about their hold on to money/privilege/whatever, and the future of their kids when those things are seemingly less available each year.  So you have this scratching and clawing at whatever they can get their hands on.  It feels like a community on the edge of a volcano that is constantly erupting- always trying to keep the magma flow out of their little parcel, because it feels like stopping the volcano altogether is impossible, so you concentrate on what feels possible.  Pretty much need to make massive changes in the structure of American society and government to really deal with these issues.  That doesn't wash our hands of it, by any means, but it feels really weird to point again and again at the 10-15% of people shifting the magma around (while the rest mostly don't have resources to deal with it) and not focusing on the volcano itself.[/quote]

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