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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]
Please do, since I'm already seeing this study get trotted out on neighborhood facebook as great scholarship.
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I am considering writing a response. One irony I guess is that the report will probably generate more traffic to DCUM. Hopefully it won't be a bunch of racists coming to find out how to get into an all white school.
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The racists would quickly discover that there aren't any all-white public schools in the DC system, not even close.[/quote]

Um, doesn’t Janney come close, for one?  [/quote]

Yes, if by “all-white” you mean reflecting national averages.[/quote]

It's a bit more. "White students, on average, attend a school in which 69% of the students are white" - from "Harming Our Common Future: America's Segregated Schools 65 Years after Brown".
At Janney, it's 74%, and the next-biggest group is Multiracial, which I would guess is also different. [/quote]

Yes, and Janney (Key, Mann, Murch, Brent etc.) parents could move to the burbs, or a different part of the country, or go private in the District, to enroll their children in schools that are even more white.

[b]This study is coming at the wrong jurisdiction and the wrong parents.[/b] [/quote]

This is the problem I had with the "Nice White Parents" podcast as well- concentrating on a small number of white people who remain in the center jurisdictions, meanwhile 85-90% of the white kids in the region are in the suburbs.  Many, many of those people are more explicit about their locational choices being based on school racial makeup (I have talked to some people in Fairfax who have heard these comments from neighbors, barely coded).  Not saying white people in the District should be let off the hook- there is something interesting there about liberal hypocrisy (liberal in the streets, conservative in the sheets, so to speak) and about how far white people are really willing to go in terms of the racial makeup of their kids' school.  But there are 90k kids in public school in the District, something like 15% are white- you are literally talking about less than 15,000 white kids.  Total enrollment in the five closest school districts (PG, Arlington, Montgomery, Fairfax, Loudon) is 595,000, of which around 35% are white, so over 200,000 white kids in those public schools.  Forest for the trees here.

There are some really unusual racial dynamics going on in this area- it has probably the largest middle and upper middle class black population of any metro area in the country.  The District has almost zero poor white people.  You have the ways the middle ring suburbs are changing and becoming more heavily Hispanic.  The large Middle Eastern-American and Asian-American populations now in Fairfax and Loudon. School options/choice layer on to this.  But it's gonna take a LOT more work and nuance to analyze all that.  [/quote]

Exactly.  And I do think there is definitely some nuance in what makes UMC white parents think a school is acceptable.  When you dig into it, you see that Beers Elementary and Miner Elementary have very, very similar PARCC scores.  And yet, Beers is a total unknown to DCUM and most white parents wouldn't even consider it as an option, frankly in large part because it is black and in Ward 7.  Whereas Miner is commonly discussed here as an acceptable option for ECE.  Or is the lack of acceptance of school like Beers because there is no discussion of it on DCUM compared to Miner, which might actually indicate that the Brookings research is onto something?

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. 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? Unless you make giant societal interventions that make parents less anxious, like, say making college and housing actually affordable for the middle class ...

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]

So stupid. Beers is not acceptable because there is no way in f*ck I am commuting there to drop off my child and pick up every day as a single parent who works downtown.
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