Reply to How Come BOE Candidate Stephen Austin Won’t Say What His Employment Is??

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The sign issue is stupid.  Illegal signs for candidates happens every election cycle, I imagine more so if you are new to it.  I find it comical that this particular election cycle, this particular race, people are complaining about it.  If this is your biggest complaint in life, get over it, because things are pretty good foe you.

[b]I don't think Austin intends to be what others label segregationist,[/b] he just hasn't been around long enough to understand the history of the language.  And yes, some of his followers are over the edge of appropriate, but from what I have seen, that is not him.  Penalizing him for being new and having low class followers doesn't feel right.

And the smear from the far left (which I usually count myself a member of), including a former BOE member, a current state senator, a current state delegate, and many, many others, is well beyond acceptable.  I may vote for him in protest of their behavior.

[/quote]

If he didn't originally know that "neighborhood schools" was a segregationist slogan, then he didn't know much about the history of public schools. Which is not necessarily a qualification for serving on the BoE, but it's true that not everybody knows everything, and people learn (we hope).

But then people told him that it was a segregationist slogan. Did he stop using it? No. Did he defend his continued use of it? Yes. Is it a smear to point this out? No.[/quote]

I never heard of that being segregationist.

Here's a KIPP school using exactly that term -- in fact their company name is "Neighborhood Schools, Inc'! https://neighborschools.org/
Are they segregationist?

Also, the WXY report commissioned by MCPS for the boundary analysis uses the term as well:

"MCPS strives to create [b]neighborhood schools[/b] where students live as close as
possible to school. "

Page 32 of the WXY report on the MCPS website: https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/departments/publicinfo/Boundary_Analysis/interim-report/MCPS_InterimReport_Full.pdf

Are MCPS and WXY segregationist for using the terms?
[/quote]

Charter Schools are segregationist by design yes. Often along economic, rather than racial lines, but the point is a special school so your special little Larla doesn't have to go to normal school with the full range of your community. There's also a certain of irony in both KIPP (who explicitly draw don't draw from specific neighborhoods) and Austin (whose campaign is about fixing in stone specific boundaries that very often do NOT involve going to the school closest to you) claiming the mantle of neighborhood schools. Neither actually support the idea in principle. That's consistent with the history of the term although; where segregationists found segregated neighborhoods they championed "neighborhood schools" where they didn't they talking about "school choice" and charter schools. There's no principle beyond making sure that their kids get the lion share of the benefits of the public education system and other kids don't. MCPS (and consequently WXY) has also been a historically very segregated system that has to appease a faction of parents who demand that that system stay in place; it's utterly unsurprising that they're use the language of segregation to describe that system.

I was bused as a kid for economic diversity reasons, from my all white, middle class neighborhood to a poorer, less white neighborhood that was further away that any MCPS student is going to be travelling no matter what the BOE does. As an adult, I look back and realize what a positive experience that was for me and I can look at the data that shows that it improved achievement for poorer kids in that county. When I cast my vote, it'll be to, as much as possible, dismantle segregation in Montgomery County.[/quote]

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