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[quote=Anonymous]New poster. This thread is fascinating.

I participated in the DME meetings on the boundary changes last summer. There was one elementary school in particular, in NW, that was very well-represented at the meetings. They had several issues they were pushing, but one was an attempt to avoid having a set-aside to ensure that "at-risk" children could enter their school through the OOB lottery. The policy proposal in question would have raised the poverty level at the school somewhat, but it likely would have remained in the single digits.

I am not saying that they were as bad as the guy in the podcast who suggested moving the school time 20-40 minutes earlier to discourage kids from bussing in, and I recognize that the at-risk kids in the DC debate would not often be honors students as they were in the story. Still, I was completely taken aback by how may parents in supposedly liberal, educated DC sincerely believed that a tiny percentage of at-risk kids would damage the experience of their children at this very high-performing school. Even when all research points to there being no ill-effects on students from wealthier families, especially when the poverty percentage is below 20%.

In our own neighborhood, a steadily growing number of families are participating in voluntary integration (aka sending kids to the neighborhood school), which I see as the only true solution to all of this, in addition to other forms of integration, especially real estate and workplace. But I am beginning to wonder if this is like taxes, and it cannot be a voluntary thing. Bussing did not succeed, but I wonder if some sort of mandatory integration is the only way. In this regard I am encouraged by the recent Supreme Court decision requiring public housing to be somewhat more spread out, per the article PP posted above about black poverty being the most concentrated. This move toward mandatory integration is a positive step.

When I read these threads I am struck by the lengths posters will go to paint the impoverished African American condition as being completely hopeless,  beyond all possibility of remedy through education, health, housing, or any other policies. Despite there being strong evidence that progressive policies in all of these areas have shown results, for example integration of schools, or in the absence of that, charters that serve disadvantaged populations. The people writing these horror stories often use language intended to signal that the writer is a progressive, liberal. This is sometimes referred to as "sympathy trolling".

But I believe that the underlying motive, whether conscious or unconscious, is quite sinister. Essentially, the purpose of these "hopelessness narratives" is to argue against all policy measures that might be used to solve the problem, including policy measures that may cause discomfort for the writer, integration policies being chief among these.

Thank you to the OP for beginning this thread. It's been one of the more interesting DCUM discussions lately, and despite being depressing at times, it hasn't devolved into a name-calling contest. 
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