Reply to Roosevelt High School in Petworth?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The thing is, we want “our” kids segregated from the kids who are dumb and want to hurt them.

We want our kids to feel like excelling is normal and violence is not.

For many kids that simply isn’t true. And I don’t know what you do for them. They end up at schools like Roosevelt and as a result we shun them.

There of course is the usual segregation, racism, classism, and all that. It doesn’t help. I’ve put my kids into a middle school that some would not. I’m willing to go pretty far.

But at the end of the day, I would not let my kid go to a school with open gang activity and that doesn’t teach to kids who can get a 3 on an AP test. It’s too much of a mismatch.

I’ve been in Roosevelt for the foreign service curriculum rundown. Years ago now. It would be something I’d like to have done myself. But how many of these kids could actually complete such a curriculum?

I get the WHY. Trauma and centuries of being treated as subhuman and not being permitted to learn, achieve, and feel safe are terrible. But when it leads to harmful treatment of the people around you, how should the people around you react? Through avoidance, not overreaction, right? I can’t fix a kid’s trauma. My DD certainly can’t. My kid can’t teach yours Algebra. What are reasonable expectations?

The only way I see of changing this amounts to colonization. I’ll call it what it is. It’s things like sticking Coolidge Early College at Coolidge. Making a group within a group that doesn’t have to deal with Black lower class trauma or Central American gang activity and the other myriad problems kids can’t shed when they get to school.

If you get that in there, the edges start to bleed together. Things start to heal. But this won’t start without colonial island analogy school situations.

Hate it but I fail to see more realistic situations emerging when clearly these 99.9% poor minority DCPS schools are being shunned. [/quote]

Clearly this post sounds very reasonable to many DCUM posters, but is based on absolutely zero actual knowledge of what’s going on on the ground.   Maybe before suggesting “colonization” (?!!!!!!) you should spend a few minutes listening to what the people dealing with “[b]lower class[/b] Black trauma” (!!!!!!) actually have to say about their lives.  It certainly isn’t your “colonization.”[/quote]

I wrote this. I'm a neighbor with kids, one an eighth grader in very nearby schools. Not a charter fan and I wanted, and still want, DCPS to succeed.

I hate this idea, and I can't think of anything else that will make the school integrate outside of poor black and brown DC. Integration is one thing, because generally the writers here are the middle to upper class parents who avoid schools that are almost strictly Black and Hispanic and poor. What I'm talking about with 'colonization' - me calling it what it really is, because doing ugly shit deserves to be called what it is, is the only approach that seems like it could draw new parents into the school in a choice-based enrollment regime. DC appears entirely unwilling to not let people choose schools and change their kids' enrollment every year or whenever they want.

Success is another thing. Succeeding for the students who are at Roosevelt now. I want that to happen, for ordinary students and even for those who are truant, criminally-involved, stoned every day, whatever. But has anyone ever proposed anything that helps those students succeed? If so, DCPS clearly hasn't gotten the memo, as test scores and attendance aren't going in the right direction.

The only things I've ever read about involve (1) taking very small numbers of students and placing them in completely different environments, e.g., taking one Black student and sticking them in a high-achieving White school in the suburbs and (2) KIPP-style drill-all-day schools. Roosevelt is almost by definition neither of those things. Can they, will they, get kids with trauma to love to learn and become optimistic about their futures such that they make good choices, get help to succeed long-term? I really want this. But as I've shared before, I'm one parent, not a parent of a kid like this, and my kids would only deal with externalities arising from these kids not succeeding to date.

All that said - if you want to teach me about how we could respond to a long negative history, I'm interested. I don't need a litany of complaints or a recapitulation of history, I'd like ideas that would help me do something more than just nod along as somebody tells me about negative things that have happened. Like, seriously, what would make it so that kids reading below grade level in a subculture suspicious of academic success would love to read? What makes 10th graders who see relatives unemployed and can't see their way to a good job believe that they could actually get one?

I just want to prioritize a better future through action. Would spending a few minutes listening to Black people who've not succeeded economically help direct what needs to be done? Or would I just hear some undirected complaints? I say all this anonymously and impolitely so I can get to the point. Does hearing people complain get anywhere? Wouldn't you want to start with how people think they and others around them could help make the situation better?[/quote]

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