Reply to Disadvantaged children can hurt achievement of others in their classrooms

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree. Knee jerk accusations of discrimination and racism get us absolutely nowhere.  Especially considering that the AA middle class families in DC make schools choices almost identically to the way white middle class families do. Racism is not an issue here.[/quote]

+1[/quote]

But in the vein of "let's face reality," race is very much an issue in this city and I'd say it's concentrated and even exacerbated in the school boundary debate. There have been a whole lot of knees jerking in every direction these days.  Sure, we can keep it terms of income but race is embedded in every reference to FARMS, SES, behavior, capabilities and achievement.  It may or may not be there with the OOB ruckus, because parents should be concerned about overcrowding; it's certainly an element when people weigh the value of a WOTP school by its OOB percentages.

No one here thought of poor white children as they read the header of this thread. For every "snowflake" insult thrown out, there are many more equally insulting generalizations about low income people.  
[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I agree. Knee jerk accusations of discrimination and racism get us absolutely nowhere.  Especially considering that the AA middle class families in DC make schools choices almost identically to the way white middle class families do. Racism is not an issue here.[/quote]

+1[/quote]

There's an element of desperation to this effort to prove that poor kids are dragging everyone down.  While I'm not one who's going to put my kid in a failing school to prove a point, I do feel pretty strongly that continued failure--even if it stays isolated on the other side of town or gets pushed out to the suburbs--is going to impact his future.  My takeaway from this research about disadvantaged kids is that kids grow into adults who have more disadvantaged kids who . . . drag everyone down.

Give that some thought.  This public discourse cannot be limited to "get them out of my child's school."[/quote]

The issue is real and needs to be dealt with one way or another - screaming "you don't like brown faces in your school" only gets in the way of solutions. Frankly it's not about "brown faces" - in any number of places around the US those could easily be white faces as well.  It's not about race at all.  Take a look at a group of Banneker students, as compared to a group of Ballou students - and you will see that while they are both majority AA, they are worlds apart - there are huge differences in behavior, motivation, drive, ethic, and even in terms of the respect they show each other.  And that's what we're talking about here.

What the studies do show is that it is indeed a very real and very serious issue that will propagate and perpetuate from parent to child and from student to student if it's not being recognized and dealt with.  It needs to be dealt with early on - prenatal care, info on proper parenting, preschool, and so on.  Many people do not have the life skills to manage their own lives, let alone raise children and need to learn these skills.  What the studies also show is that a system can be easily overwhelmed.  When the critical mass of troubled students exceeds 15 or 20 percent of the whole, the returns rapidly diminish - for ALL students.  That's observed reality.  How we propose to deal with it in terms of policy is yet another matter.[/quote]

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