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

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

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[quote=Anonymous][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]

I haven't screamed anything.  I've observed that race is very much embedded in the issue of school quality and choice.  We're not talking about any number of places around the US, we're talking about Washington, DC.

You've put forward what I think is the most valuable proposal--that change needs to happen before the kids are school aged.  But I haven't seen very many other comments actually looking for solutions.  It's mostly been about looking for evidence and consensus that having wealthy kids mixing with poor kids is bad for everyone.

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