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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]DC is heavily segregated and seems to be following the national model in terms of dismantling most steps that lead to integration.

What the TAL program showed is that if you don't mandate it and enforce it by law, white people prefer segregation...and the only thing that improves the outcomes for black students is integration. [/quote]

I'm glad to see a discussion here about the TAL piece (though a bit disappointed it's devolved into the usually racially-tinged bickering).

DC & DCPS is pretty much unique situation in the United States. The TAL program focused on cross-school district integration--between Hartford city school district and suburban school districts. All under the Connnecticut state BOE. That's not the situation in DC. In the US, VA schools, MD schools, and DC schools have absolutely nothing to do with one another. (This is by design, btw.)

In the TAL piece, the suburban school districts are something like 80% white; Hartford city school district something like B 95% minority.

If you look at DC (DCPS & DCPCS) in isolation, something like 80% of all students are poor.

If you focus on DC and your integration efforts are limited to that student population, in the [b]best case[/b] what you will end up with is not an integrated school system, but a system in which every school's student population is around 85% poor and 15% middle class. [b]There is literally no school in the country with that SES makeup that is successful.[/b]

We won't end up with a "best case" because if DCPS were to be fully integrated, we'd suffer a massive outflux of middle-class students--black and white.

Let me put it another way: If what you're trying to do is generate an integrated school population consisting entirely of the current DCPS/DCPCS student population, the result will be uniformly failing schools.

The [b]only[/b] conceivable solution to the problem of failing DCPS schools (barring some sort of retrocession of DC to MD or VA) is integration of DC's poor students with the suburbs.

That can take one of two forms: The first scenario is that MD and VA voluntarily agree to reciprocal busing with DCPS. The second is that, over time more middle-class families move into DC radically changing the demographics of DC. (i.e. more poor people live in the suburbs and more middle-class people live in the city.)

Guess which of those two scenarios is more likely to happen?
[/quote]

"There is literally no school in the country with that SES makeup that is successful." Not true, there are several in DC alone that are successful with this level of poverty or higher, and many across the country. See, for example: DC Prep. Also, the stats you quote are public school stats, not DC student stats. If you include the DC resident students attending DC or MD private schools, the poverty rate drops considerably.

As for your prediction, I agree, the long term end game is the Manhattanization of most of the District. Movement to the DC suburbs is one part of that, but also to different parts of the country, especially the south (the great reverse migration). But that will take another 20-30 years. We need to integrate more in the meantime. Simply waiting for this demographic shift and allowing generations of poor black students to receive poor educations as we wait, is not an acceptable policy prescription.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/02/02/census-great-migration-reversal/21818127/

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