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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

"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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If what you mean is we need to integrate regionally--and nationally--I agree with you. If what you mean is that

I'm curious if you truly believe that DC Prep is a viable general model for DCPS, why the urgency to integrate? You seem to be of two minds. You say "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."

But any form of integration that leads to 80% high-poverty schools in DC is going to percipitate a wholesale evacuation of middle-class families from DCPS.

Is your prescription "DC Prep For All", or what's the plan? [/quote]

I think you forgot to finish the sentence in your first paragraph, but I am guessing you were going to ask me if I meant that there should be integration within DC also, in addition to regionally and nationally. My answer is yes, as much as possible.

I am curious if you have lived elsewhere or are familiar with schools elsewhere in the developed world, in Europe, Canada?

The US is at the extreme end in terms of segregation, difference in quality across school districts, and so on. It also has the lowest personal income taxes of any developed country of reasonable size (i.e., other than the tiny tax havens).

My point about DC Prep was just that you seemed to be making an ignorant blanket statement that is often made by people in these arguments, that high poverty schools always fail. I was telling you that you were wrong, and not only are you wrong, but your belief in this falsehood probably unconsciously prevents you from seriously considering integration as an option. Did I misinterpret what you were trying to say? If so, my bad, sorry.

Basically my plan would be:

1) raise taxes and make equalizing payments so that there is a much smaller difference in school admin quality, teacher quality, facilities, everything, across neighborhoods, cities, states, and nationwide. In other words, make it impossible to have schools like the one in the NPR story. No matter how poor or dark-skinned the neighborhood, the neighborhood school is decent and will give students the chance to succeed in life even if their parents have stumbled or are otherwise disadvantaged. This is how it is in pretty much every other rich country.

2) possibly impose burdens on private schools, to disincentivize their establishment and use, within the limits of what the constitution allows.

3) provide moral leadership (President, mayors, senators, council members, etc) for voluntary integration, like Carter sending his kids to public school.

4) as a temporary measure, encourage methods used by DC Prep and others to reach kids in segregated environments, so we don't have any more lost generations. This can be done in DCPS, not only charters. This year DC is piloting an extended day program for high poverty DCPS schools, which is the main tool that DC Prep uses.

(yes, to answer your question, the DC Prep model can work anywhere, it is mostly an extended day model, that is the crucial difference between it and DCPS, combined with some other philosophical and pedagogical aspects that would be easy to emulate in DCPS. The main obstacle to this in DCPS is the teacher's union contract, but that's another discussion, and as far as I am concerned, we should agree to pay teachers a lot of overtime for such work.)

those first four are what we should do through government. and finally, what we can all do personally:

5) voluntarily integrate. Live in a diverse neighborhood and send your kid to your neighborhood school.

6) if you don't have kids or your kids are grown, volunteer in a high-poverty school.

I am an idealist but I am not naive. I have studied and worked enough to know that people will often act selfishly and even irrationally, and good policy takes this fact of human nature into account. However I would like there to be more of a moral conversation. I would like people to see this as a moral issue. Just as it has become unacceptable to make sexist remarks, and it has become unfashionable to belong to "men-only" clubs that do not allow women members, I would like it to become unacceptable for people to say stuff in social settings like "yeah, we're moving to the suburbs, too many poors in our local school". I would like this to become a shameful remark in polite society, with the moral expectation being that you will try to integrate as much as you can, obviously not to the point of damaging your kid's life, but as much as you can.

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