Reply to South Arlington elementary school boundary adjustments 2019

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[quote=Anonymous] [/quote]
That's the thing, they're all increasingly poorest. Oakridge and fleet and possibly Abingdon  are probably going to have farms rates under 40 percent when the dust clears, so great for them. They're going to donate their poorest to the other south Arlington elementaries. The sky's the limit for barcroft, Randolph, Carlin springs and the new drew, which are all going to clock in at about 70% farms or more. I'm not unsympathetic to these children, and they need a lot of help academically and otherwise. You can easily see this in test scores; poor kids always do a lot worse. My concern is that when the student body is that disadvantaged, there's not many resources to direct to kids performing at or above grade level, and their relative advantage leads to comments like, they'll be fine which basically means, they can be ignored. Not my kid.
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Oakridge and Henry are already well below 40% FR/L.  Henry already lost its Title I status.  
But I admire your optimism regarding Abingdon and Drew.  the "new Drew" SHOULD be under 40% (ALL schools SHOULD be), if they were to go about boundaries based on what's right.  But if proximity is all they care about, look which students from Henry and Oakridge and Abingdon will be redirected to Drew.  Hopefully even given the proximity method, Drew will be comfortably and stably below 40%; but I hope not at the cost of Oakridge and Henry becoming 20% or less and adding to the disparities.  And hopefully not at the cost of Barcroft rising above 60% again (it is currently below 60%, btw).  Randolph is already 70% and Carlin Springs has been 80% for quite some time.

But you are right that excessively high FR/L schools, especially when they also have high % English language learners, can have a different approach to education with different expectations and standards (lower ones).  APS and teachers will emphatically deny that - and perhaps from an individual classroom teacher perspective it may not be true - but it can be quite evident from looking at the administrative (aka leadership) level.  It is not always the case, as evidenced by high quality, high-performing Title I schools; but those are not the 60, 70 and 80% schools in Arlington.  Yet Arlington buries its head in the sand believing it is different from everywhere else and immune from the social ills infecting the rest of the world; and that it is exempt from having to have integrated schools.  If we were talking about majority Black v. majority White schools, Arlington would be a bit more embarrassed by its progressive hypocrisy and segregation.  But we're segregated Latino v. everyone else and it's absolutely fine because the Latino community needs to stay together in totem.  And we make sure it stays that way by having a Latino school board member - whose children did not live and learn with this poor South Arlington Latino community in question - fiercely defending policies and philosophies that maintain the status quo and segregation under the banner of "representing my community."  Well, as I understand it, school board members are at-large.  That means each member's "community" that they are supposed to "represent" is ARLINGTON.  They can each bring different perspectives and draw attention to unique needs of various segments of the larger community.  But they're supposed to bring those to the table as they make policies and decisions based on common ground, compromises (from all sides), and what's best for the system overall.

"Promixity" and "community" are red herrings and everyone knows it.[/quote]

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