Reply to Study: "Discussions of D.C. public school options in an online forum" (yes, this one)

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Reply to "Study: "Discussions of D.C. public school options in an online forum" (yes, this one)"

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[quote=jsteele][quote=Anonymous]You fundamentally misunderstand the point of reports like these.  It's descriptive; the goal is to describe a problem, not to offer solutions in the same report.  I was patient in several earlier posts in trying to explain this, but you have doubled down on your complaints.  You don't like that your site has been portrayed in this light (which is understandable) and so have characterized the report as shaming and name-calling, instead of perhaps considering some of the points made.  White people do indeed make decisions influenced by racial dynamics as discussed in prior research; this is uncontroversial.

It is frustrating because you are completing rigid in your defensiveness and will cede nothing, over several days of posting.  Perhaps it's possible that parents want to do what's best for their kids AND their decisions are impacted by unconscious or conscious biases and assumptions about what makes a good school?  I'm a black parent who has visited this site for years, and the racism and classism is entirely clear to me and others, some of whom I know have stopped even visiting this site.  I'm not sure what else to say at this point except good luck in complaining about what you see as unfair treatment instead of considering some of the issues raised.[/quote]

This is what it boils down to:

[quote] Perhaps it's possible that parents want to do what's best for their kids AND their decisions are impacted by unconscious or conscious biases and assumptions about what makes a good school?  [/quote]

This statement clearly displays just how uninformed you are about the people with whom you are trying to engage. The vast majority of the posters in this forum do want to do what's best for their kids AND consider their assumptions and biases. You simply cannot dispute that most of the schools that are popular in this forum are objectively "good" by most definitions of good. There are a few blindspots and addressing those blindspots would be helpful. But, you show no interest in being helpful. Your only interest is to shame us.

I really don't now how you can expect people to change without being able to offer any ideas about how they should change. If you don't know the answer, why do you expect others to know it? This is plain common sense. Don't you think that it might be possible that people have struggled with the moral and ethnical issues, reflected about them, but still concluded that their choice was the best despite that it wasn't perfect?

I am happy to work with you to improve the disparities in DC public schools to the extend that I have any ability to do that at all  (and I suspect my ability is very limited). But you are going to have to move beyond the name-calling and shaming.
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