Reply to spin-off! What is so awful about attending school with exclusively upper middle class kids?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][b]I keep my kids in my neighborhood schools in part because I'm uncomfortable with the widening gap between haves/nots in this country.  [/b]Sure, maybe my kids'd be better able to float down the highway of life within a bubble of fabulous, well-educated, well-off peers if I kept us within our peer group, educationally and financially.  But I don't think that that's a tenable solution for us as a society.  Siphoning off the top percentile and leaving the rest behind is a recipe for worsoning all sorts of things, including the economy, if the competitve edge thing is what's really at stake for parents.   If I thought the schools were dangerous or that my kids were unhappy or that they weren't getting an adequate education, I'd put them in private.  But I'm not gonna do it just to gild the lily, as it were.  [/quote]

How does your choice of neighborhood schools keep that gap from widening further?  Do you live in a socioeconomically diverse neighborhood? Does your neighborhood elementary school have a diverse student population base with a wide range of household types and incomes? If so, do your children actually socialize with the children who have vastly lower household incomes?  Do they invite them to birthday parties and playdates? Do they sign up to play on sports teams together?

I ask these questions because of my friends' experiences with our socioeconomically diverse neighborhood schools.  They speak very earnestly of how valuable it is for their children to go to school with kids "whose families receive food stamps."  They say it's "such a great experience to prepare them for real life."  But the kids walk to school with the same group of children from their own (white liberal) neighborhood every day.  All of the children are from white, liberal, two-parent, upper-middle-class, highly educated families.  They play with the same kids during recess.  They walk home with the same kids.  They have playdates and parties with the same kids.  And the new friends they've made at school are from the same types of families.  Now granted these are kindergarteners, and this probably changes somewhat in middle school and high school.  But for now the kids are having the "valuable experience" of going to school with poor kids while socializing entirely with children like themselves.  Their parents are quite self-congratulatory about it, but it seems a bit skewed and condescending.  That may well not be the case for your family, PP.  But among these folks, there's more than a little irony involved.  [/quote]

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