Reply to Integration and DC Schools -- A high priority? Yay or nay?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Integration is very important to me and I am engaged in it, but it is generally overtaken by other priorities on this board.

I'd say mostly, this board wants differentiation and to not have children of board participants in the same schools as students with behavior problems. Those goals do not go well with generalized integration.

There are also more general segregation/race and class relations issues, with a major one being a distribution of income and educational attainment that is at the edges with nobody in the middle ([b]we have a bunch of high income advanced degree holders and HS-or-worse educated low income parents, nothing in between in DC[/b]).[/quote]

If you actually think this, it's a reflection of your own limited social circle. It's wrong. DC has plenty of families that are middle income. Lots of people just have college degrees and no advanced degree, plus plenty of fields offer steady income but not high income. We can afford to own homes (condos or houses in part so the city outside the most gentrified neighborhoods, and also if you bought before rates went up) and care about education, but also money is tight because this is an expensive city and it gets more expensive all the time. On the other hand, living in the city often gives us the ability to live without a car or with just one car, living in small homes keep us from accumulating so much stuff, and there are real cost savings to being close in to work and lots of free entertainment. So a lot of us are loathe to move out of the city where we might get cheaper housing and food but more expensive and longer commutes and a host of other expenses just by virtue of living far away from things.

I regularly feel completely invisible in discussions about education in the city because so many people think as you do. That there are only two kinds of people in the city: (1) rich, mostly white people with advanced degrees, and (2) poor black and hispanic people with a HS education or less. I'm sure your in group #1 and it's actually an embarrassment to your education that you are so ignorant of the many many families of every race in this city that are dual income, have college degrees, are not rich, can still pay our bills, and obviously send our kids to public schools because where the hell else are we going to send them?

What's funny is that we send our kids to school with rich people and poor people, and people just lack the observational skills or common sense to understand that we are middle class. Some of the rich people at our school just assume we are also rich, because we wear professional clothes and have read books, and they seem confused when we don't have opinions on whether Colorado or Vermont is better for New Year's skiing. Other rich people at our school just group us in with the poor people. The poor people all think we are rich, which is fair, because compared to them we are. Literally no one cares if our family's needs are being met by the school system.[/quote]

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