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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You can argue that a more culturally diverse school would solve the problem.  It won't.  The kids, especially at the high school level, will self-segregate. And a lot of what I've observed across the county is not a race issue, it's a class issue.  At any rate, as long as we continue to fear being around people other than ourselves, we move nowhere with regard to getting along in this country.  [/quote]

Actually, studies show that mixing poor kids in with wealthier ones raises poor kids' performance:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/magazine/who-knew-greenwich-conn-was-a-model-of-equality.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

From a recent study of MCPS: "On average, the poorer children in wealthier schools cut their achievement gap in half compared with their peers in poorer schools."

That's good for the handful of poor kids at schools in Bethesda or Potomac, but what about the poor (and middle-class) kids who make up the bulk of students in East County schools? [/quote]

[b]
The problem with those studies is that they never ask what happens to the middle to upper middle class kids.[/b]  I mean, a big part of the fear (and it is fear, not just avoidance) of parents sending their kids to PG County schools is that the supposedly overwhelming number of poor kids will bring their middle class kid's achievement down.  If studies investigated this claim, maybe it would provide a counter to that argument.  Or, of course, it would only validate it.  But needless to say, the question needs to be asked.

The same argument that you site is the argument made for section 8 housing, that bringing poor families in to mix with middle class families helps those poor families, but I haven't seen studies back this up.  And many people claim that what happens is the middle class areas where the section 8 housing is brought in end up going down hill.  Of course, that could just be a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e. the middle class families freak out over the section 8 housing and flee before finding out what happens).  But again, it would be helpful in difficult conversations like this to actually have some statistics.  That way, perhaps we could figure out what works and what doesn't work to actually help people while maintaining stable neighborhoods.

I feel like so much of the arguments made on both sides -- the people who are primarily interested in helping boost achievement among minority and lower SES kids AS WELL as the people who are concerned about their middle to upper middle class kids and ensuring they aren't negatively impacted by measures designed to help others -- so many of both sets of arguments are based on either ideology or fear, both with a significant helping of assumption.  And so we kind of just go in circles.  [/quote]

Actually, the studies show that the kids from affluent families continue to do well.[/quote]

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