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[quote=Anonymous][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]

Well, but here's the question, what is the threshold?  If it helps to put low-income kids in with high-income kids, how many low-income kids can you put into a high-income area before it shifts?  Are those studies based on putting a small number of low-income kids into a school with high-income kids?  If that is the case, then there isn't enough high-income schools areas to adequately disperse the low-income kids.  That is the problem.  And I believe that is what has happened with Section 8.  They start with just one or two families, and it works well for those families, so then they create more Section 8 in an area.  What happens is the wealthier people move out, more Section 8 is added, and then you're back to the same problem -- concentrated poverty.

So let's say we embrace this concept that low-income kids benefit from being mixed in with high-income kids, well, what is the ideal ratio?  Because obviously, the suggestion is that low-income kids do poorly when they're concentrated in one area.  so you establish the appropriate mix of SES.  Then you try to create that.  Well, if there are greater numbers of SES kids in a county, then it is impossible to create that ideal.  You move too many low SES kids to a high SES school, and the high SES parents start pulling their kids out.  Then the ratio shifts.

That's the problem with that approach.  I think that it has been tried, and it only works when you do it on a small scale.  The problem is that we still have all of these predominantly low-SES schools.   So what do we do with them?   Move high SES kids to those schools?  I don't think you're going to get the parents to agree to that.

In fact, the article specifically says that PG County tried that, and the high SES people pulled their kids out and sent them to private school.

I don't know if I'm comfortable with the suggestion (or as you claim, statistical fact) that poor kids need to be around rich kids to succeed.   Perhaps that does work, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other things that will work.  It doesn't mean that the only way to improve performance among poor kids is to put them with rich kids.  [/quote]

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