Reply to Banneker versus School Without Walls

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[quote=Anonymous][b]But yet there are non-minority families there with high performing kids.[/b] There are clubs and a huge community service requirement. My kid does sports outside of school so is largely uninterested in school sports. I do think people are uncomfortable with it being predominantly AA and people have stated that in the archives. What strikes me as crazy is that you think Banneker parents aren’t going to defend their choice when you attack it. You don’t have a student there so your impression of the school is largely created from test scores. Ok, you’re right their SAT scores aren’t as high as other schools. But it doesn’t mean my kid can’t score high.
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In response to the post above, you're really fudging things, PP. I posted some pages back that I used to volunteer at Banneker as a STEM mentor at special events, and occasionally in classes. Hence, my impression of the school is not based primarily or wholly from test score data.

There aren't more than 15 white kids at Banneker and you can count the number of students of East Asian ancestry (Chinese, Korean, Japanese) on one hand. Moreover, most of the non-minority families use Banneker as a placeholder school for a year or two before getting organized to move on. Only around 1% of Banneker graduates are non-minority in any given year, half a dozen seniors.

What happens with SAT scores at Banneker is that affirmative action in college admissions gives the highest-performing students a pass on scoring high. These students probably could score very high, 1400+, but few bother because the adults in the school, at home, and indeed in college admissions offices around the country, don't care if they do. High-performing Banneker students soon figure out that they won't need to score high on SATs to crack elite colleges. I found the arrangement offensive, one of the reasons I stopped volunteering. Although I'm a liberal, I want the Supreme Court to roll back affirmative action in admissions, like Michigan and California did in their public universities around 20 years ago.  I want affirmative action in admissions to end because I'm convinced that it hurts low-income minority students more than it helps them. My time at Banneker taught me that.[/quote]

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