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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.[/quote]

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there.  Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc.  Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up.  The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES.  Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea.  http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html
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I agree with you that those "pesky" parents can and do make a difference with schools, but is it also because those same "pesky" parents stay highly involved in their kid's academics and extracurricular activities; in other words, as they are being a pain in the butt toward the school (in the best possible way of course) or they being equally involved with their kids?  IMHO, I think so.  At least this is my observation with higher SES families, especially among Asian minorities. [/quote]

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