Reply to Help me Edit: Response to Brookings Report

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think you are reacting emotionally and defensively and if you take a few days to process this and calm down, you may see that the report has many good points.

Basically, many white gentrifiers don’t want their kids going to the public schools in the neighborhood they moved into and boards like this help them figure out how to send their kids to “better,” typically whiter and less economically diverse non neighborhood schools. That’s pretty obvious. [/quote]

But that's not what happens in DC.  By far the biggest factor around SES clustering in DC (as basically everywhere else in America) is the housing market.  Kids go to Deal and Lafayette and Murch and Janney and Ross and Oyster not because of the lottery, but because their parents bought expensive houses in those areas.  The lottery doesn't place that many kids in the Ward 3 elementaries.  In-bounds preference does.

The fact that there are many schools in DC that are majority-minority and whose test scores are low is a big, big, big problem.  But it's not because parents don't choose those schools in the lottery.  Which is what the report is trying (poorly) to argue.

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The explanation above works as an Upper NW take on how the housing market drives segregation in schools. East of the Park, things are not as cut and dried. The lottery places a good many white kids in majority-minority DC public schools for Early Childhood programs families are not zoned for, because kids without older siblings in by-right schools often cannot crack the lottery for PreS3, and possibly PreK4, in the areas with the most expensive housing. What happens is that families who fail to get ECE spots in by-rights schools commonly land in other public schools within a few miles of home, both DCPS and charter, that are majority-minority.  Some of these families stay on at these schools into the lower grades because they like them.  But by the upper grades, these families have generally left majority-minority schools, mainly over concerns about lack of challenge up the chain (no Gifted programs in DC and no test-in MS programs, standard offerings in other big US cities).  The authors of the report serve up the standard Upper NW-centric view of school segregation/parents' choices. [/quote]

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