Reply to How is the meeting at Dunbar going?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This whole at risk set aside is a HORRIBLE plan!  In D.C. the face of "at-risk" is, in peoples' minds, the young black child.  With this plan, the young black child at a Janney or Lafayette or Hearst, will immediately be identified as one of the "at risk" set  aside kids.  Will this make black kid that is in bounds feel pressure to have his peers know that "I am not one of them"?  Will this make the OOB at risk child feel somehow "less than"?  Will people look on that child with disdain?  This has huge unfortunate social repercussions especially when "at risk" is closely associated with race in the minds of people.[/quote]

+1,000  Set asides are essentially the same as busing to integrate schools in the 70s. I was an AA kid in Boston at the time who lived IB for white schools and I can tell you from first-hand experience, there are people 30 years later who still think I'm from the projects and that I got into better schools than them because of it.  :roll:  I got over it, but there was definitely a negative impact on stability of my friends who were bused

DC has a horrible track record of helping at-risk children to begin with. Divvying them up over the city to schools with no experience in the complexity of their needs but good results with general population makes absolutely no sense. It didn't occur to me that set asides would be a serious part of the proposal.

Set asides are not the answer to any question. Check out David Catania's Fair Student Funding and School-Based Budgeting Amendment Act of 2013. 
http://www.davidcatania.com/fairfunding

"The Act will build into the Uniform per Student Funding Formula—the mechanism used to fund public schools in the District—a dedicated funding stream for students who are at risk of academic failure, as identified by the following risk factors: homelessness, within the foster care system, eligible for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or above the expected age for their grade.  According to data provided by the Office of State Superintendent of Education (OSSE), nearly 35,000 public school students met this definition of at-risk in the 2012-2013 school year. The Act requires that the vast majority of this funding—90 percent—goes straight to the schools to be spent by principals, with input from members of their Local School Advisory Teams."

This puts the burden on schools and the city to deliver support for students. Set asides subject students to the vagaries of yet another type of lottery. It's like the Hunger Games where only the poorest of the poor survive to then be paraded around for their non-poor peers so they can experience diversity.

If it takes the DME this long to come up with crappy social engineering that doesn't address the root of the problem, why waste any more time?

November can't come soon enough for me. Catania for Mayor!!! Please!!![/quote]

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