Reply to Interesting article about school quality when demographics factored out

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Interesting article about school quality when demographics factored out"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]@Anonymous at 11:09am

I hear you on test prep but I just googled Thomson and it is apparently an IB primary years school. (The only one in DC...?) Can't just be drill/kill all day I imagine?

[/quote]

Exactly, and they have Chinese and Spanish.  So many of the downtown parents are driving their kids to white charters all over the city - with a great school right there.  So...what does that say about these liberated downtown parents?[/quote]

From what I have heard from "liberated families" is they don't want to put up with the behavioral problems (foul language, unpleasant home life that gets discussed, etc). There is also a fear that their child will get picked on or become a target of anger. I am reporting this but do not agree with these statements, just so we are clear. They don't want anything to interfere with their child's learning.[/quote]

So there are no behavioral problems in schools with lots of white kids?[/quote]

No...  but the behavioral problem quotient demonstratively diminishes when the caucasian/asian increases.

As a percentage of the whole.

As in - the school is better with more of them; and worse when there are fewer of them.

Math is brutal.   :roll: [/quote]

and THIS is why we can't have gifted or magnet schools in DCPS folks. Actual overt racism. [/quote]

Are you saying that it's racist to tell the truth?[/quote]

Has little to do with race and everything to do with poverty.

From today's [url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/even-in-a-prosperous-city-like-dc-many-still-go-hungry-report-finds/2017/09/19/6601d938-9d55-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html]Post[/url]:
[quote]“I would see kids headed to school with orange fingers and orange tongues,” she recalled. “Those were indicators of Cheetos and Fanta soda for breakfast.”

She recalled that some federal food-subsidy programs lasted only two weeks and that teachers could often tell when it ended. “Around the third and fourth week of the month, you’d have students starting to act up in class. In some schools, those students might be referred to a special-education program. But the problem was that they were hungry.”[/quote]

What I've always found odd is that advocates for the poor spend so much time writing about how poverty is a bad thing. How hunger makes poor kids act up in school. How unstable home lives end up causing instability in the classroom. How high-poverty schools are dysfunctional, wracked with violence. All just blocks from the White House.

Then turn on a dime and accuse middle-class parents of being racist because that's the only possible reason they wouldn't send their kid to a school with a large at-risk population. I thought poverty was bad? If not, why on Earth are we spending billions of dollars to fight it?[/quote]

Poverty is bad.  Poverty doesn't mean you need to be scared of poor people.  Poverty does not mean a school doesn't have good teachers and students.  DCPS is a PUBLIC system, so what thinking "poverty is bad" entails is that those with means invest in improving the system.  That means in part not buying into stereotypes that poor students = bad students.  And that's what this GGW article is able.  It also means not being phobic of poor black schools and, say, considering investing in your local middle school without hyperventilating.  It also means not speaking in coded terms like "the school was a poor fit."  And it certainly means not coming on DCUM and saying overtly racist things.  
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics