Reply to The REAL issue with the proposals to shift boundaries & how MCPS can fix it

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Reply to "The REAL issue with the proposals to shift boundaries & how MCPS can fix it"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

[b]No the argument is that homeowners have a reasonable expectation of stability[/b] when a school is a major, if not the greatest determinate factor when choosing a house.  Anything else destabilizes the market, causes real financial pain and robs people of their choices.  All for some pie-in-the-sky theory that sending my kid to your school will make that school better.  I mean I'm flattered that you think my kid will help (she must have some innate quality that the students there don't have), but I doubt that she will solve systematic poverty and lack of parental education.  However, what is not in question is that property values will drop in the affected area.  The market may be irrational, but it does what it does and real people will lose real money here.  Then in 10 years when all the high SES people migrate to the still (or newly) high performing school clusters and the SJW's begin screaming again, we'll have to do it all over...  Wouldn't it be just easier to fix the actual problems rather than acquiesce to the unreasonable demands of some teenagers?  [/quote]

And they've got it! You live in Montgomery County, the expectation is an MCPS school.

Otherwise the argument is that we must maintain a harmful distortion in the housing market because some people might lose money if we don't.[/quote]

There's no "harmful" distortion.  People with means will always filter to the best schools - just the way it is.  The only distortion is trying to carve some of them off against their will.  [/quote]

If people really stand to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars from getting rezoned from this school to that school, then yes, it absolutely is a harmful distortion. Because rezonings are a thing that happens.[/quote]

Not at all.  You presuppose that the boundaries themselves are a distorting factor, when the actual distorting factor is income inequality.  So long as high performing schools are seen as a valuable amenity, the money will filer in and push lower SES individuals out no matter where the boundaries are.  Tinkering around the edges only transfers equity from the families who are taken out of the district to those who are moved in.  However, during the next sales cycle the newly "promoted" house commands the same price premium that the desirable district brings and lower SES brackets are priced out in the same way as before.  Thus, what you do is get a temporary gain in SES diversity (to the extent that wealthier families don't immediately bolt), financially punish some families, give some families a windfall, and then have to do it all over again in ten years once you realize that fighting the natural progression of the market just doesn't work.  The only way to break this cycle is to make [b]all[/b] the schools high performing; but, given that the fact that the best and only statistically valid predictor of a child's educational outcome is their parents' educational attainment, you cannot "fix" the schools by moving boundaries, but rather you have to lift up the community as a whole, increase income across the board, and assist lower income families with childcare and other programs of the like.  This is, of course, hard, so it won't be done.  What will be done is that some feckless politicians will tinker around the edges, pat themselves on the back for increasing a useless metric like diversity (while ignoring the only metric the matters - performance), and ignore the income disparities that are the actual root of the problem.

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