Reply to Interesting article about school quality when demographics factored out

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[quote=Anonymous][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]

Your argument might have more weight if the poor people weren't scared of the poor people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/when-a-dc-school-closed-for-renovations-parents-faced-a-troubling-choice/2017/07/04/88c94334-5773-11e7-ba90-f5875b7d1876_story.html

I'm deeply sympathetic to the claims that middle-class parents have some moral responsibility to contribute to fixing the problem of school segregation. My kid currently attends an EOTP elementary school. They are on track to go to a middle-school that is by every measure "struggling and high-risk"--and not in the distant future, but next year. So none of this is some rarified hypothetical scenario for our family.

And I agree there's no place for overt racism--those people are assholes. But it would probably bolster the case for getting middle-class, largely white, parents to invest in "poor black schools" if we start by admitting that with poverty comes a greater level of dysfunction. Hell, that's the core narrative for organizations that work to help at-risk kids. If that weren't the case, middle-class parents would bear exactly *zero* moral responsibility for sending their kids to schools with high at-risk populations. Or for supporting funding for programs to alleviate things like homelessness, hunger, and poverty in general. If everything's hunky-dory then there's no problem.

Obviously that's not the case. Let's stop pretending it is.[/quote]

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