Reply to spin-off! What is so awful about attending school with exclusively upper middle class kids?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think many of the parents who are choosing public school because they think their child will be sensitized to how other people live have a very naive view of how schools like that really work.  I grew up in a good sized town that had one large public high school that everyone in town went to.  There were no private schools near by.  The only other option was boarding school, but it was a decent school, and very few people felt the need to send their kids elsewhere.  We had students across the spectrum, from quite rich (the child of one of the highest earning professional golfers of the time) to the kids from public housing.  All races, with sizable black and hispanic populations.  I played sports with the black kids, and we were very friendly. I'm sure some of the people I had in my classes were poor, but I couldn't really tell you which ones.

For the most part, I hung out with the kids who were like me. I didn't visit the homes of the kids who were poor or culturally different, and I can't really tell you anything about what their lives were like outside of school. I definitely wasn't unique in this regard.  I did have one very good black friend, but her parents were better educated and higher income than mine.  Her mother was just a darker-skinned version of my mom. This wasn't a conscious choice, but it just was.  If your child goes to a school where he or she is a distinct minority, then this "diversity" experience might work, but I still suspect that kids will always end up spending the bulk of their time with people who are really like them, even if their skin is a different color.  Walking through a school hallway doesn't give you any more appreciation for how other people live than walking down a downtown street.    [/quote]

I think you are kidding yourself if you think that growing up in a smallish (only one HS), largely middle-class, town, is a comparable experience to sending your kids to public schools in DC, VA or MD.  I grew up in a town of 75,000 that had two public HS.  I attended the elite private school (which was also a boarding school) through HS, then got tired of the fish bowl and went to the public HS.  There was much, much, more diversity in the public HS.  It's true, I didn't hang out with the vo-tech kids, and the kids in my honors classes mostly looked like me.

Also, I think you are kidding yourself if you think that a private school kids with minorities who for the most part can afford $35K a year, plus a sprinkling of scholarship kids (just a few of these) is comparable to sending your kid to a public school where even most of the whites can't afford $35K a year.

I guess there are two questions, which I don't have answers to:
(1) Is a school where most kids - white and minority - can afford $35K (or $70 K for two kids) [b]economically [/b]diverse in any meaningful way?  Even if they have 5% kids on full scholarship?
(2)  Do kids get experience with diversity by being in the same school with diverse kids?  I think you're right that kids mostly - not always - hang out with others like themselves, especially if they are in honors or magnet programs where there's less diversity.  But I'd argue that just meeting in gym, the cafeteria, the hallways, is valuable.  As opposed to a total greenhouse experience in private school.[/quote]

Since you seem to have missed my point, I'll try again.  I think everyone here is so used to homogeneous neighborhoods, that they don't really believe that anything else exists.  My home town was "smallish," but the high school had 5,000 students, and was truly diverse.  The town had a large manufacturing base, so we had everyone from the people who owned the plants (with nationally famous names), to a bunch of engineers/managers, to a large number of blue collar families, and a significant amount of public housing that wasn't really very different from what you'd find in D.C.  Was this the same as going to an inner-city DC 90% FARMS school?  No, and I didn't say it was. I also didn't say it was the same as going to an exclusive private school.  I did say that I did go to a truly "diverse" high school (which seems to be the holy grail for some folks around here), and I don't think my experience was actually much different than it would have been had I gone to a school where everyone was exactly like me. I ended up spending my time with people who were like me, in any case.  I had a few passing acquaintances who were from different backgrounds, but no real exposure to their lives.  My family was middle class, and, while I knew that, in theory, there were poor people in our town, going to school with them didn't give me any real insight into their lives outside of school.   I even mentioned that this might be different if you did send your child to a school in which he/she was truly in a minority (less than 10%), but I suspect that few on this board are really seriously talking about doing that.[/quote]

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