Reply to is "forcing" middle class families into DCPS basically the recovery strategy?

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Reply to "is "forcing" middle class families into DCPS basically the recovery strategy?"

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[quote=Anonymous]What school is this?  I know gay parents looking for this type of environment.

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I wouldn't say I am a racist but if I could coin a word I would say I am rarelist.  Which my description would be that I am rarely around whites in this city.[/quote]

White dude here again - I think this goes a long way toward explaining the friction you see across class/cultural/racial lines, because a lot of people coexist without a lot of interaction and not because anybody is hateful.

It's a combination of lack of experience and that "Bowling Alone" thing - basically that we don't have a lot of social clubs or things that bring a lot of people together and people are mostly family first, and then they know their neighbors, and then people have some friends and acquaintances and relatives and that's it.

So, the rare-interaction thing is probably a long-term status quo because of the big picture.  But basically, I think everybody should just learn to shrug off the little things that other people do across culture lines  [i](why is he so uptight?  why can't she speak correctly?  would he say that if he knew where I worked or how much I earned?)[/i], knowing that most middle class parents have a lot in common if we just think about it for a second and we're all trying to unlock the code to educating our kids in a system that produces a few successes and a lot of failures, along with a ton of turmoil.[/quote]

Agree with most of this.  And yet, there are some large cultural differences that transcend both class and racial lines.  For example, at DD's school, a new principal hired a handful of stellar teachers who happened to be be gay.  A block of parents first protested loudly, then withdrew their children from the school.  The root of their discontent was that they were culturally conservative Christians.  Because we're in DC, and one can count the number of white conservative Christians on one hand--all sending their kids to private school--that meant they were black. There was a lot of friction generated over that incident among others.

So part of the communication breakdown is class anxiety, part racial anxiety, and a healthy dose of cultural anxiety.[/quote][/quote]

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