Reply to Should MCPS start busing or open enrollment?

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

But currently the public school that you attend is based in where you live.  Many people on here are saying they would like to live in the W districts for the schools but cannot afford to do so.  They feel that just because try cannot afford to live in the area, their children should still be able to attend the W district schools.

[b]I think school achievement is a function if parent involvement.[/b]
 Schools that have higher parent involvement have students that do better academically.  One suggestion might be to over haul parent involvement in the local schools.[/quote]

That is your opinion. The fact is that school achievement is a function of the parents' socioeconomic status.

And again, if access to a public school is restricted to the children of people who can afford to live in the neighborhood, to what extent is it actually a public public school?[/quote]

I don't think parent SES is the determinative factor.  I think it's parent educational attainment, which might correlate with SES, but doesn't have to.  We all want high-functioning local schools, and I think a big part of what makes the W cluster schools high-performing are the children and the involvement of the parents, not the facilities, and not the PTAs.  And, frankly, the educational attainment of the parents has a bigger effect than the parents' SES.  Not to say that parents in other districts don't also have PhDs and the like, but I think places like Bethesda have unusually high concentrations of people with post-graduate degrees.  It has an impact on the children when their parents and all their friends' parents expect -- not just want -- their kids to go to college and beyond.  I know this because we work with children in DC who grow up in communities where people may not even expect to graduate from high school.  Cycles repeat themselves.

It's hard not to see these inequalities wholly through the lens of money, but at least for us, moving to a "W" district was not about wanting SES purity.  The biggest difference between our kids' experience in DC public schools and MCPS is that our kids have way more peers at advanced academic levels.  Whereas in DC our kids would be in reading groups of one and hope that teachers would remember to do something with them beside toss a book at them, in their MCPS ES, they have an entire reading group to work with, which has had a very beneficial effect on their excitement about learning.  A lot has been made of the big budgets of the PTAs in W schools, but (not to take away from the hard work of those PTAs), most of the funding goes to extras that, if they didn't exist, I don't think would matter that much to my kids' day-to-day academic experience.  You could take my kids and their peers and stick them into a crumbling classroom, and it wouldn't be great, but they would still learn and push each other along.

This peer group effect (which has been magnified in HGC) is what I was looking for -- a classroom full of nerdy kids like mine who won't tease them for their Target and church bazaar clothes and their tendency to ramble on about whatever non-pop-culture thing they're into these days.  I don't care what color their classmates are, and I don't care how much money they have.  I actually prefer my kids DON'T have rich friends, because it's just a headache for me when they want to know why so-and-so has something and they don't.  We loved the diverse environment of our kids' school in DC, but they were alone academically -- that is the only reason we left.  If their current peer group can be propagated and sustained everywhere in MCPS through forced busing, then great.  But I am pretty sure what I want for my kids is not what everyone else wants -- people complain all the time even in the W clusters that school is too much of a pressure cooker.  And given what everyone is saying on DCUM about these inequalities, I am guessing it's not easy to replicate and sustain.  So I don't think the answer is that the resources of the W schools have to be redistributed county-wise to even it all out, so that no school is higher-performing than another.  If we went down that path, you'd see W school parents going private (if they can afford it), or moving to Fairfax.  Maybe it's selfish not to agree to provide my child as a resource to another school, but you get that way when it comes to your kids.[/quote]

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