Reply to This American Life about desegregation in schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What I see is a bunch of parents (not the honor student from TAL episode, that's an outlier) who failed their kids by not enforcing education at home who made their own school a failing one by failing tests and failing attendance.

Now these parents relinquish responsibility for the failure and demand that it's school's fault they didn't make their kids succeed.

And you want to fix this at the expense of my kid?  My kid is supposed to be a crutch for your failing kid?   I don't think so.  Your success is your job and you have to work for it. No one owes you anything.[/quote]

The TAL story had more than a 1,000 kids whose parents enforced education to the extent of putting them a bus to ride 30 miles twice a day.  How is that not "working for it"?  Obviously, the two examples provided were not outliers when it came to valuing an education.  The second student in the story who was bused to the suburban schoold ended up tutoring the "crutch" student whose sentiments mirrored what you're expressing here.

What the story posits is that integration is uncomfortable for everyone involved, but no one suffers.  No student is exposed to violence or finds their own grades dropping because they're sitting next to a kid who escaped from a failing school.  But the grades and the prospects of the transferred students do go up.  Because the air is different, the vibe is different, there's running water, heat, air conditioning, roofs that don't collapse, cafeterias that don't flood, a staff that isn't bitter about their shitty working conditions and students who actually want to be there every day.

The Normandy school district made a deliberate attempt to make leaving their school difficult, yet paid more than $10 million in one year to transfer students clamoring to leave. The state, which allowed the school to operate in dysfunction for nearly two decades, changed the status of the school from unaccredited to [i]non[/i]-accredited to force their return.  Not so that the state could fix the schools or re-establish them as places where learning happens, but rather so that they could appease the racist asshole parents who claim that they couldn't stand any students with violent, brain-dead fail cooties coming into Lake Wobegon school districts, no matter what color their skin.  Their fears had about as much reality to them as an 80s horror movie, while Normandy parents who believed their kids futures to be FUBAR were absolutely on the money.

People in this forum spend countless hours trying to suss out these types of interlopers (not saying anything about skin color) who cheat on residency to get their kids into better shcools, simultaneously don't care about education, AND bring down the quality of education for "good" people who care enough about their kids to spend a million dollars on a 1500 sf colonial.

We can't for the life of us or the success of our city figure out the achievement gap, but we are so on top of the poors here.  Thank god.

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