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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I choose to live in DC because I define "education" to be both what you receive in school as well as what you receive outside of school.  Both DH and I work in downtown DC, so having a short commute means we can spend more time with the kids doing something other than sitting in a car commuting.  If we both worked in the burbs, then we would move there.

The quality of the NW elementary schools and Deal are terrific now, and Wilson will be the same in a few years,[b] because the parents at these schools are super-engaged[/b].  [/quote]

No, those schools will be terrific because the parents are high-SES.[b] Their kids will do well in those schools, and they would do well in private or the suburban publics as well.[/b]

The measure of a school system should be how they do with kids who weren't born on 2nd or 3rd base.

[/quote]

I agree with you, to a point.  It's a huge showing of privilege to say "my high SES kid will do fine anywhere because he is high SES!"  I don't think that is necessarily true.  I have a friend whose kids graduated from Wilson and he said, quote, "they were terribly prepared for college."  They got into good colleges, true, but they apparently just were not on par with the other kids in terms of writing & research skills.  High SES kids do well enough wherever they go not because the school magically becomes good for them, but because they carry their privilege with them.  Ultimately it seems like people don't want to accept or see that when you share public resources with poor people, those resources sometimes reflect the systemic disadvantages of poor people.  It's not true that they magically become great due to the presence of high SES people.  I see this as a gentrification revealing the fault lines -- when you gentrify you're in "their" system, not yours, sometimes.  And then when people talk about the "super engaged parents" who are going to change everything, they're really talking about creating a parallel (ie segregated) system for themselves, which takes a while.  I'd like to see actual integration in DC, which would not rest on the assumption that "super engaged parents" are going to fix everything by creating a parallel system.  [/quote]

MoCo also has poors.  Should people stop moving there?[/quote]

Well, first of all, I'm not saying anything about where people should and shouldn't move.  I don't think these issues are solved at the level of individual choices, so you should move wherever best suits your family.

Second of all, what I'm remarking on has to do with the extreme ends of income inequality that you see fairly uniquely in DC proper, I think.  [/quote]

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