Reply to Atlantic Article on Rolling Terrace and Outsized Role of Affluent White Parents

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Reply to "Atlantic Article on Rolling Terrace and Outsized Role of Affluent White Parents"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is getting to be ridiculous. If you're white and send your kids to predominantly white schools, you're racist. If you're white and send your kids to "diverse" schools and then get involved in the PTA and care about your kids' education, you're racist. Is there anything white people can do that is NOT racist??[/quote]

Nice strawman you've got there.  NO ONE is saying that white parents are racist for being involved with the PTA.  Some white parents, however, are racially tone deaf when it comes to the activities they organize through the PTA and the "causes" that they direct the PTA to take on.

I work in international development.  It's a field where it is very easy to do the wrong thing for the "right" reasons.  That's why it is so important to involve local voices when planning projects/activities, and to have members of the beneficiary community (the stakeholders, as it were) as EQUAL participants in program design and implementation. [/quote]

What is the "right" reason to be involved in the PTA?? Because you care about the school and the education the kids are getting! It's basically the ONLY reason to be involved, right or wrong. I didn't think this was a very good article because the examples weren't that great. It was so wrong of the PTA to purchase gift cards to thank the teachers for their hard work? Isn't that part of their job, to show teacher appreciation??[/quote]

I think it's important to look at the article here.  Now, RT parents have disputed this, but the article says this:
[i]
 For example, parents of kids in the program ensure that its teachers receive gift cards at the beginning of the year and during Teacher Appreciation Week to pay for supplies. “There are parents in our school that can’t put enough cents together to get a coat much less give their teacher their supply list,” Rivera-Blanco said. “That imbalance is huge. You can walk into a classroom and know which is a Spanish-immersion classroom and which one isn’t.”[/i]

They aren't talking about the PTA here.  They are talking about how the relative affluence of the immersion families creates a disconnect between the immersion classrooms and the "Academy" classrooms in terms of resources.

So, again, it's about where parents are choosing to put their resources.  Are parents taking on projects that benefit the whole school, or are they just making sure their own kids are covered?

Same with the Chromebooks.  Affluent parents opposed them because THEIR kids get plenty of time to familiarize themselves with technology.  Never mind that the majority of the kids in the school don't.  It's putting your own compulsions over the needs of the students in the school.  Basically, you have middle/upper class parents trying to create a middle/upper class mini-school within a low-income majority-minority school.  It has some issues.  [/quote]

Parents simply do not give gift cards at the beginning of the year.  This is completely false. Never heard of it at RT ever.[/quote]

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