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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We're just down the road at ESS. Same problems, but perhaps less amplified because our kid's school doesn't have the immersion program.

Small, excessively vocal group of white, moneyed parents enforcing their values as if those values are indisputably correct. The PTA is trying to better engage the whole community, but these like 6 parents are so loud it just drowns everything else out. [/quote]

Yah how dare 6 parents try and effect change in an under performing school. Hevens forbid other kids start getting good test scores and make it out of that neighborhood.[/quote]

Exactly.  I am a member of the PTA and give generously to my kids' class as far as crayons, kleenex, hand sanitizer and pencils.  Room parent. Mixed SES, some high, some low, a lot of ESOL, huge school.  I also volunteer in the classroom once or twice a week where the student teacher ratiio is 26 to 1.  I work with kids who are not getting one on one time with the teacher at the moment.  Help them learn to read and write.  They know me and are excited to see me when I also volunteer at lunch and recess for the whole grade.  I love those kids.  I also raise money at the aucton for items that benefit all classes at the school.  I am not the only parent at the school who does this.  There are many who put time in.   According to you all, I am a horrible person.   This forum is a freaking soul sucker.  Damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I appreciate our PTA members for all that they do, like pp above. If these other voices want to be heard, they need to attend the meetings and volunteer for things in order to be 'represented' at the PTA. I just don't buy the statement that six grown adults drown out any other voices. Speak up. Don't sit on the sidelines and complain you aren't represented. [/quote]

I'm the PP who originally mentioned the small group of overly vocal parents at ESS. The issue isn't that parents who donate their immaterial and material resources to the school--like myself and the PP who mistakenly understood my comment to be casting her/him as a "horrible person", among many other dedicated families--are not "heard", it's that a handful of parents whine incessantly and advocate unskillfully for minutiae that matters tremendously to them but likely isn't even on the radar for the rest of us. "Being heard" is just a sliver of all that "being involved" comprises. When there are legitimate problems to tackle, then let's give those problems our due attention. But bemoaning indoor recess and sugar in yogurt like it's this huge undermining of your child's human rights is just ridiculous. It sucks up attention and marginalizes all the other work of "being involved". Honestly, avoiding these traps is part of the work that people have to do in terms of recognizing their privilege and making space for more voices.[/quote]

It doesn't marginalize the "other work being involved", it [b]marginalizes the less important voices clamoring for disproportionate resources[/b]. Get to a place where your voice can be held in parity and you will obtain parity. It isn't the other way around! [b] People recognize privilege by maintaining it and propagating it[/b], not by dismantling it after generations and generations of setting it up. There are no shortcuts in life and this laughable notion of absolute parity and fairness is a farce. [/quote]

:shock:

Do you hear yourself?![/quote]

You tell me which generational benefits are not ok to keep and pass down and which ones are? Do I need to prop up the peasants and working class in other countries too or just the ones inside my borders? I am sorry but the baby of a poor uneducated single parent doesn't really deserve the same access to stuff that a multigenerational good family kid gets. They may want it, the mother working hard at McDonalds may not understand why they will never get it, and no one would accuse the situation of being equal and fair but that doesn't mean they are entitled to it. Just as a child born in a slum in Bangladesh will not have the same life as one born in Los Gatos simply because the people around them didn't build the same environment, why should somebody get to bypass life's strategic positioning just because they want to? What this Bull shit "privilege" talking point is amounts to resource redistribution, plain and simple.

People need to stop thinking with wants and hopes and start treating life like a game of chess and realize that sometimes they might have to put in the work that they might not see the benifits of so that others get the benifits and relize that if you don't have access it is by design, either take it or move on.  All lives don't matter and that is the way the world works. A private is not worth the same as a general and if given the choice the system would sacrifice thousands of privates to save one general. Just consider your nuclear unit (as you chose to define) as a bunch of privates. Also take a step back and relize most great things in human history were built on the backs of people who never got to partake in the benifits of them, hell I bet your outfit you are wearing while reading this and the phone or computer you're reading it on was made by borderline slaves. But when oppression happens to you on a smaller scale it is messed up?  Hypocrital small thinking by small people at its worse.[/quote]

'k. Whatever you need to tell yourself.[/quote]

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