We live in SE DC. I love it. My oldest DS goes to a good Hill DCPS school and went to a daycare where many of the children were poor. I think he's awesome - I am clearly biased. I think he has the best social skills of any 7 year old I've ever met. We are white. We have been to parties where everyone else is black - he walks right into the room of kids and is like, "What are we going to play?" He understands that some people have disabilities because he has classmates with disabilities. He understands that some families have gay parents because we have friends who are gay and go to church with families where the parents are gay.

I do think he might be getting a better reading/math education in Arlington/Mont. County or a good private school. However, I think we are preparing him for life in our amazingly diverse and diversify city and county. If he's really smart and becomes a doctor, he will walk into his first day of residency in an urban emergency room and be less freaked out and more comfortable with diversity.

With every school and every neighborhood there are trade offs.

Anonymous wrote:Lots of generalizations here.

It is more important than ever for our children to realize that we are in a recession and that children their age are starving in America. How they get that point doesn't matter. But, it does matter for humanity that they get it.

Agree. And I would add that children aren't just starving in the US. There are children who are dying--in the US and abroad-- because their families can't afford health care, adequate shelter, and clean drinking water.

Lots of generalizations here.

It is more important than ever for our children to realize that we are in a recession and that children their age are starving in America. How they get that point doesn't matter. But, it does matter for humanity that they get it.

I think that a lot depends on how the school, whether private or public, addresses--if at all--the issue of SES.

When I was growing up as the "poor, but bright" scholarship student at my private school, it was painfully clear that the school did not make an effort to address socio-economic diversity. Things like having to pay from prom tickets--when your family is working class poor, you cannot shell out $200 for tickets to the prom, pay extra for soccer uniforms, pay for out-of-town debate tournaments, hire a violin teacher, etc. My parents worked, so they couldn't shuttle me to playdates. Most of my friends lived in wealthier parts of town. Poor children become ostracized from social activities and then from other students at school.

I think that many public schools don't have the resources to make sure that these sorts of economic barriers come in the way of cross-economic socialization. They simply can't afford to subsidize poor students' participation in these activities.

Private schools send mixed messages about SES. When they claim to embrace economic diversity among their students, it's usually the teachers who are getting tuition benefits. Hardly the kind of diversity that we really want.

Ultimately, I think that schools have to reach out to parents to make sure that they talk to kids about this sort of thing. Wealthy parents in particular need to make sure that their children respect other children who don't have the same economic means that they do.

Anonymous wrote:Great question OP. As someone who came to the US as an adult, this desire to go out of one's way to surround one's kids with those who are less fortunate is the most puzzling thing about this board.

I want my kids to grow into high functioning empowered adults. The best way to attempt this is to surround them with smart, hardworking kids from well-functioning families and get them used to interacting and competing with them, both in academics and on the sports field. Sure, it will be important for them to learn that the world is full of all kinds of people, but that they will learn from travel and interacting with friends from different activities and camps. If I can give them successful role models, why should I go out of my way to show them "average." They can find that anywhere.

Someone here also not from the US and this is also my reaction. I went to a truly economically diverse school - lost of kids that were on welfare and lots of kids that were from wealthy families (kid of top plastic surgeon, internationally renowed engineer) and some in between. Friendship were driven by economic status and then a lot of pressure to conform within each group. In fact I think there was more pressure to have the right stuff from the right store since that determined your status in each group. There was so much about my experience that was truly awful that I really want my daughter to go to school with other kids that are similar in socioeconomic status but diverse in life experiences, interesting and interested in the world. At my daughters school (an elite private in DC) there are many parents that are shockingly wealthy but their main focus is on the education of their child and on good behaviour. For example the tooth fairy brings a dollar. My friend opted for the local private school and finds several parents to be "showy" about how wealthy they are, and the tooth fairy brings $20.

Anonymous wrote:What about the idea that having your middle class children in school with upper-middle and upper-class children will let them see the potential of what hard work/high income can bring? Not equating the material with happiness, but it opens the eyes to possibilities of deciding where priorities lie and choices the kids make for their future.

Except it's not their peers who are working hard - it's their parents or even their grandparents who worked hard or have a high income. They only see that their friend Jonny has a new Porsche at 16 and DC only got the family's hand-me-down BMW - so DC must be poor, which is so messed up and so indicative of the U.S. consumer society.

What about the idea that having your middle class children in school with upper-middle and upper-class children will let them see the potential of what hard work/high income can bring? Not equating the material with happiness, but it opens the eyes to possibilities of deciding where priorities lie and choices the kids make for their future.

Just to remind PPs, the question here isn't actually "public or private?" It's more about homogeneity of SES.

Lots and lots of public elementary schools in Bethesda, Potomac, Arlington, McLean, Fairfax? have, like, 1.2% FARMS. And average HHIs of $200,000, according to 2010 Census data.

So waving the "but we chose public!" banner can be beside this particular point; the kids are all, to a person, upper middle class.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great question OP. As someone who came to the US as an adult, this desire to go out of one's way to surround one's kids with those who are less fortunate is the most puzzling thing about this board.

I want my kids to grow into high functioning empowered adults. The best way to attempt this is to surround them with smart, hardworking kids from well-functioning families and get them used to interacting and competing with them, both in academics and on the sports field. Sure, it will be important for them to learn that the world is full of all kinds of people, but that they will learn from travel and interacting with friends from different activities and camps. If I can give them successful role models, why should I go out of my way to show them "average." They can find that anywhere.

You're equating "smart, hardworking" with kids whose families are wealthy enough to afford $35K (or $70K for two kids) per year for education. And you're equating "well-functioning families" with parents who chose law school instead of government or not-for-profits. So essentially, you're associating all these desirable characteristics with the upper class, because for much of the middle class, private school is out of reach. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt, because your came to this country as an adult, but it's hard to think you understand US social classes, and it's even tempting to suspect classist yourself, and/or you're trying to limit your kid's exposure to "regular" US kids.

I agree with the poster who said that upper class kids often work less hard -- unless they happen to be in an elite private, and specifically if they entered that elite private in the upper grades when they were judged on their achievements and grades.

There are lots of well-functioning families where the parents didn't choose to enter law, and their hard-working, well-functioning kids are generally in public. And believe it or not, some of the hardest-working kids come from immigrant families with obviously lower SES than yours.

FWIW, sending your kid to summer camps won't expose him to a different SES, unless you choose one of those karate camps with signs on the street corners.

Interesting response. But the first quoted message does not actually equate "well-functioning" with "wealthy enough to afford $35K (or $70K for two kids) per year for education."

I keep my kids in my neighborhood schools in part because I'm uncomfortable with the widening gap between haves/nots in this country. Sure, maybe my kids'd be better able to float down the highway of life within a bubble of fabulous, well-educated, well-off peers if I kept us within our peer group, educationally and financially. But I don't think that that's a tenable solution for us as a society. Siphoning off the top percentile and leaving the rest behind is a recipe for worsoning all sorts of things, including the economy, if the competitve edge thing is what's really at stake for parents. If I thought the schools were dangerous or that my kids were unhappy or that they weren't getting an adequate education, I'd put them in private. But I'm not gonna do it just to gild the lily, as it were.

I attend private schools and was "poor" in comparison to the other kids.

I knew by high school that my definition of poor was not really what poor meant. You know kids figure these things out - homogeneous group or not.

I don't think there would have been any value to me as a child to attend a school with truly "poor" kids as I wouldn't have valued there parents income status. It just doesn't have the same meaning for a kid.

What gave me a broader viewpoint was getting out into the working world at 15. I wanted to go to work - didn't have to - and through working retail, fast food, etc. I really began to more fully understand how lucky I was and appreciate how hard my parents had worked to get to where they were. I realized that the job I did 20 hours a week that I thought was fun actually paid the bills for someone else and kept their kid clothed and fed. It was in those years and through that experience that I really gained compassion and understanding. To this day, I can remember a lot of the women and men I worked with and remember mostly a lot of them worked way too hard for way too little money.

To answer the OP's question, nothing. I think it also is not a public vs private thing. My children happen to attend private school, but they frankly see a lot more diversity than they would have if I sent them to the lily white JKLM elementary down the street. A tiny starter house that needs work in my neighborhood goes for $750K. So how much economic diversity is there, really? With the possible exception of the very few lucky winners in the out-of-boundary lottery, all of the kids going to that school have parents who pull in six or seven figures a year.

My children attend private school because I want them to understand that there is a point to being a well-rounded and educated person that goes beyond competing hard to ensure that they, and not Johnny or Susie, get the spot at TJ or Blair. I grew up going to public school. On paper there was a tremendous amount of divserity of every type in my public school system in a reasonably affluent suburb of another city in the Northeast. In reality, there was no diversity. The gifted kids were 99% white, they came from uppr middle class or wealthy families, and you spent your entire school day with the same small group of 50 or so kids. We were the "poor" family because we didn't belong to the country club. I doubt the public schools around here are any different from the ones I knew. I think the choice between public and private based on some sort of diversity basis, including economic diversaity, is a false dichotomy.

My parents were the first of their family to make it to college, they barely made it into the professional classes and then my father was pushed out in corporate restructuring. For a variety of reasons they have a very insecure retirement. We went to city schools and then state colleges. My siblings are all college graduates, middle class but none of us feel secure. So in some respects it is hard to even relate to the OP. But I would agree with several of the posters understanding wealth and security are relative experiences is an important quality in an well balanced individual. This article in the Atlantic on how the wealthly perceive themselves was enlitening to me. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-fears-of-the-super-rich/8419/

I also agree about work ethic can be a problem. I have had more than a few coworkers that could not believe they had to work a full 8 hour day and all 5 days of the week. They did not usually come from really wealthy backgrounds but rather very indulgent parents. I do however work with the attorneys thatpull all kinds of stops to get their kids jobs to the point that they ask employees to help with their kids homework. How does that kid ever learn to do their own work?

I had a friend tell me once if my child could not think of anything worth saving for I was giving them too much. No matter what your economic standing the key will need to be to help you child have something to work toward.

I think there is an important distinction to be made. I want to an elite private high school with a mix of high-earning professionals and wealthy entrepreneurs. In most cases, the professional kids were quite motivated by the high school years to achieve because of the merit-oriented, education-values households they came from. They took full advantage of academic and extracurricular opportunities and were motivated to get into the top schools. Those kids also had a sense that there were not vast trust-funds or family businesses that could finance a future life of countless screw-up. I was one of the kids- granted had a fantastic lifestyle growing up, but also knew that I had to go after all opportunities to sustain it for myself. The future TF/big family business kids didn't have the same incentives to perform because many of them just assumed that no matter what they did they would inherit the world so to speak- and many did.

I'm glad I went to a top private, helped prep me for a great Ivy, which led to great grad school, which led to a high-income career that actually focusses on improving the lives of the poor and under-privileged around the world. I think people are sometimes myopic- it's not an either or proposition all the time- you can do well (financially), while doing good (impact)...the choices just aren't as stark as biglaw vs. non-profit....

Anonymous wrote:Great question OP. As someone who came to the US as an adult, this desire to go out of one's way to surround one's kids with those who are less fortunate is the most puzzling thing about this board.

I want my kids to grow into high functioning empowered adults. The best way to attempt this is to surround them with smart, hardworking kids from well-functioning families and get them used to interacting and competing with them, both in academics and on the sports field. Sure, it will be important for them to learn that the world is full of all kinds of people, but that they will learn from travel and interacting with friends from different activities and camps. If I can give them successful role models, why should I go out of my way to show them "average." They can find that anywhere.

You're equating "smart, hardworking" with kids whose families are wealthy enough to afford $35K (or $70K for two kids) per year for education. And you're equating "well-functioning families" with parents who chose law school instead of government or not-for-profits. So essentially, you're associating all these desirable characteristics with the upper class, because for much of the middle class, private school is out of reach. I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt, because your came to this country as an adult, but it's hard to think you understand US social classes, and it's even tempting to suspect classist yourself, and/or you're trying to limit your kid's exposure to "regular" US kids.

I agree with the poster who said that upper class kids often work less hard -- unless they happen to be in an elite private, and specifically if they entered that elite private in the upper grades when they were judged on their achievements and grades.

There are lots of well-functioning families where the parents didn't choose to enter law, and their hard-working, well-functioning kids are generally in public. And believe it or not, some of the hardest-working kids come from immigrant families with obviously lower SES than yours.

FWIW, sending your kid to summer camps won't expose him to a different SES, unless you choose one of those karate camps with signs on the street corners.