Were there a lot of black students at the schools you attended as a kid, Magiver?
The same percentage as the national average.
The population average (i.e. 12%)?
I think you should consider Kansas City.
Thing is their are TWO Kansas City’s. One in Missouri, the other in Kansas.
Both serve about the same racial and economic base. KCK used to be mostly black and poor white, however lately the Hispanic population has grown.
YET,Kansas City KANSASschools are vastly superior to the ones in Kansas City MISSOURI.
Now its hard to just give you all web links to the 2 districts to show you why one is good and the other just downright sucks. You would have to live in our area to understand. However to sum it up in my opinion:
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KCK never had the history of racial tensions and teacher strikes that they had in KCMO.
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KCMO has had a LONG history of incompetence from the superintendents on down. Gross mismanagement, corruption, and incompetence were/are the norm. The last straw happened just a few years ago when the one decent high school they had with a college prep program, Southwest High School, was ruined by the stupid decision of a superintendent to close another high school and put these, less than college material, kids into Southwest.
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In KCK they have a great magnet high school called Sumner Academy which has the best academics in the city and serves to give the students of the district a realistic goal for hard work.
So in short, in our area, Kansas City, you could put your kid in an excellent school which has a good mix of the races.
When kids are missing an enormous amount of days, busing them elsewhere is a moot point.
Even if they show up for class the grading curve creates an artificial level of achievement. It’s pretty common for an “A” student in my city to move to a surrounding school system and see their grades plummet because of the inherit flaws in in the use of grading curves.
The result of this is a degradation in the value of a high school diploma to the point it’s meaningless. It’s forced business to test new hires for the most basic of skills.
It cost nothing to fix this. Issue 2 grades for tests that include both the adjusted grade as well as the actual grade.
I’ve seen this first hand. When I was between jobs I applied for a factory job that paid $10/hr. It involved a test of basic math skills. By that I mean 3rd grade math skills. I got 100% of the answers correct which the HR person seemed genuinely surprised at. I pointed out it was 3rd grade math and she proceeded to tell me the lady before me got every answer wrong. How can someone get every answer wrong? Then it dawned on me. It wasn’t multiple choice. You had to write down the actual number calculated.