Damned if I know; I’ve lived near the school since 2008, and there hasn’t been any kind of significant neighborhood change that I can think of- about the only thing that comes to mind is that a lot of the older homeowners have either died or gone to nursing homes sometime in the past 7 years. But they’ve been replaced with younger couples and families- if anything, that would help the school I’d think.
All I can think of is that the nearby apartments may have had some sort of demographic change, but they’ve always been low-income, high-crime sorts of places, and I’d think that it’s more a situation of “nowhere to go but up”.
Probably the saddest thing is that since the school has such a reputation for badness, few of the homeowning parents want to send their kids there, so it’s a sort of vicious cycle- there are a few neighborhood families who are trying to make some kind of hippie point, but far more either go private, or send their kids to the local magnet school (interestingly enough, it’s set up to attract white kids so as to avoid segregation, as it’s in a predominantly black area- Hamilton Park Pacesetter is its name). A lucky few manage to take advantage of some sort of rule that says that if the school’s a Title-somethingorother school, that you can request that your kids not go there, and you can go to a nearby school like Moss Haven or Merriman Park.
In the long haul, I don’t think the situation will hold; as bad as Skyview is, it’s light-years better than Thurgood Marshall, which is less than a mile east, and smack in the midst of the apartments. Someone’s going to pitch an absolute shit-fit about inequality of opportunity because you literally have 4 schools within about a 2-3 mile radius and the performance is SO different between them, and it seems to be determined by the percentage of low-income and/or apartment students versus the percentage of local homeowner kids. I suspect some serious rezoning is in the future.
Not coincidentally, this backs up what I was saying earlier- the low income/apartment kids are overwhelmingly black and hispanic, while the homeowner kids are overwhelmingly middle/upper-middle class white kids with college-educated parents, who in the main aren’t racist, but merely don’t want their kids to go to a sub-par school if there’s a better option available.
The blunt truth is that for whatever reason, the actual students who have to take the tests at those school may have differing traits that affect how well they do on a “standardized” measurement of performance. That’s probably the biggest reason for the difference. Some of this difference may be because the parents of poor kids are themselves usually poorly educated, overworked, and unable to provide the various trinkets and toys that richer parents can afford. (books and electronic kits and computers, healthy food, you know)
And some of it probably is just straight genetics.
If you pursue the best education possible for your kids while at the same time support policies that make it harder for minorities to do the same for their children, then yeah you’re incredibly racist.
If for example, you move to the burbs for the schools and then support tax cuts that overwhelmingly have a negative impact on working poor black people in the inner-city, that’s really, really racist. The fact that you’ve structured your life so that you never really have to see the consequences of those policies doesn’t make it less racist, it makes it more racist.
If you put it like that (as a 2-part thing), then sure, that’s racist.
But as often as not, it’s a choice that comes with a great big “OR” in the middle. For a hypothetical example, if I was the parent of a gifted child, and I petitioned the school board to increase G&T funding at the expense of low-income after-school care, is that racist? I’m looking out for my own children. I would expect the low-income parents to do the same thing in reverse, and ultimately that’s their responsibility to do so, not mine. Nobody has an obligation to look out for someone else’s kids at the expense of their own.
Which is why I put it in the second part, because that’s the important part. If, for example, you move to the burbs and then become a Tea Party Republican who consistently votes for policies and politicians who are diverting resources away from the inner-city so that you can continue to maintain advantage in your life over the lives of inner-city minorities, that’s racist.
No, it’s classist at worst. Unless you’re also positing that only poor minorities live in inner cities and only majority race middle-class or rich people live in the suburbs.
I don’t know if I’d call it axiomatic, but I also don’t know why anyone would assume that they aren’t? Your question makes it sound like you don’t think that there are any black people who hate other black people.
No, even if both conditions are true, this is not racist. It’s rather easy to illustrate this. There will be winners and losers for all policies. Simply supporting one policy that disproportionately negatively impacts minorities is not sufficient to determine if the support is racist or not. The motivations for that support is what would control.
These types of accusations of racism dilute the meaning of the word.
White American here, and I voted “somewhat racist.” People forget just how bad things were before the Civil Rights Movement. The U.S. would not twice elect a black President and overall be cool with interracial couples/marriage if it was as virulently, flagrantly racist as its worst critics say. Are there still racist yahoos out there? Absolutely, and they get a disproportionate amount of attention in the media. But things are much better than they once were, and we can all do our part to make things better still. I’ve seen this among people I know, and in the country as a whole. Part of the genius of America is its capacity for change, reform and self-improvement.