Yes!
No, because the white parents leave. They say “quality of education” and “safety” even when there’s no evidence those things are lacking, and they shake their heads and pull their kids. They say “parents who don’t share our values” or “demographic shift” and they extrapolate the behavior of one or two kids to all the “apartment kids” or “bus kids” or “not neighborhood kids”. And plenty of “neighborhood kids” may exhibit the same behaviors, but they are seen as individual fuck-ups, not as bellwethers for the group.
Then, counselors shuttle the black kids into less rigorous courses, the principals suspend them for shit that white kids get away with, and teachers refuse to support them when they face life challenges the way they support the white kids because they don’t see themselves or their own kids; they have less empathy.
This reinforces the idea that “demographic shift” is ruining the school, so white parents feel even more justified puling their kids out. The ones that remain dorever treat the school as “theirs” and see the “apartment kids” as existing on sufferance. Because the parents of the white kids are contributing a lot of money/time, and just because everyone buys into the assumption that the “neighborhood parents” are special, they and their kids get treated like royalty: best teachers, best clases, best programs are all aimed at those kids. This intensifies the gap between the two.
The end result is a “Yale or Jail” school, where a small cadre of all theaffluent white students and a handful of minority students get a top-flight education and everyobe else struggles.
Some people seem to think that test scores are a function of the school building and location, not of the kids who take the test. I was in a meeting with parents (mostly non-white, btw) who were having hysterics about their kids’ elementary school being transferred to a lower test score high school. It happened anyway - and test scores in the new high school magically rose.
When you mix kids with different levels of parental involvement, smart kids with clueless parents get the benefit of role models of high achievers in their schools and the availability of things like AP classes that a school full of lower parental involvement kids might not be able to have.
Wrong. Parents, not “society”, are responsible for feeding their kids, it’s one of the most basic responsibilities that parents have.
Damn, fell right into the logical trap that I use on other people 
Let’s say there are 3 high schools. One is majority white, performs high on tests, school breakfast and lunch rate is low. One has all races in proportion to their representation in the US. And one is majority black, performs low on test, school breakfast and lunch rate is high.
Your idea is to take kids from the majority white school and move them to the majority black school? What’s wrong with moving kids from a low performing school and placing them in a high performing school?
I don’t get that.
*I should have used green and blue for the races but I forgot, sorry.
Sort of like your position arguing for him to get away with saying ‘No’ as a valid argument?
Easy fix number 1 for slightly improving the US school system:
No more record-keeping in the lunch program.
Is that true though? My kids’ school is pretty racially integrated. There was talk about redistricting the schools to move some kids from a high performing school to a low performing school. During the parent meetings, only the performance record of the school was discussed, the races of the kids never even came up. Why would any parent in their right mind want their kids to move from a high performing school to a low performing school?
I just don’t get that.
Your doctor is responsible for doing his job correctly.
Does that mean if he loses his license on a technicality, you are out of luck - no more doctors for you? It is his responsibility, after all. If he can’t do it, no one can.
Ah, the hide the inconvenient statistics ploy.
This misunderstands school stats. Over and over and over and over again there are studies and reports that show that schools with high poverty rates TEND to have lower test scores than schools with low poverty rates. There are exceptions, but the correlation is very strong.
Furthermore, if you read some of the stuff I linked to above, impoverished children in schools with few middle-class peers TEND to perform worse than impoverished children in schools with middle-class peers.
If you want integration, it doesn’t really matter whether you move the high-achieving kids to the low-performing schools or vice-versa; what matters is that you integrate the students, such that each school is diverse.
Now, there are other factors in play. If the high-poverty building is a rat trap, then yeah, condemn it–not because the test scores are low, but because it’s unsound. If the teachers at the high-poverty school are terrible, fire them–not because they’re at the high-poverty school, but because they’re terrible.
But my district’s experience with integration in the seventies was that an excellent center of African American life was emptied out, sending the black kids and teachers to the previously all-white school. Those kids were treated as outsiders: couldn’t get on the sports teams/cheer squads, funneled by default into lower classes, lost their own award-winning marching bands, etc. Black teachers, despite their stellar educations, tended to be the first ones fired.
As important as integration was, the particular way it was handled was devastating to the community, and the community still hasn’t recovered from the blow.
So yeah, I’m calling for integration, but I’m also calling for preserving valuable cultural centers. I’m calling for integration in a way that respects all children. And that’s not going to mean emptying the black school to divvy the kids up among the white schools. There’s a more balanced way to do it.
Listen, all this stuff is complicated. I’m trying to reflect that in what I say, but if I sometimes sound like I think the solutions are simple, I apologize: they’re not. I think they’re far bigger than schools, and I think they’re going to be decades in the implementation, and right now far from solving these problems the politicians in power are exacerbating them. But they’re not simple.
If it doesn’t matter, then move the kids from a low performing school to a high performing school. Less backlash all around.
Test scores are a function of a lot of different things - of course the students who are taking the test are critical. The environment they are raised in, the opportunities they’ve had, the quality of nutrition, exercise, overall experience, etc. Looking at test scores is a single metric (multiple across subjects) that can act as a shortcut to evaluate all of those things.
Because lower income areas tend to have different sorts of problems than higher income areas. It’s not full proof by any means, but all other things being equal I’d rather my kids go to a school where there is no shortages of resources for anything than a school that is struggling to get books computers, school supplies, etc. Wouldn’t you make the same choice? All other things being equal, a school that has no scarcity of resources vs. one that does? I’m not saying this is the case in my kids’ school, but I did choose where I live in part because it is more a nicer neghborhood that also is more expensive. Higher priced neighborhoods tend to self select out those that can’t afford it.
I’ll have to get back to more responses later.
You cannot embark on some path to change the history of racism. It happened. Things are in no way in the present how they were in the past in magnitude, so let that go for now and move on to this point: Schools are typified and classed by their test scores, it just so happens that some of the lowest test scores happen to be in black communities. This indicates a problem within the black community, and not from a white supremacist indirect segregation theory that you have posted about previously. A symptom of a social disease in the black community is poor test scores in schools. Poor test scores and poverty sometimes translate into more dangerous schools. Whites leaving under performing schools for better ones is not contributing to racism or segregation, redlining or what the word du jour is. What you keep inching at is that a white family moving their child to a better school is somehow them being complacent or actively participating in racism, when it is absolutely not true. They are moving for better opportunities for their children. That is all.
A conspiracy is by definition a surreptitious or nefarious plot by two or more people to undermine another person or group of people by illegal means. Compare and contrast that definition with your previous posts and you’ll see that calling it a conspiracy is a rather valid claim.
Seriously, re-read your posts and you will see evidence of that in your claims. Maybe, just maybe you need to articulate a better argument if all you are seeing is other people misinterpret you.
Did you read the rest of what I wrote? Integration isn’t the only aim–if it were, then what you said makes sense, but it’s not.
This reads very much like you’re unhappy with saying racism has anything to do with the achievement gap between black students and white students, so you want to exclude that possibility, and instead blame it on the inferiority of black parents.
This is primarily a problem of white culture, not black culture.
When I put the adjective “structural” in front of “racism,” do you understand what that means?
I see nothing illegal about it.
It’s almost an attachment to human evolutionary instincts, moving toward more arable land but in this case it is schools. You go to where the better bounty is with less risks if you are able to.
DC doesn’t force you to enroll in your closest school, so people do this here. If enough people leave a school, the city closes it.
Sure, but you used examples from the 70s. Where are some modern day examples of moving kids from low performing schools to higher performing schools? Did that work? Is that something we should try to do?
I used those examples to illustrate what could go wrong if there’s a top-down decision made without consulting everyone, to suggest the risks of your proposal. I see no reason to think it’d go differently today.