I appreciate that feedback. However, I stand by what I said like 90%. Lemme explain my reasons.
I think the United States is a society with deep racial injustices. White people have disproportionate power and wealth. Black people have disproportionate lack of power and wealth.
When I talk about “white supremacy,” I’m using it as I understand bell hooks and others to use it, not to refer to a deliberate Klan-like effort to keep black people down, or even a belief that white people are fundamentally better. Instead, I’m using it to refer to this system that favors white people, conferring disproportionate power and wealth to us. It is this sense–the sense of reigning supreme–that shows up as white supremacy. It’s a systematic indictment, not a statement about an individual’s beliefs about race.
And I do fault parents who choose to move kids out of an integrated school to a segregated school, without a very strong reason for doing so. Such a move tends to perpetuate white supremacy, for the reasons I’ve cited previously.
That said, there’s the 10% I don’t stand by what I said, and that 10% is the ambiguity: because “white supremacy” is an ambiguous term with multiple definitions, and because some of those definitions–probably the better-known and more-used deifnitions–don’t apply in this case, that may not be the best term to use. “Structural racism” is, hopefully, a better-understood term, so I’ll try to use that instead, going forward.
No that’s not it. You are taking the position that it’s fine to condemn a group of people who won’t endanger their children by sending them to dangerous schools while excusing another group that has created that dangerous environment.
Now should the young children in the dangerous environment have a better environment? Absolutely. However, the left isn’t interested in fixing broken aspects of culture.
Here’s a quote from Mr. Rogers that I think is important for this topic:
and another one:
We live in a society. Our children will grow up and live in the society that our choices have brought about. Of course we want to to whats best for our own kids, that is natural as a human, but our responsibilities don’t end there. We are a social species, we depend on our communities for many things. We should do what we can to strengthen them so that our kids have the best possible word to grow up into. If your kid turns out fantastic, but society around them is a smoldering ruin, what good will that do them?
Thanks, but I’d rather not congratulate or castigate as side commentary - posts stand on their own without a need for score keeping.
I acknowledge that systemic and structural racism plays a part in poor performance of certain minority groups across the nation. I agree that research shows that in general students tend to perform better across many metrics when they are among a surface level diverse student body. I’m not so sure that better performance is uniformly distributed. From what I’ve read, it works kind of like a high performing group X can be made up of lets say 100 students. A low performing group Y can be made up of 500 students. If we mix X + Y, then on average, the performance will go up overall. The gains are mostly concentrated in group Y, with group X mostly holding steady, with some minor variance in both directions.
The argument for forced integration is that those variances aren’t something to be concerned about, and the gains in group Y are worth whatever cost to group X may be imposed.
To those arguments I would say if my kids are among group X, then I value their education substantially greater than those in group Y. If there is even a possibility of the forced integration being a cause of a negative outcome, then it’s not worth it. That calculus has nothing to do with race and everything to do with prioritizing my kids over other people’s kids.
And while I do agree that some aspects of white flight have underlying racist motivations, I think in the basket of motivations there are many other significant non-racist motivations. So much so that unless some particularized action can be identified, it’s not informative to call out racist motivations because doing so can so often be wrong.
If a there are two families one white, and one black, that live in an underperforming school district that is racially diverse, and they both decide independently that because education is their top priority they are moving to an area with better schools but not racially diverse, is one perpetuating structural racism, or engaging in white flight, where the other isn’t? Why can’t they both simply be doing what they think is best for their family?
These kinds of discussions often run like that - call the other side white supremacist resegregationists, and then complain they won’t engage in thoughtful nuanced discussion.
There is literally no level of possible negative outcome–however slight the chance and however slight the outcome–that you are willing to accept? Even though there are also real, concrete, positive outcomes as well?
I love my son blindly, overwhelmingly, unconditionally. But I put him in a majority-black/majority poor magnet school with some real educational problems because 1) I think the impact on his education will be slight, and that I can more than compensate as a parent if there is any impact and 2) I feel like there’s a positive social benefit to integrating society from the ground up. I am a serious fan of intensive academics. I teach at a school where we expect 80% of our kids to be done with AB Calculus sophomore year at the latest. I literally don’t know anyone more in favor of rigorous expectations than I. But I find the argument that any chance of a the slightest negative impact on your child’s education justifies any means to just be specious. It’s hard to take seriously.
And I’ve worked in a district for 15 years that lost pretty much all the white kids to white flight, and in those years, I have talked to so many white families about my district. Racism is a huge part of it. A lot of it is implicit: if parents pull up to a school and see a circle of black kids talking, that’s enough to make the school register as dangerous. If the school’s ESL and poor populations are struggling on state tests, that’s enough to declare their kids can’t get an education there. But if you look at the data–I shared some 2 pages ago–affluent white kids do well in urban schools. They are cossetted and catered to, IME. There are individual schools in my district I wouldn’t send a kid to, but there are also tons of majority-minority campuses where the non-poor white kids perform at the same level as their suburban peers. Using the test scores of the poor and non-English speakers to justify not sending your kid there because their might have been some marginal improvement at a majority white/majority affluent school seems preposterous to me. This is especially true if you send them to the second-tier private schools in the area, which, again, IME, are quite weak academically. But they are great at making sure your kids’ friends look like them. It’s hard to see it as anything other than a deep discomfort with majority-minority environments.
If group X is mostly holding steady, then there’s no cost to group X compared to not mixing groups X+Y.
Furthermore, group X gains an additional benefit, inasmuch as learning how to function in a diverse society, understanding how different cultures work, etc. are benefits. One of the articles I talked about earlier quantified some of these benefits.
Some prioritizing of one’s own kids makes sense, but when a mild hypothetical benefit for my kids contributes to a serious actual harm to other people’s kids, I can’t justify that decision.
It’s not about motives; it’s about predictable results. Purely selfish motives can result in structurally racist results, and so my frustration with white families who engage in this activity is based on these results, whether or not the families wear white hoods.
As for your example, you gotta talk about results. Will the white family moving to a monochrome school lead to worse academic results for other kids? Will the black family have the same result? We live in a world of racial injustice, so sometimes two analogous actions taken by a white person and a black person will have different results. And, again, it’s the results, not the motives, that matter.
The other thing about this is that if you want to prioritize your kids’ education, take those sacrifices upon yourself. Spend thirty minutes a day less engaged in TV watching or Straight Dope posting or whatever, and instead spend those thirty minutes reading to your kid or taking her on a nature walk or teaching her to multiply fractions. Nobody is literally doing everything they can for their kids; there’s always room for improvement.
What I see is people who want to help their kids, but want to externalize the cost of helping their kids: instead of taking away from their own time, and quality of life, they take away from the quality of life for kids in poverty.
Hate to nitpick but 80% of a student population passing Calculus as a 10th grader is an extremely rare school. Especially with the qualifying remark “at the latest.” That means you have a substantial amount taking and passing Calculus as 9th graders or before. What type of school is this?
I went to an upper middle class suburban high school (over 95% white). There was quite a bit of violence, but it was not “seen”. White kids fighting or bringing weapons or vandalising was just seen as something that they needed to learn better, not be written off. Kids got a slap on the wrist or detention for stuff that other people get expelled or arrested for.
And it also creates another generation of white kids who are doomed to think that the advantages that they have over minorities are fairly and justly earned.
Personally, I think get rid of the “school lunch program”, and just have free lunch, period. Nothing to sign up for, no means testing where you have to prove that you are poor, just lunch (and breakfast (and even dinner, why not?), if I have my way), available for free for any student that wants it.
Out of curiosity, how much do you break down these scores? Do you look at the mean or the median when you look at the averages? Do you look at how individual student’s scores changed through the educational years? It very well could be that if you are just looking at raw test scores, then they may have great test scores because they only have smart students. Your kids may not be smart enough to get those test scores, so they may be the ones that are funneled into the remedial classes, where they get no improvement, while the better students progress.
Going to a school that boasts lower overall average test scores, but a greater improvement throughout the entire student body, showing that they are concerned about all the students, not just the top ones, would be a better metric to consider, IMHO.
The parents of kids in high-performing schools tend to be the kind of parents who are doing that already. The parents of kids in low-performing schools tend to be the kind of parent who aren’t. Maybe they can’t, maybe they won’t - but the point is they don’t.
Still, as you say, there is always room to do more. That might be good advice addressed to the parents of low-performing students.
I don’t see that. The parents of high-performing students aren’t externalizing anything, and aren’t harming the poor kids by helping their own kids with their homework.
We are a STEM magnet, but we are majority-minority/urban/70% free and reduced lunch. There are very good urban schools, but everyone prefers the narrative that they are all wore torn hell scapes, justifying removing their kids without even exploring the option.
Do you have any evidence that affluent kids with the kind of parents that do that anyway will be at an educational disadvantage if they attend a school with “the other kind”? Because I work in schools like that, and I don’t see it. You can’t take the difference in test averages in two schools and assume any given kid would have the same difference in their own achievement.
I want to be sure of what you are asking - you want a cite that students with involved parents do equally well no matter what school they attend? Also, by “educational disadvantage” do you mean test scores, or things like in-school violence, gangs, and other factors that affect education?
I’ve seen it with my own eyes in my own family. The public school in its entire history of offering AP chemistry had one student pass. Once. With a 3. Straight A’s in all AP (where offered) or honors classes but not learning anything meant this was not a good fit, so off to boarding school!
