Actually, what I find confusing is you talking about black communities in totality and then pointing to one location that isn’t all that black (30% white) and talking about it like it is across the US (in that way)
It isn’t. The underperforming schools (ALL of them) should be broken up and bussed to the better performing schools (in small enough amounts to affect the change). If that school is doing fine, then great on them! But I am only talking about a fix for the underperforming ones. You keep conflating the issues of what you see as racist and the school dilemma. I am only talking about the education gap.
Sure , which is why there is a fix proposed. That some of you either cant see the forest through the trees, or you are concerned about something different than education.
I do find confusing that I ask why you think that a high diversity school should be broken up, and you reply by saying that it is underperforming. It’s not, it’s just highly diverse. Still doesn’t prevent white families from moving out of the districts for whiter schools.
I also wonder why you think that I was talking about black communities in totality, when I was talking about communities that had large black populations. Those are not the same things.
What is an underperforming school in your opinion? Bottom 5%, 10%, 25%, 50%? If there is a school that is just under your cutoff, would you give it a chance to see if it can be improved, or just break it up? If it happens to have a great band program or sports program, or the students and community take pride in it, but the funding has been lacking so test scores are not as good as the schools with more funding, is breaking up that school the best thing to do?
If you have a school that has quite a number of highly gifted students who are on college track, but also has a fair number of students that are not motivated, due to home and personal issues, to do much academically, is breaking up that school actually going to help anyone?
Schools are part of the community, and the community is part of the school. If the only thing that you are concerned about is the education gap, and you are willing to ignore possible harms to the community in your efforts to see an increase in test scores, then you are missing more than just a forest as you point out twigs.
It’s not that clearcut. Tenure and other teacher contract items can make it difficult to layoff teachers (this can differ greatly in different areas depending on the contracts they negotiated).
Then you have the physical building and grounds whose cost to maintain does not really diminish with fewer students.
I admit, I’ve got nothing for this.
But on a related note, when the white families move out, aren’t other non-white families moving in? Or are we just positing that the houses formerly owned by white people are just abandoned for all time?
Depends on exactly how they lose the kids. My kids’ parochial school covered pre-K through 8th grade. Let’s say they have 300 kids total, 30 in each class/grade. They lose 30 kids. If they lose three kids from each class, the school will only save on consumables- they will use less soap, less paper etc. Teachers don’t get paid less for teaching 27 kids and their benefits don’t cost less because they are only teaching 27 kids. Because the school was so small, there was one principal and one secretary, so they couldn’t cut back any more on that. The only way to save more money than the costs of soap, etc is to get rid of some program altogether - but that only works if there is an optional program that can be given up without affecting the rankings.
Now if losing 30 kids meant they lost the entire second-grade class, that would save a more substantial amount of money. But as long as they have a second-grade class, the costs for it will be virtually the same whether there are 10 kids in the class or 30.
I yearn for the olden days, when Americans understood there was a middle ground between black and white, that the Liberty to send one’s children to private schools could be combined with the Responsibility to provide good public education for those who want it. For example, we can require all taxpayers to contribute to public schools whether their children attend public schools or not, or in fact whether they even have children or not.
In post-rational America many seem to think that Hyperlibertarianism and Marxism are the only two options available to us.
AFAICT, DeVos’ strategy for making her private schools look better than public schools is to deliberately sabotage public schools. IIRC, she is on record as proposing that reducing their revenue is the way to improve public schools.
Who remembers President Carter participating in a live phone in show with Walter Cronkite hosting? Millions of people called in to ask President Carter questions - one person who got through to the line asked why he sent his daughter to a public school.
Your fix is both impractical and simplistic. A true fix is going to require a lot of work, a lot of changes to our society, a lot of different particulars based on different communities.
Yep. My older niece is pregnant with her third kid and is already determined that all of the kids she ever has will be home-schooled.
Reasons: 1. She and her husband will not vaccinate; 2. She doesn’t want the kiddos learning that the Earth is really old, and who knows what else.
I could intervene and corrupt and try to subvert the kids but I’m sure that would set off WWIII within the fam.
We ended up homeschooling for two years in the Midwest simply because we knew we were moving back east and were falling behind. We once went to some local homeschoolers group meeting and…wow. The crazy was strong.
The Kansas City Missouri school district is so bad even black families move out.
Which is even worse than losing white families because at least these black parents cared about their kids and the school. I talked to one coworker (black) who was frustrated by this because he wanted to stay and help the black community but he was so angry at the schools. I told him he should think of his kids first and he could find schools in the suburbs with at least some minority kids and with good academics.
