Do those parents agree?
The median home price in the US does not cover the downpayment in selective parts of the Bay Area. If you’re not familiar with it, going to areas where every single house in the subdivision is worth more than $1M can seem strange - but it’s the reality here.
This is exactly my point - these areas self select on income. The discussion about city vs. suburb is not solely focused on schools. It is more generally about the concept of choosing a lifestyle. Schools are a big part of why some people prefer suburbs for sure but it’s not the only reason. But lots of areas or activities self select on some criteria. Go to a cos-play convention and I’m sure you will find a high percentage of people who are interested in comics and manga. Go to the gun show and I’m guessing you’ll find a lot of gun rights advocates. People self select all the time. There is no way to stop it that isn’t completely authoritarian.
People like **SlackerInc **and **Brainglutton **who bemoan the suburban lifestyle and would advocate people integrate into lower socio-economic tiers to set a better example for others, or to provide some “rising tide” benefit are on the fringe of both history and reality. It doesn’t work that way.
Instead if you would say, ‘suburbs are bad for the environment because they provide for an inefficient utilization of resources’ I would agree. Then we could talk about if the cost is worth the benefit. It’s too bad Slacker and BG took the route trying to shame people. Those arguments are silly and quite absurd.
So Minnesota’s Met Council is a mirage?
ETA:“Rising tide” is a conservative metaphor!
It’s a metaphor that succinctly conveys the message you are promoting. The term does not have a copyright.
Is the purpose of the Met Council for the more affluent to set a better example for the less fortunate? Is their purpose so that the less fortunate will be assisted by being dispersed among the more affluent? I’m not seeing how the Met Council is relevant. They expanded the city metro area to increase their tax base by force. And even so, I do not think you’re making the claim that this practice is mainstream - are you? I would still consider this act on the fringe.
Yes. They are not yelling any more, and their kids are still getting into good colleges. (Which they define as Berkeley.)
When we were house hunting 17 years ago the first thing the realtor showed us was test scores for the various high schools.
BTW, the $1 million dollar houses are not McMansions. They are large, but not that large, and are often very close to their neighbors.
Pretty big metro area, and state, to be “fringe”. And it is not the expanded tax base that is the big deal here, as that has been going on already for a long time. Did you read the op-ed about it? It was a conservative complaint, so you would I think enjoy that aspect. I am most excited about the requirements for low income housing in the 'burbs.
Speaking of which, here’s another “fringer” for you:
Oops, that’s right: he’s not on the fringe, he is part of the government that is in full charge of the state of Minnesota right now! (Democrats in Minnesota are known as DFLers because they add “Farmer-Labor” to the end of the party’s name.) The voters kicked the Republicans out last November, don’tcha know. Oh yah…
Sure, this is only going to happen in blue states at first; but if you haven’t noticed, blue states are ascendant right now. And as white males become a smaller and smaller part of the population, the number of blue states will only grow. In a few decades, I should expect that policies like this will be in place in most states. And even the red state holdouts may find that they are put in a position of losing federal money if they do not play ball. They will of course fulminate about states’ rights and federalism and so on, but to little avail. Mwahahahahahaha…
For sure. $1M is actually can be quite modest. People like Slacker will say that people should pay even more for wider land so they can park vehicles in a rear garage to conform to some kind of aesthetic.
There’s really no way to respond to this haphazard gnashing of ideas. You predict giant sea change in the future and somehow come across as being anti white males, implying somehow these ideas are race based. This post makes no sense to me.
I can’t even tell what points you’re trying to make - are you predicting that suburbs as we now know them will decline to the point of non-existence? I’m trying to understand but I’m having a hard time. Good luck I guess?
That to me validates the point of the suburban people who move for better schools, and the people who put their kids in private schools because they’re better.
There’s probably a tipping point in there somewhere, when the number of motivated students and parents outweighs the unmotivated, and good things start to happen in spite of the unmotivated ones. Or vice-versa, if the unmotivated dominate, I suppose.
I’m still not convinced that the motivation to move to the suburbs is race-based; if anything it’s class based, which is often confused with race based, due to the fact that the majority of black and hispanic people are poor. Combine that with a sort of historical undervaluation of education by those two groups, and you have a recipe for awful schools that anyone of any color or ethnic group wouldn’t want their kids to go to if they were interested in them having a good education.
The majority of black and Hispanic people aren’t poor.
Nor is it true that black people have undervalued education.
I
Hey, a point of agreement! This is exactly why I want to try taking those 100 percent gang infested schools in Chicago and just lightly sprinkle their population throughout the metro. Before doing so, though, I would advocate ferreting out the “hard cases”, the instigators, and sending them to “juvie”.
Oops, AINEC. I wonder how many conservatives’ minds would be blown to learn that nearly three out of four blacks and Hispanics are not poor?
Fair enough. Substitute the following sentence into my last statement.
“if anything it’s class based, which is often confused with race based, due to the fact that the poverty rate of black and hispanic people is considerably higher. Combine that with underperformance by a lot of predominantly black and hispanic high schools”
Regardless of whether it’s a majority or not, a poverty rate of 38% is more than 3 times the white poverty rate of 12.4%, so it’s still a stark difference that would tend to seriously flavor the schools.
I bet they didn’t sustain their initial outrage, but I doubt they are happy about it. I’d be furious if my town pulled a bait and switch on me like that. The main reason of moving into a nice suburb is the schools. They should at least have been given the option of driving the kids to the old school themselves. I bet a lot of them moved across town.
Interesting link monstro. The basic point still stands though and was made before - the issue now is more (but not exclusively) class than race with class to some degree correlating with race. The article itself is also very clear that there is a significant discrepancy in the numbers of graduating college. Not covered is which colleges and how many go onto post graduate education. Or how many are not making out of High School.
And sorry to buck the trend here but the issue is not exclusively who attends the school. There is a difference in the quality of schools. Schools that primarily serve lower SES neighborhoods simply do not have enough resources to provide the same level of educational opportunities as those that primarily serve those that are middle class and above, partly because of how schools are funded, partly because of additional challenges that a school which serves lower SES students must handle, and partly because many (not all) of the better teachers would prefer to work in a less challenging circumstance. And that is not even getting into what resources are available outside of school.
It also obviously does not serve a young adult Black male to have spent primary grades and High School in a majority urban Black educational environment and then be thrown into a college environment in which only 1 in 20 looks like him and of those some are of a different SES and background. Of course my personal experience was a long time ago, but what I saw back then was an unsurprising self-segregation and little mixing.
Bringing this back at least somewhat to the subject of this thread, the issue in this case is not city vs suburb or even public vs private - it is SES mix of the student population primarily with some overlaying impact of racial and other group stereotyping both externally imposed and imposed from within a peer group and by ones own self. To the degree that suburban schools are better funded and have less additional (poverty related) extraneous issues to deal with they have the ability to provide more resources to educational objectives.
I am not going to voluntarily send one of my kids to anything other than where I think his/her educational needs will be best met. Maybe some here have enough belief that their kids are the best and brightest who will excel the same wherever they go to school - my kids are smart enough but not that smart.
The conflation of race and class makes it difficult to parse out impacts. My local High School bemoans the performance gap. Average ACT for White students is 26.6, for Black students 19.3. Average for all students across the state is 20.9, the country 21.1, and for all Black students across the country is 17.0. Blacks represent 27% of our student body and the bulk of them (albeit far from all) are of lower SES. Now I see those numbers as reflecting that lower SES Black students are likely doing better in our school than elsewhere. What I do not have data on is comparing by race and SES - my sense of it is, based on friends of my kids, is that the higher SES Black students if anything out perform the higher SES White kids and that the gap is a class gap primarily not a racial one. I cannot prove it however.
Sorry for the rambling hijack.
This is a little ambiguous. It is trivially true that people like me are law-abiding (or at least, if it isn’t I’m not going to say so here) and lead a similar lifestyle.
However, historically, those terms have been used as what are known as “dog-whistles,” where “people like [us]” is intended to suggest the axes of SES and/or race or similar, “lifestyle” to have connotations of morality and good citizenship, and the whole to imply that people of a different race, SES, or whatever arenot law-abiding or good citizens.
That latter interpretation comes up in discussions of the relative merits of suburban versus urban living (to the point that “urban” is frequently used to mean African-American culture) and so it’s not odd that it is being understood here.
If that’s not what people mean, perhaps something can be added to bridge this communication gap.
Only if you conflate “private education” with “quality education.” I went to a (denotatively) public high school in the American sense of the term, and when I was there it was one of the top high schools in the country.
(And in Manhattan, at that.)
This has gotta be one of the goofiest attempts at a cite in recent memory - reminiscent (almost) of the halcyon days of gonzomax. Your author appears to be rather exercised over claims that only 4% of college graduates are black males. He claims it is actually a magnificent 5% (contrasted to 27% for white males). He then goes on to say
Is it your contention that the fact that
is evidence that blacks really, really value education? If so, why don’t they do better at it?
Regards,
Shodan
Dude, just apologize and say your were wrong. You can’t just rattle off that most X’s are Y if it is patently untrue.
That is a good question and has a good answer, but you don’t want to hear it.
People live here not for the schools but for their jobs. The school in my town is just one of many excellent ones. The Cupertino school system is pretty good - one fruity guess why. So is Palo Alto. And house prices are high to match.
What are you talking about? The reason they made the change was that the “good” school had gotten badly overcrowded. Where I went to school you got your next school based on your address - here all people from one elementary school go to them same middle school, and all who go to the middle school go to the same high school. So they actually moved the elementary school to a new high school/middle school. They moved the one closest to the other school (which was not bad even then.) And no one was guaranteed a school based on address. This was not the first time the district moved schools around, just the first time that anyone had a fit. (I’m pretty sure no kids got yanked out of high school to another - just new students.)
I went to a feedback meeting. It was like a riot but not so mellow. These parents basically believed that the test average for the school reflected on their kids, not that the ability of their kids created the high test scores. The new school got the same amount of money as the old, had the same class of teacher, and actually had a nicer campus. I know that moving kids around is an integration thing sometime, this had nothing to do with that.
They were worried that their property values would go down, but this was just before the housing bubble started, so they did okay.