It sounds like your schools are significantly less discriminatory than ours.
But - you might want to investigate a little deeper. In my area, what they say happens is not what actually happens. I know this for certain, because I have been on both sides of it - I’ve had strings pulled for and against my children. (Not in that order, incidentally).
Do you mean those kids didn’t eat lunch in your cafeteria, didn’t use your gym, didn’t ride your busses? Weren’t socialized together? Because segregation means they’re kept apart.
And that’s what magnet schools do - they take the chosen ones away, to a safer space, away from the untermenschen and deplorables and lesser humans.
And everyone suffers for it. The chosen ones suffer because they are taught to be callous and elitist, and the rest suffer because they don’t have the affluent, influential, educated parents supporting their school. Watching sporting events between a comprehensive school and magnet schools made both these points quite clear to me.
It does sound that way. Like I said, this school is >90% non-white, and according to state reports, 50% economically disadvantaged. These kids are primarily immigrants or 1st gen Americans, often the 1st in their families to graduate HS, never mind go to college. This is definitely not segregated by class, as you imply they function. No one is taught to be elitist, what they learn is to work their asses off, so that many of them report college is a breeze compared to HS.
There’s no doubt we’ve been lucky with the unionized nonprofit charter k-8 they went to and this HS. Perhaps these schools are outliers, but I hate when I hear indiscriminate trashing of both types that have been so good for a lot of disadvantaged kids in our personal experience. I have no defense of for-profit charters, so don’t even.
For years, my middle school was named Wilbur Junior High School, and for years, additional words were scrawled in the spaces of the ink stamps of possession, making it "WILBUR and JUNIOR got HIGH at SCHOOL.
I live in Charlotte, NC now, but I attended Jefferson Davis Elementary in Biloxi as a kid. I saw the headline hoping it was that school that had changed its name, which would be incredibly shocking, since there is a fucking presidential library (supported by the state) for the confederate president there.
So the district that banned To Kill a Mockingbird from the curriculum has a school named after the confederate president.
Where was he charged and convicted, outside of Cornel West’s fevered imagination? Or are you OK with labeling people as “criminals” absent a conviction, and to what other people/crimes does that extend?
Of course he won’t be charged or convicted. He’s an American president. Laws are for lesser mortals.
But it is a matter of public record that Obama had command authority over the drone assassination program, and also a matter of public record that this program made a mockery of international law and killed civilians.
I am perfectly comfortable labeling someone a war criminal in such circumstances.
To what people does it extend? To those whose position and privilege forever bars them from prosecution and justice. To what crimes? Crimes against humanity.
I’m also comfortable labeling Bush the younger a war criminal if that’s any help?
In other words, to exactly the set of people for whom the accusation will never be verifiable, rendering it a vacuous accusation. In the case of US presidents, at least those since FDR, I believe you are effectively using the term as a synonym for “US President”. If you want to argue that schools should not be named after politicians, I can get on board with that.
Thanks to the doctrine of universal jurisdiction, every country in the world except the US has the right to charge a US president with war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. There are many countries that do not like us, so they could charge away. The reason they don’t is that the actions are rightly seen as aspects of coherent US policy, not as one individual’s aberrant behavior, and so are considered the province of treaty enforcement rather than criminal prosecution of an individual such as Obama.
I think strong criticism of the policies of the executive branch under Obama is more than justified, especially with respect to covert technologies, but concluding that Obama the individual is a war criminal is misleading hyperbole. I feel the same about the accusations against Bush (though less so about those against Rumsfeld et al who deliberately distorted evidence and misled the American people and the UN in order to start the war in Iraq - those actions probably do rise to the level of war crimes).
However, I think that Obama is a fundamentally good person, likewise the members of his administration (including Clinton) despite many of the polices they promulgated, and I prefer to apply the label “criminal” either to people actually convicted of crimes, or in a stretch to people of evidently bad character where the accusations are about personal behavior, rather than bad policy.
I clicked the article about this when it was trending on Facebook. When you scroll down, you can see posts other people made about the article. The first one said “Obama doesn’t deserve this he did nothing but divide our country!!!”
…Yeah, as opposed to the President of the Confederacy who literally divided our country.
This is not unexpected. If it is typical of Magnet schools, then it will be whiter and richer than the comprehensive schools, and less wealthy and less white than the charter schools. The layering, for a given geographic area, is quite often comprehensive → magnet → Charter → private. As you go to the left, income drops and people of color increase, as you go to the right, income rises and people of color decrease.
If you look closer, separating into Black, Hispanic, Asian instead of deceptively lumping together all “non-white” then the contrast becomes far more stark - because I can pretty much guarantee that your magnet school has far more Asians than the comprehensive school, which in turn has far more Black students.
This is again completely expected and by design. We know, it’s abundantly documented, that poor people score lower on entrance exams and performance tests. The magnet/charter system selects against the poor, segregating the children of the poor by the simple expedient of testing. Rich people of color aren’t discriminated against under such systems so the architects - the people supplying you with the false information about how it works - won’t be held responsible for sustaining and increasing racism in the educational system. They aren’t racially discriminating, they are economically discriminating, and the fact that this is driving racist 3rd-order effects can be ignored.
Any system that works as you’ve described is slanted to give a higher quality education to those that need it the least, and a lower quality education to those who could otherwise be lifted out of poverty and permitted to make a better life for their own children.
Hundreds of studies have been done, and the most valid predictor of children’s academic performance and test scores is parental income. It’s not parental intelligence, it’s not parental involvement, it’s not race or creed or nationality, it’s parental income - all those things can be pointed to, but none of them correlate to the degree that parental income does.
Part of how this system works is it co-opts the natural and admirable desire that you and I have to do the best we can by our children. You didn’t send your child to a magnet school because it’s worse than the comprehensive school, you sent them there because it’s better. You know this is true, you just didn’t recognize the income/test score connection until now.
We are complicit. That doesn’t mean that we should support and defend the system, or try to decrease the quality of our children’s education, it means we should try to improve the system, and increase the quality of education available to everyone else’s children. Lift up, instead of passively assisting in the dragging down or the poor.
@Medievalist, that’s all interesting and no doubt true in some places, but you seem to be ignoring my data that it’s not true here. This Magnet is most definitely not selecting by class. I’d say college educated parents are far less than 40%. And there’s an explicit racial quota system to reflect the city’s demographics, something I’m not exactly comfortable with. 25% white, 25% Asian, 25% Black, 25% Hispanic. In practice, any Asian who can plausibly lie about being one of the others does. So while the school says it’s 18% white, there were only 3 white boys in my son’s class of 180.
Great. How? You said schools should be funded equitably from the state level. I agree 100%. Are you familiar with the history of the Abbott court decision and it’s aftermath in NJ? It mandated equitable spending in urban schools, and after 20 years has had no real effect. Educating poor urban kids of uneducated low functioning parents is a problem no one has solved no matter how much money you throw at it. Even in our fabulous charter, some kids from that background just didn’t drink the education kool aid, even with a parent motivated enough to enter the lottery.
Ah, New Jersey. As it happens I am somewhat familiar with that system, partly because I am currently sitting within sight of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and partly because I have two acquaintances who are long time career teachers in that system. It’s really not bad compared to the rest of the US - but that’s a low bar.
It is ostensibly selecting by income, because as you said it’s test-in. And that’s what the tests are measuring, as shown in the graph I already posted. Not by class, by parental income.
And moreover, New Jersey’s system is corrupt. Leaving aside the abundantly documented malfeasance under Christie, one of the two teachers I know in that system got to teach in a better school because his parents are personal friends with highly placed politicians. (Including Christie and Whitman - he brags about this, he’s a piece of work. I don’t know why accomplished, intelligent women like his wife so often marry truly awful men.) His social set routinely gets their children into whatever school they want, regardless of test scores - and even when recommendations aren’t official, if people high in the state government call, principals listen. Or they are punished.
The other teacher I know in NJ is a good friend, our families spend much time together. She used to be a librarian before New Jersey took the librarians out of most of the schools the less affluent children attend. She’s one of the good ones, you’re lucky to have her. Since both of my sisters are career teachers (one in England, one in Maryland) we often talk about this sort of thing.
Well, right there’s a good start! But we have to be cognizant of the fact that schools profit financially from the affluence of parents. Magnet schools have more parent involvement which means more off-the-books spending - like for field hockey sticks, library books, teacher assistance from the PSA/PTA and private individuals (I’ve personally pumped tens of thousands of dollars worth of computer monitors into the local schools - which is completely off budget of course). Magnet school parents are more likely to have cars which means more input from parents to school administration which means better schools. It’s very simple - more monied parents means school funding isn’t really equitable at ground zero of teaching.
I wasn’t familiar enough with it to recognize the name but Wikipedia helped. Here on the other side of the river we have Murry Schwartz’s 1976 decision more in our minds. I believe what you are saying here supports what I’m saying - just throwing money at a ghetto school, while taking out all the highest performing students and sending them to magnet and charter schools, isn’t going to work, it’s self-sabotaging.
And here you’ve written a very great truth - we have no perfect solution. But the economic discrimination that New Jersey (and also my home state of Delaware) is pursuing is not only not a solution, it’s making things worse.
For my part, I adopted a child from the inner city. Which lets me refute the claims of people who say nothing can be done, certainly, but it doesn’t do anything to reform the system at all.
Yet as I said, 50% of this school is classified income disadvantaged. Your suburban theory simply doesn’t apply in the big city. There is no, repeat no fundraising at this school at all. When I tried to get a fencing team started and said parents of some of the freshman kids who had been club fencers would raise money and do the driving it was refused. There’s no PTO to speak of. You have to accept your “rules” are not universal.
Yet as I said, if you look at the actual numbers and where they actually fall on the continuum I showed, you’ll see I’m right. The magnet school average income is higher than that of the comprehensive and lower than that of private schools. Look it up for reals if you have data access, don’t accept the categorization that Chris Christie has approved for your consumption.
But - you have a very good point that rural/suburban/urban are quite different! From everything you’ve said, it’s significantly worse where I am, not just at the state level but also in our respective local areas.
Nonetheless, segregation by testing is a real thing, supported by real science. If it’s subtler where you are (and it is, at least since 2014 ) that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If there’s a test, or a recommendation system, or existing social stratification by economics of housing, then without directed and purposeful intervention these things will always segregate educational opportunities by parental income, to the great detriment of society as a whole.
