@gudmom you could replace being “born in the wrong zip code” to “born to the wrong parent(s)” using your example. Either way, it’s not the kids’ fault. A kid can’t make their parents move, even if they can afford to which as @ucbalumnus points out, moving just might not be an option, and certainly not as easy as it sounds. I don’t think people in Camden, Newark, or Asbury all stay there because they want to. I think there are circumstances that you aren’t thinking about that make families stay in the communities they live in and it’s not just because they don’t care about their children.
@Gudmom I can’t agree more with your post. The reality is you don’t really need to move to another district if your parents are well-situated. My kids are in schools that most people who think they are “in the know” would not send their kids to. My kids are still in the 99th %ile for state testing and their education hasn’t really been diminished. Receptiveness to learning is the biggest difference-maker in achievement. Parents who move to get their kids into “better” districts only succeed when they have the necessary cultural capital anyway (and they probably would have been OK anywhere). It’s largely about status but it’s easy to falsely attribute successes to the school. Also school districts love to take credit for things that are really more about having stable, wealthy families sending their kids there.
I do agree that where I live in Southern CA, it’s the students and their families who cause high test scores and not the schools. If anything, the trend is for many parents against giving too much homework or having too many AP or Honors classes. Rich kids and poor kids have their own different problems.
@Gudmom Good schools do matter from my perspective and you are right that money alone does not solve the problems with bad schools. Parental involvement has been shown to be the most important metric when it comes to educational outcomes for children, but we don’t get to chose our parents. One of the differences in my life was my Mom’s decision (parental involvement) to send me to a magnet school over my terrible neighborhood school. I saw kids in my neighborhood who were smart and wanted more out of life and some achieved it coming out of that terrible school, but I had a much easier path coming out of my high school. The #1 resource of any school is its teachers and the difference in the staffs at the 2 schools was stark with many more experienced well trained teachers at my magnet school versus my neighborhood school. My magnet school had much better facilities (especially science classrooms/labs), teachers, students, books, school spirit, and positive educational outcomes. Also, my mom was a single mother who never made over 20K a year (even working multiple jobs) with 2 children. If it wasn’t for that magnet school, their was no chance for my Mom to have her child attend a better school . You can be cynical about being born in the wrong zip code, but for the poor kids who are looking for a better life, a “good school” could be a lifeline to reach it, in spite of their zip code, parents, or any other obstacle.
Just curious- is this girl claiming racial bias in this case? https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/02/us/florida-girl-sat-controversy/index.html
Maybe implying is a better word. Not seeing any overt claim. Just wondering.
@jym626 I don’t think she is implying racism based on what I have seen. Ben Crump is a civil rights attorney, but he got involved due to his connection (Florida St grad) to her number 1 choice school and the fact that some other FSU alum asked for him to get involved is the backstory that I have heard on the case so far.
@GudMom How is this quote from your post any different than zip code?
“…until I realized that we didn’t pay for a better school, we just paid to live near parents like us.”
Living “near parents like us” is the zip code…so yes, the schools by themselves in a vacuum might be doing everything right or wrong, or whatever (and I would definitely argue that there are differences in quality of teachers/faculty by school, they certainly are not all created equal)…but no school is in a vacuum. In fact, “zip code” implies the entire community, not just the schools themselves. It’s a function of the entire community, but that is the zip code or town or whatever you want to call it. The location and the people that live there.
As I implied in a previous post, being in the “best” schools may not always be optimal either, especially as it relates to college admissions. In fact, and this is from personal experience,so while the top schools in state (Millburn, Chatham, etc.) that send more kids to elite colleges overall, many of the hardworking kids at these schools have more competition and have a harder time “shining”. (They are getting a great eduction though and usually adjust well to college if they are coming from a more rigorous program.) I also think there is a lot of unnecessary stress at some of the top schools, which is one of the reasons why my husband and I purposely avoided a “top” school/zip code…but at least we had the choice.
But as it relates to this thread, I really don’t see how you could argue that there are different opportunities for different children depending on their personal circumstances, a big part of that being where they live. Sure, a big part of it comes from who you are as a person inside and there are some stars that come out of Camden and some kids crumble in Short Hills. But as far as college admissions go, the relationship between where you live and the caliber of the college you go to/just going to college at all is probably pretty linear. Just like the relationship between such success and wealth is linear, as is the relationship with test scores and wealth, etc.
Schools alone cannot solve the problem. But it’s one if the pieces of the puzzle. A quality K-12 education is paramount, IMO.
What I am saying is that most schools don’t t actually do much to cultivate individual children. Most schools, no matter where they are located, take what they get and move it along to the next grade. So if you get a kid whose parents check their backpack, make sure their butt is in their seat and their homework is done, put their spelling words on flash cards or make them review multiplication facts, that kid will do fine wherever. And if you get a kid whose home life is chaotic - and I’ve seen them in this “good” school district too- they may be seen as a behavioral problem in school, and the teachers put up with them, lower their expectations, and pass them on to the next teacher. If you live in a place where families are falling apart all over, if you have no place to study and there are adults sleeping in your living room, where no one cares if you sleep in and don’t go to school, sure you can say it’s the zip code, but if the family dynamic stays the same, changing the child’s school is just geography. Some kids can rise above challenging situations- I am one - but family structure and values is far more important than school district.
I live in an interesting town that is very diverse, yet has very few black or hispanic families. That sounds like heresy here. But 25-30% of the families are immigrants, most speak a language other than english at home. They are Asian, S Asian, Russian and other Eastern Europeans, Caribbean, North African and Middle Eastern (Arab, not black)…represent many different cultures and religions. But are we diverse? Some people would say no because we have few black or hispanic families. I say sort of, in the way that schools like Harvard say they value - diversity of experience, culture, religion all being different points of view into the classrooms. But are we really so diverse when the median house costs $750,000? Where the average cost of new construction is $1.3 million? When most parents, no matter their origins, are employed as STEM professionals, scientists or Doctors?
We do have some black families. One girl’s father is a director at an investment bank. Others are managing directors at the tech companies in the area. Just to the north and northeast of us along the bayshore, are several largely white, working class or plain old poor towns. To the west, a middle
class town with a substantial black population. To the direct east and west, historically black areas have turned to havens for undocumented immigrants living 4 families to a house, overrunning the schools and diverting services to cover the more pressing needs of ELL. The federal (state?) government had to take over one district because it had become so overcrowded it was in violation of fire and safety codes, and there was just no way of funding it locally. School quality can change solely due to changing demographics of the school population, and in a very short time. I think we have to stop focusing on “the schools” as good or bad, and focus on making functional communities and families. And I kind of shrug at diversity initiatives. Any kid who is qualified to go to Harvard should take advantage of any boost they can get, because there will always be far more qualified kids than there are spots, so really, why begrudge anyone? But at the same time, diversity for the sake of the photos i. the marketing materials - meaning the proper balance of skin tones - is pretty meaningless and even condescending. I imagine what it must be like to walk into a Harvard classroom as a black or hispanic student, and feel the burden of expectation on me - how will I display my unique perspective today? How will I demonstrate the VALUE I “add to the community”? It’s ridiculous. Every person brings themselves, and every person should be valued, but don’t put the burden on POC to somehow “improve” the community by what? relieving it of it’s otherwise-inevitable whiteness (or Asian-ness?)? Please.
@ChangeTheGame I think that’s why @Gudmom cited the magnet school system as being particularly valuable. I am a product of a magnet school and it was fabulous. It’s changed with the times, though, and largely reinforces class distinctions and a traditional racial hierarchy in AP and Honors classes and access to IB now. A mom told me that it was a steady embarrassment that the school - which enrolls 30-40% African Americans never had any Black students enrolled in its Honors African American History class (a required class here). Some of that shift seems to have coincided with the abandonment of the gifted program in favor of content tests for access to higher level classes. While there is bias in IQ testing, it’s more fair than testing content knowledge over testing ability to master content.
I think magnet schools are are great part of the “fix” needed for K-12.
Do you all know how your magnet schools select students? In my county, they more or less cap the number of kids from each town that are accepted…I guess kind of like how Texas does their universities’ admissions to make sure that all towns have the chance to be equally represented (in Texas I know it’s a percentage that get automatic admission, or something like that…here you have to go through a pretty rigorous application/testing process but all of the towns get kids in the school).
So that helps some students. Generally speaking, I think the magnet kids do pretty well and tend to stay out of trouble because they are around other serious students.
Re: #3468 @Gudmom
From the way you describe your town, it looks like it has ethnic and national origin diversity, but not so much SES diversity.
@CCtoAlaska That Honors African American History class reminds me of a Honors English Class that I took as a hs junior with 29 girls and 1 guy (me). I hated that class because I was always expected to carry the banner from the perspective of all males… Some African Americans may avoid classes like that for similar reasons (especially if they know their may be only 1 or 2 black students in the class).
@ChangeTheGame that is a very interesting point. Maybe all of the African American kids are passing on taking the test to get into that class (every honors and AP class has an admissions test) due to fear of having to bear that burden. I didn’t think that was what was going on but it might be a big part of it.
@Gudmom Like @collegemomjam pointed out, some get left out with magnet schools (I tested into my magnet), but I definitely understand your point of view because I believe that fixing the African American family is the key to fixing our SES and educational outcome woes. My family has laughed at some of the promotional materials at some schools, because some high stats schools with a low percentage of URM students will have an URM on almost every page of their brochure. But I think it is good marketing.
But presumably, that’s a reflection of a neighborhood being nearly all African American. To the extent African Americans in your neighborhood wanted to live in all African American neighborhoods, that could be an indication of their prejudice and bias.
I vehemently disagree with the characterization of NYC as segregated. Stuyvesant is open to all and one of the best public schools in the country.
Stuyvesant is one school, and definitely NOT open to all - it is very difficult for any student to get into. It’s a great example of an excellent public, urban academic magnet school – but definitely not representative of the school system as a whole.
Is there transportation to these magnet schools? If not, that’s just another barrier for low SES kids.
@roethlisburger NYC is not alone. All major urban school districts have become much more segregated over the past couple of decades. Magnet schools are not representative of the school district as a whole but even NYC’s magnet schools have problems with diversity, especially Stuyvesant which is notorious for excluding African American and Latino students. I’ve noticed this because our local elite magnets do a much better job than NYC or Boston Latin.
From November 2017:
“At Stuyvesant High School, the racial inequality is especially stunning. Established in 1904, Stuyvesant is the city’s most celebrated specialized high school and the most popular for test-takers. Stuyvesant has the highest cutoff and admits only the highest-scoring 1,000 or so students, not all of whom attend. This year, the school offered admission to only 13 black students out of 1,000 slots for freshman.” http://www.cssny.org/news/entry/racial-inequity-reigns-supreme-in-citys-elite-high-schools
NYC public schools are 70% Black and Latino. Diversity in NYC public magnet schools is pitiful. At the neighborhood/gifted program/charter level it’s even worse. Here it’s merit-only for the largest elite magnet and they enroll more African American students than white students, all based solely on having certain grades and state test scores. There is no affirmative action component - it’s all based on grades and test scores. The admissions are more fair so they end up with a better representation of the city’s student body as a whole. It’s usually about a third Asian, a third Black, a fifth white and the rest Latino or other ethnicities.
@CottonTales there is transportation always provided. Not sure about NYC. Here there are hardly neighborhood high schools left. You pretty much have to apply for HS because most of them are special admissions. It’s like applying for college, actually, with essays and transcripts, sometimes interviews. Like with college, some are harder to get into, some easier.
I am not referring to NYC, just mainstream USA. Just wondering if school districts provide transportation to kids who go to magnet schools that are not in their usual bus route area.