@CottonTales I would think if it’s a regular public school, any district will. In my state, the public school districts even have to provide busing for students who attend private schools by choice up to ten miles away (which irks me). I don’t remember if that’s a federal or state mandate, though. It’s probably different in each state.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-are-often-the-most-segregated/ (table at the bottom) lists New York near the top of the list of cities by segregation (most segregated at the top, with many of the usual midwestern and midatlantic suspects at the top).
New York issues student metrocards to high school students so that they can use the (extensive) public transportation system in that city:
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/school-life/transportation/bus-eligibility
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/school-life/transportation/metro-cards
That may not be a practical solution in school districts in areas with poor public transportation.
^Portland, Maine does the same thing.
@roethlisburger There is an overwhelming amount of data to support that there are many segregated schools (some may be self-segregated) and I am sure that many will post articles or show the data to back that up. Why schools are segregated is a more complicated question that involves many factors. The SES of racial groups is a major factor (it tends to takes a certain amount of wealth/income to “buy in” to diverse schools), Brown vs. Board of Education was never able to intergrate everywhere (people with any means just moved) along with many school districts don’t bus students, and the population growth among of people of color (POC) in America is another. With the US population demographics shift currently underway (White population expected to be at 47% by 2050, down from 85% in 1960) some of this re-segregation was expected as some will always chose to live in areas in which they are the majority. But to say that there are not any “white schools, black schools, or Mexican schools unless they are privates” is inaccurate. My kids school cluster is very diverse, but within my own county, there are 8 high schools that are over 70% Hispanics or Black with a couple pushing 90%. The demographics for those schools have changed at light speed in most cases (One school that was 70% white in 2000 is over 85% black today). I believe I can go into any major metropolitan area with at least a population of 10% African American or Hispanic students and find segregated schools.
PossePops got a full tuition paid for at Cornell and only got jipped by a university that is well known to be stingy. If other black kids get a similar deal, they would be doing much better than their non-black counterparts. Your biggest complaint is that some black kids don’t get enough financial aid to go to school. I don’t see how that is a problem unless they are getting less financial aid than non-black kids (I believe they actually get more because high achieving black kids are so rare). Black kids shouldn’t get more financial aid because of their race.
This is actually a case FOR segregation by ability (a form of grouping which often does segregate students based on race). Schools should specialize in teaching certain ability levels so that resources and classes can be efficiently managed. People take sports, music, etc. lessons based on ability level for a good reason. Bring on the tracking.
I think that the ban on tracking actually hurt high achieving black kids in black majority schools because they were forced to sit in classes with disruptive kids and had low expectations placed on them because they couldn’t be differentiated from the majority of kids with low ability at their school.
I can agree that it is hard to get all the soft skills + extracurriculars right to get into an elite university (at least for non-URMs, URMs can get in easily with only decent test scores and GPA), but it sounds like these kids can barely even get into any university. Having the grades and test scores to get into an OK university is not a stunningly hard feat. I would be surprised that the parents are actually trying and are still somehow doing it wrong. To get into a university out of the Top 50, all the student has to do is spend time studying. Even poor, uneducated immigrant parents (including black immigrant parents) can get this right.
I think that for the most part, many of them fail to get into university because they and/or their parents don’t care enough about education.
North NJ is actually very diverse now, including the high achieving districts. Hispanic people moved in from the overcrowding in NYC. Educated Asian immigrants who don’t want to live in the city seem to prefer NJ over Westchester and Long Island.
It’s funny how fast this thread moves. Anyway picking up my draft from a few days ago…
“I felt so much more worldly than my peers in my lily-white college, many of whom had never even been around Jewish people, let alone black people. They were great people, don’t get me wrong. They just grew up in a bubble.”
I chuckled at that one @changethegame It’s funny how some “worldly” folks can be more culture shock for others when one would think the opposite. There were a few AA kids in college that grew up as the only AA family in an all white area. They were somewhat lost in their own separate bubble.
I remember watching one white kid at school put his clothes and detergent in the dryer and ask me why there wasn’t any water. Early on we didn’t have a dryer so I stood on a stool at 6 yrs old to hang clothes on the line in the basement so I was scratching my head as I watched him. He had servants to do his laundry so didn’t have a clue. I gladly helped him out. I never saw him after that but it’s one of those funny things this old brain remembers.
“they actually get more because high achieving black kids are so rare”
@undeservingurm or anyone else that thinks this way might want to Google “history of blacks in Sag Harbor” or Jack and Jill of America or Posse Foundation to gain perspective on high achieving AA kids. It’s not as rare as you may think but I bet if @changethegame and I talked for 15 min we’d come up with at least one if not several mutual acquaintances. It is a small world.
“Just wondering if school districts provide transportation to kids who go to magnet schools that are not in their usual bus route area.”
Not full transportation, no. Not in our area, anyway. The magnet elementary and middle school do central pickups where a bus will go to only 1-3 stops to pick up 10+ students at each stop in somewhat centrally located places. Most people in the county live within 3-5 miles of one of these stops, but they’re not always in places that are walkable especially for kids that age. So kids going to the magnet school have to at least have transportation to and from the central pickup point, which may not be far from the house but almost certainly happens at times that are tough for a working parent to make.
The magnet high school is worse. It starts 2 hours prior to the elementary and middle school and there is no bus service at all for the start time - 7 AM. If high school students want to stay 2 hours after school is done and catch a ride with one of the elementary or middle school buses to the central stops, they can.
This - lack of transportation - and the number of expensive projects are two issues I have constantly discusses with the school administration as being barriers to low income students. It’s a huge pet peeve of mine. I graduated from this magnet school and it may be the main reason I was able to work myself out of a background of poverty into a financially successful life. There is no way in heck my single parent would have driven me to a central pickup (when I graduated from the magnet they had standard bus service) and no way we would have had the money to do all the projects. I distinctly remember in 4th grade a project requiring me to build a model of an atom and having to rummage through an industrial dumpster behind the AT&T central switching station - they always had a lot of interesting wire and supplies discarded - to get the supplies to build that project; but that was one of the few projects we ever had to do that required supplies. Now, the projects assigned to my boys have required $300+ in supplies a year. It makes me sad and angry that the way the school operates now, poor kids have little chance to attend or be successful.
@PossePops I’m not sure I am following you in this post, and since you are quoting me, can you explain better what you mean? Especially by putting the word “worldly” in quotes?
“I felt so much more worldly than my peers in my lily-white college, many of whom had never even been around Jewish people, let alone black people. They were great people, don’t get me wrong. They just grew up in a bubble.”
I chuckled at that one @changethegame It’s funny how some “worldly” folks can be more culture shock for others when one would think the opposite. There were a few AA kids in college that grew up as the only AA family in an all white area. They were somewhat lost in their own separate bubble.
@UndeservingURM I was actually talking about Westchester county with the 40% black back in the 70s/80s but that was also an “experiment” and I think the school is more like 70% black now, not sure.
You are of course exactly right that North NJ is a very diverse place…but I’m not so sure each of the towns are as it relates to African Americans. My school district now (where my kids went/go) has maintained about 11% ish African Americans since we moved here, about 20 years ago. But our town and the other towns with strongish schools (many more highly ranked than mine, but IMO not necessarily a better experience) have seen their Asian populations increase. My neighborhood (which I continue to love, average homes sell for mid 700s) has become quite Asian as well.
I live in between two towns that are the extremes we are discussing…one town that I believe is 90% plus black, and the other with less than 5% blacks and one of the highest ranked towns in the state for schools/real estate. My kids have gotten to see both extremes just within a few miles of home (probably not that rare in Northern NJ, as you say).
There is another town we border on the south that has actually gone way up in the rankings since we have lived here (happens to be the town my husband grew up in so we know it well) due to the increase in Asian families moving to the community.
Another town not far from here is often thought of as the top public school in the state and has lots of Asian students (gets high marks for “diversity”, but has virtually no African Americans). I have friends there that say there are very few white kids in the top 10%. The environment is very competitive and sometimes kids have a hard time placing into accelerated/AP classes because there is so much competition. I wonder sometimes if some of the kids from this school (from any race) would do better with college admissions if they lived in our town where they would stand out more. Even though many high schools don’t “rank” I still feel that your class standing somehow comes out in your application. And it would be easier to take more rigorous course load (and do well) at our high school, which also is something colleges look at. I know that the colleges say they take all of this into consideration (they know how the schools vary in competitiveness) but I wonder if they really dissect transcripts and secondary schools enough to pick up on this.)
Hi @collegemomjam sorry I misquoted the person. I started writing that a few days ago and got sidetracked by work. I’m saying that if you are Jewish, Black or whatever and especially if you are from a big city you can go to another place be it a university or the poduncks and you end up being the one who’s more exposed ie “worldly.” As an example, a kid from NYC might be more culture shock for people in WV than he is culture shocked by being in WV. Hope this clarifies things and that I totally agree with and can relate to what you said.
Such an argument is more valid within a large school for everyone, and where the tracking is not completely rigid and is not done in a way that discriminates on bases other than ability and motivation of the student. There are plenty of situations where the tracking is too rigid where a tracking decision made early locks a slightly late-blooming student out of the higher tracks that s/he is fully capable of moving into at a slightly later time. There are also plenty of cases where tracking decisions are seen as corrupt or unfair in various ways.
Personally I don’t think every single place has to perfectly reflect the same proportion of each race as is presentnin the general population. I went to Colgate, and they have the same initiatives to increase representation of minorities to reflect national demographics. I think this is a losing game. It isn’t Harvard, it is a small, regional LAC located in a very rural and boring area. It is probably natural that it reflect the demographics of the region. Red Bank, NJ near me was once a small African American fishing village. Many of the women worked in the big estates in Rumson. This was a long time ago, but the AA population stayed - why shouldn’t they? Until they started being displaced by hispanic immigrants. I am not sure how or why those schools should have been integrated, just because it was a pocket of black people surrounded by pockets of white people. The schools weren’t bad, although the more white areas were probably considered “better”. Now there is a charter school there too, which is more people trying to get out of schools that are increasingly hispanic. Why? Well, you f you think it’s weird to be one of a small number of black kids in a white school, imagine being one of a small number of English speaking kids in a spanish speaking population. It’s weird, and nonine likes to be the odd one out.
You end up like Beto O’Rourke. Not sure that is necessarily a bad thing.
Yes but the false negatives are a small minority as long as the bar isn’t set too high. Teaching inner city at risk kids vs. motivated, studious kids are completely different skills. They require different approaches and curriculum. Many teachers that are terrible at teaching inner city schools are excellent at teaching at upper middle class suburbs. These different skills have decreasing marginal cost, so schools become more efficient by focusing on only one.
Segregation by ability is GOOD. It allows schools to cater to the unique needs of students instead of trying to force kids into a one size fits all solution.
I agree that it is better, but it seems to be the trend in our area to put all the kids in the same class - our high school got rid of the “lower level” classes.
There was a debate about whether low performing URM schools actually need more funding.
A new $54 million middle school with state of the art everything and fancy, sparkling tech and labs and that serves URM kids in SF opened recently in 2015.
It’s a complete failure. It’s gone through 3 principals in 3 years. The test scores are abysmal:
https://www.wired.com/story/willie-brown-middle-school-startup-mentality-failed/
@CCtoAlaska said:
You don’t really believe that do you? I mean, there is nothing in Stuy’s admissions process that considers race, so how could they possibly be excluding African American and Latino students?
There are things people can criticize Stuy for. One is whether the SHSAT is the best way to choose a class. A second is that the Stuy environment is certainly not for everyone. From what I know about it, both of my kids would have qualified academically, but one would have thrived and the other would have been miserable.
But racism is one thing they are not guilty of, at all. For many poor families living in NYC who have bright children, schools like Stuy are a salvation, far better than the local public schools where many students simply don’t care. They can be from any racial background, living in any NYC neighborhood, and Stuy will give them a fair shot to attend, give them a great education, and surround them with equally bright peers.
That is a model that all selective schools should aspire to. The world needs more Stuys, not fewer.