…except we don’t live in a society where the black schools are better than the white schools, so not many black families would choose them.
Our county has open transfer for high school. We have eight high schools and seven of them have specializations such as banking, IB and performing arts. And if you transfer out of district your freshman year, you don’t have to sit out a year for sports. My older son went to the AP magnet, mainly because all his friends from his parochial K-8 school were going there. He did well and started school with a semester’s worth of AP credit. Our younger son went in-district to the performing arts magnet school. He took dance his last two years and loved it - he swore it helped him with his wrestling. He was asked to join the dance company but he had too many conflicts.
On the other hand, in the realm of colleges, where students’ choices are mainly limited by admission standards and costs, black and other non-white students are more willing to attend predominantly white colleges than non-black students are to predominantly black colleges, even when there are similar admission standards and costs. Indeed, there seems to be a double standard on these forums, where there seems to be extreme hesitation on the part of most posters to suggest a predominantly black college to a student not known to be black, even though most posters will not hesitate to recommend predominantly white colleges to non-white students (and some even recommend those with fewer non-white students for greater potential “diversity” benefits in admissions).
Another example of where preferences of race and ethnicity reveal themselves is in engineering at Florida State and Florida A&M, which have a joint engineering division. Most engineering enrollment is from Florida State (64% white), despite Florida A&M (88% black) being less expensive and offering better scholarships, creating an obvious arbitrage situation that those indifferent to racial composition of the students can take advantage of.
I think you misunderstood my post. That’s not “on the other hand”, it’ is what I was saying, for high school.
Majority white K-12 schools are 99% of the time better schools, in terms of funding, test scores, student teacher ratios, whatever metric one uses, than majority black schools. Most black families would attend them if they could. That’s really what ending school segregation was supposed to do.
Very few white families aspire to send their kids to majority black schools - in K-12 or in college.
My point is that there are factors other than academic quality that affect student/parent preferences. The Florida State / Florida A&M engineering example is one where academic quality is the same, but most pay more to avoid attending the joint engineering division through the predominantly black school.
Yes, I agree. Very few white families will be comfortable sending their kids to predominantly black schools even if they were academically superior. But I’m not going out on a limb to guess there are very few of those, K-12.
College is different. The white kid that might get into Howard or Spelman will likely choose a not-as-good school that’s got more white people, that’s true.
I still don’t see how it is we disagree here.
I’m from AL and moved here from the North. When I moved several years ago, I was stunned that there are white towns and black towns, and only a few mixed towns. I see a much bigger spectrum here for race relations…I have seen some really positive, warm relationships that I didn’t see up North (people calling each other brother or cousin, etc and really LIKING each other), and then you run across that 5% of ugliness, and the ugliness goes both ways. Up North I only saw neutral.
If Gardendale is allowed to leave the Birmingham school district, their housing prices will skyrocket. HALF of the Birmingham city schools have been put on the FAILED list by the Feds. The violent crime rate in the bad sections of Birmingham is horrific. And all this is going on in a City that is desperate to leave it’s racial past, and has some really wonderful things going on. The dichotomy is so weird.
I was going to comment on a different thread earlier today about merit vs financial aid. I think by the time kids get to college, it’s too late. The colleges are only picking the truly extraordinary kids that manage to do well academically in this environment, and are really only helping 1% of these kids. The rest have gone by the wayside long ago. As a society, we need to focus on the grammar schools!
Which part of the North? Some highly segregated cities are in the North, like Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-are-often-the-most-segregated/