When we were picking a school district, we looked at school rating sites. But then we found out that those ratings are mostly a proxy for how white the school is.
So we switched to looking at school funding instead.
The school district where I live straddles a wealthier, predominantly white area and a poor, predominantly black area. The idea when it was formed was because rich parents want good education for their kids, and contribute more taxes via bigger homes, the schools could provide better education to the poorer areas and over time help to improve the socioeconomic balance.
In reality, all the rich parents around us just send their kids to Catholic or charter schools, which fungus money from the school district which makes it unable to provide a decent education at all, screwing over the poorer area wise than if they had two different school districts (since the public schools need to have the capacity to in theory at year accept all the kids in the case none went to charter schools). Just more proof voucher programs are racism by another name.
See, I grew up in the era of the Gifted And Talented Program. You’d be in a neighborhood with a mix of kids and each kid would be evaluated to determine if they were a “GT” student. Then the GT students would be funneled into one set of classes and the Non-GT students would be funneled into another set of classes.
Take a wild guess what the economic and ethnic makeups of the GT v Non-GT classes were.
Don’t even get me started on gifted and talented. “He has no ability to focus on boring stuff, but he loves math and science. How about we let him avoid ever doing anything boring? I’m sure that’ll serve him well later in life.”
Yeah, I grew up in that era as well, and was one of the kids in middle school funneled into a GT class. I enjoyed it of course, but it for sure contributed to masking my ADHD until recently and that was a real kick in face.
When we were picking a school district, we looked at school rating sites. But then we found out that those ratings are mostly a proxy for how white the school is.
So we switched to looking at school funding instead.
And uhhh… you’re not gonna believe this…
spoiler
It’s structural racism all the way down
says most believable thing ever
The school district where I live straddles a wealthier, predominantly white area and a poor, predominantly black area. The idea when it was formed was because rich parents want good education for their kids, and contribute more taxes via bigger homes, the schools could provide better education to the poorer areas and over time help to improve the socioeconomic balance.
In reality, all the rich parents around us just send their kids to Catholic or charter schools, which fungus money from the school district which makes it unable to provide a decent education at all, screwing over the poorer area wise than if they had two different school districts (since the public schools need to have the capacity to in theory at year accept all the kids in the case none went to charter schools). Just more proof voucher programs are racism by another name.
See, I grew up in the era of the Gifted And Talented Program. You’d be in a neighborhood with a mix of kids and each kid would be evaluated to determine if they were a “GT” student. Then the GT students would be funneled into one set of classes and the Non-GT students would be funneled into another set of classes.
Take a wild guess what the economic and ethnic makeups of the GT v Non-GT classes were.
Don’t even get me started on gifted and talented. “He has no ability to focus on boring stuff, but he loves math and science. How about we let him avoid ever doing anything boring? I’m sure that’ll serve him well later in life.”
Yeah, I grew up in that era as well, and was one of the kids in middle school funneled into a GT class. I enjoyed it of course, but it for sure contributed to masking my ADHD until recently and that was a real kick in face.
It screwed me over in college because I wasn’t used to having to take notes or study. Suddenly I wasn’t able to pass just by showing up.