"Also, private school teachers earn far less than public. Why would they accept lower wages? Because being a private school teacher is often far easier because of the exact screening mechanism that vouchers threaten."
I had no idea there was a salary gap, much less that it went in that direction. I think Freddie has just collapsed the entire argument for vouchers, which is that private schools do more with less. I already knew that "doing more" had a lot to do with screening out problematic kids, but I didn't realize that "with less" works the same way.
So, let's take where I'm from, Providence, RI, as an example.
Providence public schools are the worst in America, by almost any objective measure. The buildings are not only falling down, but the level of violence in them requires almost as much security as a medium-security prison. In seriousness.
Given this, are we to attribute that solely, or even partially?, to racism by itself as the motive for literally anyone with the means to send their kids literally anywhere else they can? It's not as if they can simply send their kids to a "better" neighboring town with better public schools?
I get why you "suspect" this, but I also feel it comes, in part at least, from bad faith assumptions about why.
I agree with all this, but I think there's also a 'finishing school' aspect to all the anti-racism. There's a certain precariousness gnawing at the heels of the upper-middle class, and traditionally a great way to maintain and 'deserve' your elite status is through a variety of rituals, like using the right salad fork or what have you. I think these schools are sensing that the rituals of anti-racism are the most important form of elite socialisation, and teachers who can't get on board with that are diluting the product, which is ultimately stable elite membership for the children.
In this sense, there's an important aspect of 'make my kids different from normal white kids, we'll make sure the elite positions select for those differences' to the dynamic as well.
I went to private grade school in SF 20 years ago. These days my alma mater claims to be “very focused” on inclusion and diversity efforts, but it also charges $41K a year for kindergarten, so . . .
"Those Black students who have the academic pedigree and wealth to go to private schools are those that the same affluent white parents would see as “the right kind of Black kids,” which is a racist sentiment on its face."
I strongly disagree with this. The very same parents want their kids to go to school with "the right kind of White kids”. They are discriminating on the basis of CLASS, not race.
I'm affluent with young children and my kids will go to a good school.
I also live in an area where 'diversity' is something that is highly thought of.
However, I really don't care about diversity. If the school my kids went to was 80% Cuban, 80% West African, 80% Asian, or 80% white I wouldn't care as long as it was excellent academically.
I won't, however, send my kids to a school that's poor academically and that has a lot of kids who aren't capable of achieving academically and have behavioral problems. Why would I?
Public education is a disaster in many parts of this country. Its a ridiculous sociology experiment based on 19th century German institutional ideals that have been abandoned in many parts of western Europe.
Tl;dr not going to send my kids to a bad school because sending them to a good school is 'unfair and racist.'
Kids and parents should have choice. If they don't what's the alternative for improving educational opportunities?
I think the two, fanatical anti-racism curricula and a structurally anti-egalitarian institution, are intimately connected. They a engaged in all manner of frantic activity to undo privilege without actually giving up any money or power. Worse still, this allows the children educated in these same institutions the ability to monopolize the discourse on racism, which will inevitably be distorted in their favor.
Maybe I read too much of The Last Psychiatrist, but people need to start seeing this supposed radicalism as a defense mechanism against change instead of what it claims to be.
Eh. You live and work in NYC. Like most major cities, the racial demographics are diverse. But there are a lot of school districts that just aren't that way. Given the population/geography distribution, I'd venture to guess that most aren't. The district in which I live is about 98% white, as are all of the neighboring ones. The county as a whole is 95% white. It's a pretty rural area. Class is a much bigger deal around here.
' One, I suspect that private school people are generally aware that a big part of the market appeal of private school is to keep out precisely the students voucher programs are designed to let in. Parents don’t want their kids to go to places with “the wrong element.” I’m sure most of those parents don’t think of this in explicitly racist terms, but certainly there’s a powerful racial dimension. Fear of poor kids doubly so.'
Can you clarify this a bit?
Haven't the high end public schools in New York put significant resources into recruiting lower income black and Hispanic scholarship students (not poor Asians though!) - i.e. isn't racial diversity (of the right kind) a prized social/cultural asset?
My understanding of why there are so few black/Hispanic kids in the flagship NYC public schools is that the private schools are scooping them all up with scholarships.
From the article: "Also, private school teachers earn far less than public. Why would they accept lower wages? Because being a private school teacher is often far easier because of the exact screening mechanism that vouchers threaten. A huge portion of the most academically challenged and behaviorally challenging students are removed from the student pool in private schools.."
So, in essence, that earning differential of private v public teachers is the going rate for not getting assaulted and beat-up by students.
In terms of identity dynamics, what's at play is yet again issues of class, not race. There is also the issue of academic rigor that private schools often have their public counterpart.
BTW, keep in mind that a lot of those parents who pay nosebleed prices for private schools are also among the CEOs putting their corporate employees through diversity training, which are not infrequent exercises in humiliation. Exercises that seem largely expiatory and a cover-your-ass way to safe-keep shitty business models (huge pay gaps executive v non-execs, questionable supply chain practices like ethnic cleansing, employees pissing in bottles, etc).
And they make for great public relations loved by NGOs and the socially conscious everywhere.
Freddie, given that you've largely agreed that this is about class rather than race, do you have a problem with the parents' decision? Like, what if the parents said:
"I don't have a problem with Black kids. What I have a problem with is violent kids who would torment my kid and make his life hell, and what I have a problem with is kids with behavioral issues who make learning incredibly difficult for all the kids around him, and who make his teacher incredibly stressed out. I could be wrong, but by and large kids from poor and dangerous areas--and here, Black kids are overrepresented--on average make learning a helluva lot more difficult for kids from more affluent or less dangerous areas."
Granted, any parent who said this would get into a lot of trouble, and would be reacted to gratefully by white parents who believe the same thing but want to prove their antiracist bona fides and would, with relief, kill this parent. But if a parent said this, where do you think he goes wrong (if anywhere)?
It seems like I only pop into your comments to disagree lately so popping in now to say I agree. It’s honestly very absurdly funny that Harvard is pretending to move towards being egalitarian or decolonize or whatever. I’m sure it can be done if they put Harvard’s finest professors on the job (Alan Dershowitz).
I often think of the truly significant changes for the better that could be implemented if people would only apply the same energy toward tangible issues of racial inequality (i.e. - education) that they apply to needlessly antagonistic, mostly symbolic social justice movements that are, more often than not, merely opportunities for self-serving individuals who excel at the kind of performative posturing we continue to mindlessly lionize.
I guess it depends on the Private school. My wife spent a year teaching at what is maybe the best Private (Independent) School in Canada. The point was mainly Harvard-Yale-Stanford-MIT prep and becoming friends with the kids of billionaires and other elites. The fact you had small classes, unlimited resources, and pretty good teachers was a bonus. About what you'd expect.
They seemed to handle race well enough. I'm sure this is the exception though. Charter schools really do seem like a mess in this regard.
> Parents don’t want their kids to go to places with “the wrong element.”
I recently said on another thread that I'd never send my kid to the neighborhood high school where he was born (Chicago) because of the gang violence and drugs. I'm obviously biased in thinking this about myself, but I don't believe it's simple unfounded prejudice. Multiple students are shot every year. A teacher was killed in a gang shooting (stray bullet) the year before I moved away.
It's not just fear that your kid will join a gang necessarily. It traumatizes the students to have classmates carrying guns and shooting each other, not to mention the heavy police presence and drug arrests.
Anyway, the neighborhood is about 40% white, and the school is less than 8% white. I'll be the first person to acknowledge that it's not about the facility or the teaching. It's not even about the majority of the students. But parents don't want their kids around students who are involved in gang violence.
That said, I'm sure white parents (including me) overestimate crime based on school demographics. Plus, shootings and drug busts get more coverage than positive news. I guess all I'm really saying is that perceptions of neighborhood schools don't just come from race -- although I'm sure race is major factor, and that it shapes how crime is interpreted. A shooting at a rural white school might be seen as an isolated incident, while in the city it's a sign of a gang problem. (There really was a gang problem, but if there was ever an exception it wouldn't be covered that way.)
I think the entire lens through which this article is written is somewhat terribly distorted.
Hypothesis: We do not live in a fundamentally racist society. We do, however, live in a /viciously/ classist society. The fact that African-Americans and Hispanics are overrepresented in the lower socio-economic classes is a contingent accident of history. The "white supremacists" that constitute our new moral panic class hate white drug-dealing rapist low-lives with precisely the same venom that they hate Black drug-dealing rapist low-lives. They may, indeed, be the most color-blind of us all.
What would a hypothetical "Critical Class Theory" look like? Traditional communism, or something more exotic?
"Also, private school teachers earn far less than public. Why would they accept lower wages? Because being a private school teacher is often far easier because of the exact screening mechanism that vouchers threaten."
I had no idea there was a salary gap, much less that it went in that direction. I think Freddie has just collapsed the entire argument for vouchers, which is that private schools do more with less. I already knew that "doing more" had a lot to do with screening out problematic kids, but I didn't realize that "with less" works the same way.
So, let's take where I'm from, Providence, RI, as an example.
Providence public schools are the worst in America, by almost any objective measure. The buildings are not only falling down, but the level of violence in them requires almost as much security as a medium-security prison. In seriousness.
Given this, are we to attribute that solely, or even partially?, to racism by itself as the motive for literally anyone with the means to send their kids literally anywhere else they can? It's not as if they can simply send their kids to a "better" neighboring town with better public schools?
I get why you "suspect" this, but I also feel it comes, in part at least, from bad faith assumptions about why.
I agree with all this, but I think there's also a 'finishing school' aspect to all the anti-racism. There's a certain precariousness gnawing at the heels of the upper-middle class, and traditionally a great way to maintain and 'deserve' your elite status is through a variety of rituals, like using the right salad fork or what have you. I think these schools are sensing that the rituals of anti-racism are the most important form of elite socialisation, and teachers who can't get on board with that are diluting the product, which is ultimately stable elite membership for the children.
In this sense, there's an important aspect of 'make my kids different from normal white kids, we'll make sure the elite positions select for those differences' to the dynamic as well.
I went to private grade school in SF 20 years ago. These days my alma mater claims to be “very focused” on inclusion and diversity efforts, but it also charges $41K a year for kindergarten, so . . .
"Those Black students who have the academic pedigree and wealth to go to private schools are those that the same affluent white parents would see as “the right kind of Black kids,” which is a racist sentiment on its face."
I strongly disagree with this. The very same parents want their kids to go to school with "the right kind of White kids”. They are discriminating on the basis of CLASS, not race.
I'm affluent with young children and my kids will go to a good school.
I also live in an area where 'diversity' is something that is highly thought of.
However, I really don't care about diversity. If the school my kids went to was 80% Cuban, 80% West African, 80% Asian, or 80% white I wouldn't care as long as it was excellent academically.
I won't, however, send my kids to a school that's poor academically and that has a lot of kids who aren't capable of achieving academically and have behavioral problems. Why would I?
Public education is a disaster in many parts of this country. Its a ridiculous sociology experiment based on 19th century German institutional ideals that have been abandoned in many parts of western Europe.
Tl;dr not going to send my kids to a bad school because sending them to a good school is 'unfair and racist.'
Kids and parents should have choice. If they don't what's the alternative for improving educational opportunities?
I think the two, fanatical anti-racism curricula and a structurally anti-egalitarian institution, are intimately connected. They a engaged in all manner of frantic activity to undo privilege without actually giving up any money or power. Worse still, this allows the children educated in these same institutions the ability to monopolize the discourse on racism, which will inevitably be distorted in their favor.
Maybe I read too much of The Last Psychiatrist, but people need to start seeing this supposed radicalism as a defense mechanism against change instead of what it claims to be.
Eh. You live and work in NYC. Like most major cities, the racial demographics are diverse. But there are a lot of school districts that just aren't that way. Given the population/geography distribution, I'd venture to guess that most aren't. The district in which I live is about 98% white, as are all of the neighboring ones. The county as a whole is 95% white. It's a pretty rural area. Class is a much bigger deal around here.
' One, I suspect that private school people are generally aware that a big part of the market appeal of private school is to keep out precisely the students voucher programs are designed to let in. Parents don’t want their kids to go to places with “the wrong element.” I’m sure most of those parents don’t think of this in explicitly racist terms, but certainly there’s a powerful racial dimension. Fear of poor kids doubly so.'
Can you clarify this a bit?
Haven't the high end public schools in New York put significant resources into recruiting lower income black and Hispanic scholarship students (not poor Asians though!) - i.e. isn't racial diversity (of the right kind) a prized social/cultural asset?
My understanding of why there are so few black/Hispanic kids in the flagship NYC public schools is that the private schools are scooping them all up with scholarships.
Is your understanding different?
From the article: "Also, private school teachers earn far less than public. Why would they accept lower wages? Because being a private school teacher is often far easier because of the exact screening mechanism that vouchers threaten. A huge portion of the most academically challenged and behaviorally challenging students are removed from the student pool in private schools.."
So, in essence, that earning differential of private v public teachers is the going rate for not getting assaulted and beat-up by students.
In terms of identity dynamics, what's at play is yet again issues of class, not race. There is also the issue of academic rigor that private schools often have their public counterpart.
BTW, keep in mind that a lot of those parents who pay nosebleed prices for private schools are also among the CEOs putting their corporate employees through diversity training, which are not infrequent exercises in humiliation. Exercises that seem largely expiatory and a cover-your-ass way to safe-keep shitty business models (huge pay gaps executive v non-execs, questionable supply chain practices like ethnic cleansing, employees pissing in bottles, etc).
And they make for great public relations loved by NGOs and the socially conscious everywhere.
Freddie, given that you've largely agreed that this is about class rather than race, do you have a problem with the parents' decision? Like, what if the parents said:
"I don't have a problem with Black kids. What I have a problem with is violent kids who would torment my kid and make his life hell, and what I have a problem with is kids with behavioral issues who make learning incredibly difficult for all the kids around him, and who make his teacher incredibly stressed out. I could be wrong, but by and large kids from poor and dangerous areas--and here, Black kids are overrepresented--on average make learning a helluva lot more difficult for kids from more affluent or less dangerous areas."
Granted, any parent who said this would get into a lot of trouble, and would be reacted to gratefully by white parents who believe the same thing but want to prove their antiracist bona fides and would, with relief, kill this parent. But if a parent said this, where do you think he goes wrong (if anywhere)?
It seems like I only pop into your comments to disagree lately so popping in now to say I agree. It’s honestly very absurdly funny that Harvard is pretending to move towards being egalitarian or decolonize or whatever. I’m sure it can be done if they put Harvard’s finest professors on the job (Alan Dershowitz).
I often think of the truly significant changes for the better that could be implemented if people would only apply the same energy toward tangible issues of racial inequality (i.e. - education) that they apply to needlessly antagonistic, mostly symbolic social justice movements that are, more often than not, merely opportunities for self-serving individuals who excel at the kind of performative posturing we continue to mindlessly lionize.
I guess it depends on the Private school. My wife spent a year teaching at what is maybe the best Private (Independent) School in Canada. The point was mainly Harvard-Yale-Stanford-MIT prep and becoming friends with the kids of billionaires and other elites. The fact you had small classes, unlimited resources, and pretty good teachers was a bonus. About what you'd expect.
They seemed to handle race well enough. I'm sure this is the exception though. Charter schools really do seem like a mess in this regard.
> Parents don’t want their kids to go to places with “the wrong element.”
I recently said on another thread that I'd never send my kid to the neighborhood high school where he was born (Chicago) because of the gang violence and drugs. I'm obviously biased in thinking this about myself, but I don't believe it's simple unfounded prejudice. Multiple students are shot every year. A teacher was killed in a gang shooting (stray bullet) the year before I moved away.
It's not just fear that your kid will join a gang necessarily. It traumatizes the students to have classmates carrying guns and shooting each other, not to mention the heavy police presence and drug arrests.
Anyway, the neighborhood is about 40% white, and the school is less than 8% white. I'll be the first person to acknowledge that it's not about the facility or the teaching. It's not even about the majority of the students. But parents don't want their kids around students who are involved in gang violence.
That said, I'm sure white parents (including me) overestimate crime based on school demographics. Plus, shootings and drug busts get more coverage than positive news. I guess all I'm really saying is that perceptions of neighborhood schools don't just come from race -- although I'm sure race is major factor, and that it shapes how crime is interpreted. A shooting at a rural white school might be seen as an isolated incident, while in the city it's a sign of a gang problem. (There really was a gang problem, but if there was ever an exception it wouldn't be covered that way.)
I think the entire lens through which this article is written is somewhat terribly distorted.
Hypothesis: We do not live in a fundamentally racist society. We do, however, live in a /viciously/ classist society. The fact that African-Americans and Hispanics are overrepresented in the lower socio-economic classes is a contingent accident of history. The "white supremacists" that constitute our new moral panic class hate white drug-dealing rapist low-lives with precisely the same venom that they hate Black drug-dealing rapist low-lives. They may, indeed, be the most color-blind of us all.
What would a hypothetical "Critical Class Theory" look like? Traditional communism, or something more exotic?