"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.
More than that: private schools have, I believe, more attrition than charters, and charters have more attrition than publics.
While Freddie's interpretation of private paying less than public is typical, I am not sure the facts bear it out. But the reality is so upsetting that it freaks people out. But the harsh truth is that public school teacher standards are HIGHER than private school standards, and so private school employment is mostly for those people who can't manage public school employment. I know, I know, the credential is a stupid requirement, but having it nonetheless makes you more money. Private schools aren't picking up most of their employees from the disgruntled public school teacher pool. Yes, there are teachers who "escape" to the private market but if you check their story you'll find they've got a spouse or father with lots of money or at the very least excellent insurance. But for the most part, privates are hiring uncredentialed teachers who have no option but private school, precisely because they don't have a credential. And they're always short teachers.
There are exceptions: highly skilled math and english teachers can expect very high pay to teach high ability students very advanced classes in particularly elite schools. But in general, the demand isn't "give me a credentialed HS teacher" but "give me someone with a Master's in the subject and demonstrated teaching experience with high ability kids."
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.
Because, due to funding dynamics I have recently talked about at great length, there are actually largely-Black, largely-poor schools that are very well resourced and have beautiful buildings and great facilities, and private schools still flourish in those places and are dominantly filled with affluent white kids.
Well, you referenced this yourself - they are "well financed" in the sense that they have higher per student *expenditures*, but this does not mean that money is spent thoughtfully, and as you know, typically goes to yet more administrative bloat.
And I'm going to have rotten fruit thrown at me for this here, I am sure, but in our situation, much of that also eventually trickles back into teacher salaries that are, in turn, recycled into political contributions to our dominant political party who absolutely *rely* on donations from the NEARI, etc. to fund their re-election campaigns.
I feel to even, instinctually, reduce this impulse to avoid the public schools in cities like Providence to racism (in whole or even in part) not only presumes bad faith, but misses the notion that a lot of the circumstances involved can (and will) vary from school district to school district, and probably even more wildly depending on the size of the places involved, where they are in America, and so on.
OK, but you're also very data driven, which is part of the reason I loved "The Cult Of Smart". How do you prove that? Or is this just your gut?
Because again, with situations like the one in Providence right now, literally any other option than the public school options on hand for anyone with the means to avoid them is a no-brainer.
North Americans conflate race with class, because they've been trained to do so through a lifetime of exposure of media created by billionaires who would prefer not to see pitchforks outside their mansions every 50 years or so. I am actually skeptical that most self-described "racists" are actually diagnosing their own hate correctly. Accurate introspection is hard, even without an all-pervasive propaganda media diet.
In San Francisco we have a number of very good public high schools, in which the majority of the students are Asian. Whites still won't send their kids to these high performing schools and instead send them to private schools or move to majority white suburbs.
I understand but it is another example of how white people don't seem to be driven by a desire to improve their children's education but more by a desire to self-segregate.
I live in the edge of where the suburbs meet rural area in the South. In a mixed race and mixed wealth set of neighborhoods. I have neighbors on food assistance and two streets over are houses I can't afford. Our school, which kids from both portions of the neighborhood (older, less expensive and new expensive) attend is still Title 1 with free breakfast and lunch for all students.
I have no doubt white flight is real. I take exception to broad generalizations about white people and self segregation being the *main* motivator for all white people's educational choices for their kids. White rich people, maybe, and ignorant white poor people. But those are relatively small segments of the white population.
When I say "white people" I do not intend to mean *all* white people, sorry if I gave that impression.
It does not matter what ones motivation for behaving in a matter that discriminates against other races and advantages your own. The fact that you do so is enough to make the action "racist" at least by my definition of the term. I know this definition is contentious. I don't think most white people are motivated by racial animus, not at all. But by their actions they are discriminatory and that's what matters.
This is interesting. I would have agreed in years past. In fact, part of the reason I left church was the (white) pastor's family worked the system so their kids wouldn't go to "that school"--our school, as it turns out.
More and more I've come to believe class is the motivator, which of course has significant overlap with race. People who desire upward mobility will by definition enter a class of people that because of historic reasons and demographic realities will be mostly white.
What I have come to loathe is that desire for more. I see big beautiful homes that remind me of some of my friends homes when I was a teen. But I also hate them because what they represent is a deep covetousness. In fact one of those high school friends and his family moved from a nice spacious middle class house to an even bigger and nicer house. When I asked why his parents decided to move, he replied, "greed."
If Black people wish to attain that same upward mobility agent wouldn't they? *we are all goddamned social primates with the exact same base impulses--then they should go for it. I certainly don't want to see Black and brown people confined to a wretched life of squalor.
I can't help but think that a major driving force behind slow upward mobility is something that is a personal problem for me: lack of ambition. For people mired in generations of poverty and truly, overtly systemic racism, I can understand why ambition wouldn't be on the list of top five life necessities.
How do we get people to believe it's possible to succeed? How do we impart the emotional energy required to overcome that first, most debilitating speed bump: that nobody who has come before you has succeeded?
There are more and more people of color for whom success seems like a possibility now. I'm not sure how much more castigating of the great white evil will move the needle .
This comment is hilarious on an article that presupposes the entire country is just like NYC when the reality is the vast majority of America is suburban or exurban sprawl where the only private schools are your run-of-the-mill parochial schools. The amount of coverage I’ve seen - between Flannigan’s piece in the Atlantic, Bari Weiss’s coverage, and the new NYT piece - on the cynical woke theater of a tiny number of extremely elite schools is completely disproportionate to how much it reflects the reality of most children/families’ experiences. I have the same wave of irritation I had 5-6 years ago when the coverage of “women’s challenges in the workplace” was exclusively limited to women with degrees from Ivy leagues who worked as executives in Manhattan.
I completely agree, and I definitely think race is part of that story. My comment was regarding not everywhere being like the Bay Area. True, but not everywhere is like NYC either. We are having a conversation about a very niche class demographic so a comment about elite San Franciscans, a different but comparable demographic, is not out of place or irrelevant.
A lot of times these white people don't want to send their kids to the mostly asian schools because the pressure there is so intensely high. It's just a different value set. The value set of striving Chinese immigrants is very different from upper middle class white Americans most of these people don't want to subject their kids to that brutal competition. It doesn't have to be racism.
My oldest begged me to not send her to Lowell (an elite public school that requires high test scores to get into) and went to the public arts school instead. She was afraid of the academic pressure she would be under at Lowell and the pressure from her Tiger Mom to do well there.
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.
Exactly. What separates the "deserving" from the "non-deserving" rich now is that the deserving ones have been socialized to feel bad about it. Or more specifically to feel bad about being white. This is the main dividing line between the Wesleyan grads and the Trump's of the world.
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 amenable to this. What I mean to say is that the characteristics they're looking for in peers for their students are not a long walk at all from the negation of stereotypes about our minority underclass.
My main complaint about Freddie's writing (which I generally love, I'm a subscriber) is that every day he rolls a d20 to determine the precise link in the chain of reasoning where identity politics goes from bad to good.
In this piece he admits that the most behaviorally challenging pupils are predominantly of minority groups, and admits that the parents are not EXACTLY thinking about race when they think about who they don't want in their school, and clearly the "not EXACTLY" is precisely at the border between class analysis and race analysis that he often speaks so well on, but in this case, this post, today, "those parents are racists btw"
This is absolutely right. In all places, at all times, most affluent and/or ambitious families will aim to send their children to schools perceived as high achieving, if they can. Asian families do this. White families do this. Black families do this. Arab families... well, you get the picture. It is only in the current era that this human tendency is spoken of as evidence of white racism. If even a careful writer like Freddie deBoer is unthinkingly parroting this, then what hope is there?
Of course there is no such thing as school quality! I agree! That's why I said: "In all places, at all times, most affluent and/or ambitious families will aim to send their children to schools PERCEIVED as high achieving, if they can."
Put it this way: If a majority black school is getting a 9 rating on Great Schools and sending it seniors to excellent universities, I guarantee you white families will be lining up to attend.
I'd take that bet. A majority black school getting a 9 on greatschools and sending seniors to excellent universities is sending BLACK seniors to great universities. The standards for white students going to great universities are considerably higher, and any white student going to a majority black school would not be assumed to be able to meet those standards.
I think you don't realize how excellent the student body at such a school would be, in comparison to an average existing urban public school that serves either mostly Black kids, or a more diverse student body. I've gone through the public school process as a parent in Brooklyn, and educated progressive White parents would line up overnight to get into such a school.
I'm pretty sure they would not. For example, white parents aren't lining up to get into Success Academy. And I'm not asserting that whites won't tolerate a diverse student body, but rather that they would not seek out an all black school with a 9 rating, because they would know what that meant.
For example, save in certain districts, you don't see whites going into Success Academy, particularly high school.
And my point is not "whites are racist", but rather "all parents prefer to avoid majority black or majority Asian schools" and "all parents prefer a hefty dose of students of their own race and prioritize this above academics". A black parent opting between a black charter school or a mostly white suburban school is more likely to take the black charter, even given the white academics are probably much higher.
Also, and here's something people tend to forget about: if you have a diverse school where 60% of the students score proficient, and a majority black school where 90% of the students score proficient, most parents understand the difference between hitting a benchmark and an average. The average ability level at the first school is almost certainly much higher. It's probably just less likely to dump the weak students than the all black charter (which is the most likely kind of school to hit 90% proficiency).
Does this apply at the bottom end though? I can see how there's gonna be a group of high achieving kids who form a social circle in a sort of lower middle class school and there it doesn't matter. But there's a certain type of school where the kids are just so disruptive that it becomes impossible for learning to happen.
Strong agree. I mean, there are schools with weekly violence and lead in the pipes. "There's no such thing as school quality" is a vast oversimplification.
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?
You are, I'm sure, aware of my stance that the concept of "school quality" is a phantom and that the perception of school quality is simply the aggregate of the underlying academic ability and outside-the-home learning conditions of their populations.
Yeah, I've debated Nikole Hannah-Jones about this on Twitter. Many schools really do have students and parents claiming they don't feel the school is safe. Many schools even get shut down frequently in response to gang violence threats -- something that seems underreported in mainstream news coverage. Avoiding such schools doesn't require a shred of personal racism (though it does involve plenty of systemic racism)
Well, I guess I'd opine that maybe it's a phantom until it isn't, I think - and you talked about this yourself recently:
If the physical environment of the school itself sucks (freezing cold, leaking water, rats, all of which happen here despite sky high per student expenditures), your kids come home hungry, or keep getting their asses kicked because of the lack of any sort of security or discipline ....
At that point, it seems like "quality" is not a red herring, but rather, tied to outcomes any normal person would want for their kids when it comes to schooling.
I absolutely agree that there is no "quality" metric tied to per student spending, and few things in education have been made more obvious over the past couple of decades.
What many normal people fail to realize is that few problems in America are due to "lack of resources", and that problems caused by poor planning, waste, even corruption, are actually exacerbated, not relieved, when more people and money are thrown at the problem.
But peer effects aren't important developmentally?
If you don't have an aggregate of academic achievement/ sufficient 'n' of smart kids you can certainly get smart kids who are well supported at home to underperform.
Why would I not want my kids to be around high-achieving peers?
"Why would I not want my kids to be around high-achieving peers?"
What the data says is they end up doing less well than if they were surrounded by mediocre peers. Why? Because when surrounded by smart peers kids don't think they are anything special. They think, "I'd love to go to medical school but there are so many people smarter than me, I'll never make it." The same kid with mediocre peers thinks they are brilliant and could easily make it through medical school.
I'm going to copy and paste a comment from a recent Astral Codex Ten post about schooling that I think provides relevant context here. (Comment credit to TGGP.)
>>Evidence that the worst students make things worse for their peers, but not much in the opposite direction:
Segregated schools with more than 80% black students do a significantly worse job of educating poor students than more integrated schools. Integrated schools also don't do a worse job of educating middle class parents. I can dig up the research if you want.
I mean I'm not going to say no to interesting citations, if you're inclined to find it, but I don't have much specialized knowledge in this area. I was just re-posting that other comment, because I'd just read it and thought it was interesting and on-topic here too.
But we're not fish, are we? The great value of a really good college or university is that it introduces you to people who are orders of magnitude smarter than you are, and thus gives you an idea of the possibilities in life.
If you're a 90th percentile student surrounded by 50th percentile students you're gonna be thee top of the class. If you're 90th percentile surrounded by 90th percentile you're gonna be at the middle. You're probably gonna learn more and be challenged more in the second setting, but you might well have better grades in the first setting since that's how curving works and the tests are gonna be way easier. I don't think this kind of data is meaningful unless it's about externally assessed things like the SAt.
I couldn't speak to "the concept of 'school quality'", but if years of academic study have arrived at the conclusion that there's no meaningful moral, utilitarian, or hedonic distinction between compulsory attendance in an environment where violence and the continuous threat thereof is prevalent and academic study is all but ignored, and compulsory attendance in a safe and secure environment where academic achievement is a high-status accomplishment, then I'm not certain a charge of gross incompetence isn't warranted against the the very institution of educational studies.
The proof is in he pudding. They compared kids who just met the bar to attend the elite public high schools in Boston and New York and the ones that just missed the bar and were forced to attend "inner city public school." There was no difference in SAT score, college attendance, selectivity of colleges they attended.
I'd be interested to see what they meant by "inner city public schools". There are plenty of large, decent public schools in NYC full of children of striving immigrants from working class to middle class backgrounds. The kids who did just bad enough to not make it into Brooklyn tech were probably Chinese kids from places like Sheepshead Bay where public schools are mostly Chinese Russian etc. This is not what most people think of as an "inner city public high school ".
This says nothing about the experience of those at the top of the order, or even at the middle of the order, in selective schools. Which is also interesting, and should not be ignored.
I think Freddie is mostly right that a typical "high-achieving" school is such mostly because of the students' existing capabilities, not because the school's instruction and management are especially effective at teaching a given student, any more than a typical "low-achieving" school is.
But that's very different from saying that the "high-achieving' school's total educational environment is, or isn't, especially effective at teaching a given student! I very much think it does tend to be more effective, for exactly the reason Freddie cites: the aggregate of the underlying academic ability and outside the home learning conditions of their populations.
That is, you go to private school to be going to school with private school kids. The level of the kids (and the ability of the school to lick kids out for failing, which is a significant factor) causes the teaching and learning to be high-quality. But then the teaching and learning really are high-quality.
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.
We agree about a lot of things, I think. I'm not sure I can think of anyone else with whom I find my points of disagreement simultaneously so predictable and so surprising. Which makes those points just that much more interesting.
' 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.
"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"
The exam schools aren't diverse because Black and Hispanic students perform significantly worse than white and Asian on the exams.
"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?"
I'm guessing this is supposed to say high end private schools - privates in New York are required to provide demographic data, but they do not have a great record for doing so in a timely or systematic fashion, to put it mildly. Typically these schools will make a great ballyhoo about these programs, but the numbers are usually small and the students are still pulled from disproportionately economically secure and highly educated homes. But I don't have good data on that because they aren't exactly looking to produce that data.
' One of the biggest, Prep for Prep, boasts 715 minority kids — snatched from DOE schools, plus some charters and parochials — who are currently enjoying the advantages of $50,000-a-year private schools such as Trinity, Horace Mann and Spence, or boarding schools such as Exeter and Andover.'
Insert Drake meme.
Private schools:
High achieving poor Asian students - 'No! No scholarship!
High achieving poor black and Hispanic students - 'Yes! Give them a scholarship!'
Wesley Yang has done a bit on this - I think there is a fair amount of data that while black and Hispanic students would still be underrepresented in the flagship NYC public high schools that is in part due to the private schools.
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)?
I am less interested in the question of an overall moral position on such parents and more on the fact that these schools are almost certainly serving consumer demand in implementing all of this CRT, demand from the very same parents who, I am convinced, are afraid of letting their kids go to school with the Black kids CRT supposedly advocates for.
I'm not so sure it's consumer demand. I think it's more just woke activists pushing CRT, then the great majority of parents (who actually don't want it) are afraid to speak out. In other words, just the standard takeover of an institution by the woke. Parents, even though they are paying the bills, have much less power in these situations that you imagine.
I once witnessed the head of school of an elite private school tell parents "if you don't like it, leave - we'll get another family tomorrow to fill your spot." Parents are quite cowed by that, especially if they are on financial aid.
And even if they're not on financial aid. Competition among wealthy families to get their kids into the perceived-to-be "top" schools is intense at all grade levels, starting with pre-K. The schools can do whatever they want with their academic programs, that's completely irrelevant to these parents, and usually the kids too: https://www.today.com/popculture/lori-loughlin-s-daughter-olivia-jade-speaks-out-candid-red-t202947
Maybe the reporting is skewed, but I don't get the sense the parents are demanding it. I think they are worried about objecting to it. It seems to be teacher driven, which is weird--teachers don't have a lot of control in private schools. I've written an article saying it's asymmetrical executation--that is, our silos are all melding together, and objecting to CRT in your public or private school could get you fired.
This is a salient point. And in no way, is the acknowledgement, and hostility towards, our general American anti-black racism going to make any parents of white families in cities where their kids are definitely in the minority, going to feel better when it's their kids getting their asses kicked in schools, either.
And then, when they've had enough and move them to "better schools" where their kids aren't miserable, they're the villains in the narrative.
How? Why? Because their progressive bonafides weren't as strong as their desire not to see their kids have a miserable childhood and a lousy education?
Are their kids getting their asses kicked in school or is this a hypothetical you dreamed up to make your argument seem stronger? Because from the research I have seen, smart kids from middle class families do well in whatever teaching environment they are in, so long as basic needs of safety are met.
Just as you correctly pointed out that my experience from the Bay Area is not generally applicable, neither is Providence RI a good example of most of the US. In most of the US there is a poorer urban center surrounded by wealthier white suburbanites who moved to the suburbs for the "good schools" while the urban school district has test scores similar to suburban schools for children in the same race and class demographic.
I think you’re making a good point; a lot of parents are afraid of the possibility of their kids getting abused, but it would be nice to have data on how likely this is. We do have data on expulsion rates, though, and it seems that black males are likelier than any other group to be expelled; this is often taken to be evidence of administrators’ and teachers’ racism, but I’m skeptical.
Guess what? When white kids are in a school where being a white kid is really different, and isn't cool? Just like in any other social dynamic in school, they're either the toughest or the toughest, or get their asses kicked.
And one's social and political left of center bonafides around ideal education policy tend to disappear in a hurry, even among blue city, blue state, upper income people with the most impeccable progressive credentials, when their (white) kids get the shit kicked out of them in public schools for being different.
Strange I never got my ass kicked in school, even when I was in the extreme minority. It didn't happen when I lived in The Project in Southern California, it didn't happen when I lived in rural Wyoming or rural California either. You must have had the misfortune to live in an extremely violent area. And I am not a large or athletic person, or at least I wasn't when I was younger.
My mixed race kids go to SF public schools and are thriving. I know some white parents who are doing fine with that too. But yes, lots of whites pull their kids out, as I mentioned in another comment. I don't think it is because they got the "shit kicked out of them .. for being different." I think it is because they are racist.
Unfortunately I cannot find any studies of the likelihood of being bullied broken down by race, but perhaps you do. I would love to see some real data on this.
"You must have the misfortune of living in a violent area"
Well, yes, and regional culture plays a large part of that too. You didn't get your ass kicked for being different in CA or WY? Congratulations!
Come up to big cities in the northeast? Hey, look at that - Hartford, Providence, Bridgeport ,Newark and too many others to mention aren't Cheyenne.
Class differences rule, and race is the force multiplier, up here. If you didn't get your ass kicked for being a minority, great, but rest assured, it does happen, which is one factor (beyond shitty buildings, chronic teacher absenteeism, etc.) which causes literally anyone with the means to do so to pull their kids out of public schools.
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.)
This is a good point, and we can distill it even further:
If you had the means and opportunity to send your kids to a place like that for a huge portion of your lives, would you? To what end? To have a progressive political flex, even at the price of your own children being miserable?
Get real - not even the tankiest of tankies are going to do that, because the overwhelming majority of parents who can make these decisions love their kids too, and don't want to put them in any danger to prove a point to someone else.
This fantasy than people do or should persists on Twitter (well, of course, right?) but not really in the real world.
Exactly. Everyone with resources keeps their kids out of that school. Black parents included. (Believe me, it’s not just white parents who frantically apply for magnet schools when their kids reach 8th grade.)
Of course, the result is that neighborhood schools like this one are in a downward spiral. Only poor and low-achieving students remain. Enrollment keeps dropping, and the school will be closed or merged with another school eventually.
Why would I send my child there when I have options? One additional kid won’t stop the enrollment spiral. And even if it did, parental instincts override liberal guilt every time.
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?
I'd ammend: they hate poor white trash more than they hate poor blacks, at least in my experience. The attitude to poor blacks is "they can't help it, poor dears", which is its own sort of racism, but nothing like the vitriol heaped on poor whites. Nobody would dare say a word against blacks, even veiled; poor whites are commonly mocked in open conversation.
The evidence does not support your claims that we do not live in a fundamentally racist society. There is anti-black prejudice in the criminal justice system, in banking, in real estate, in education, in medicine, in government and many other systems. This has been well documented by research.
"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.
More than that: private schools have, I believe, more attrition than charters, and charters have more attrition than publics.
While Freddie's interpretation of private paying less than public is typical, I am not sure the facts bear it out. But the reality is so upsetting that it freaks people out. But the harsh truth is that public school teacher standards are HIGHER than private school standards, and so private school employment is mostly for those people who can't manage public school employment. I know, I know, the credential is a stupid requirement, but having it nonetheless makes you more money. Private schools aren't picking up most of their employees from the disgruntled public school teacher pool. Yes, there are teachers who "escape" to the private market but if you check their story you'll find they've got a spouse or father with lots of money or at the very least excellent insurance. But for the most part, privates are hiring uncredentialed teachers who have no option but private school, precisely because they don't have a credential. And they're always short teachers.
There are exceptions: highly skilled math and english teachers can expect very high pay to teach high ability students very advanced classes in particularly elite schools. But in general, the demand isn't "give me a credentialed HS teacher" but "give me someone with a Master's in the subject and demonstrated teaching experience with high ability kids."
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.
Because, due to funding dynamics I have recently talked about at great length, there are actually largely-Black, largely-poor schools that are very well resourced and have beautiful buildings and great facilities, and private schools still flourish in those places and are dominantly filled with affluent white kids.
Well, you referenced this yourself - they are "well financed" in the sense that they have higher per student *expenditures*, but this does not mean that money is spent thoughtfully, and as you know, typically goes to yet more administrative bloat.
And I'm going to have rotten fruit thrown at me for this here, I am sure, but in our situation, much of that also eventually trickles back into teacher salaries that are, in turn, recycled into political contributions to our dominant political party who absolutely *rely* on donations from the NEARI, etc. to fund their re-election campaigns.
I feel to even, instinctually, reduce this impulse to avoid the public schools in cities like Providence to racism (in whole or even in part) not only presumes bad faith, but misses the notion that a lot of the circumstances involved can (and will) vary from school district to school district, and probably even more wildly depending on the size of the places involved, where they are in America, and so on.
I said, explicitly, that there exceptions. But yes, I'm presuming bad faith. Because many of these parents are operating in bad faith.
OK, but you're also very data driven, which is part of the reason I loved "The Cult Of Smart". How do you prove that? Or is this just your gut?
Because again, with situations like the one in Providence right now, literally any other option than the public school options on hand for anyone with the means to avoid them is a no-brainer.
I don't have one piece of evidence to share with you, but that parents are motivated in large measure by their perception of the "quality" of peer students and their dedication to avoiding undesirables is all over the research literature, eg https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203412107-21/good-neighborhoods-good-schools-race-good-choices-white-families-heather-beth-johnson-thomas-shapiro
North Americans conflate race with class, because they've been trained to do so through a lifetime of exposure of media created by billionaires who would prefer not to see pitchforks outside their mansions every 50 years or so. I am actually skeptical that most self-described "racists" are actually diagnosing their own hate correctly. Accurate introspection is hard, even without an all-pervasive propaganda media diet.
In San Francisco we have a number of very good public high schools, in which the majority of the students are Asian. Whites still won't send their kids to these high performing schools and instead send them to private schools or move to majority white suburbs.
OK. And I realize this can be sometimes be hard for people in the Bay Area, but imagine for a moment that not everywhere in America is the Bay Area.
I understand but it is another example of how white people don't seem to be driven by a desire to improve their children's education but more by a desire to self-segregate.
I live in the edge of where the suburbs meet rural area in the South. In a mixed race and mixed wealth set of neighborhoods. I have neighbors on food assistance and two streets over are houses I can't afford. Our school, which kids from both portions of the neighborhood (older, less expensive and new expensive) attend is still Title 1 with free breakfast and lunch for all students.
I have no doubt white flight is real. I take exception to broad generalizations about white people and self segregation being the *main* motivator for all white people's educational choices for their kids. White rich people, maybe, and ignorant white poor people. But those are relatively small segments of the white population.
When I say "white people" I do not intend to mean *all* white people, sorry if I gave that impression.
It does not matter what ones motivation for behaving in a matter that discriminates against other races and advantages your own. The fact that you do so is enough to make the action "racist" at least by my definition of the term. I know this definition is contentious. I don't think most white people are motivated by racial animus, not at all. But by their actions they are discriminatory and that's what matters.
This is interesting. I would have agreed in years past. In fact, part of the reason I left church was the (white) pastor's family worked the system so their kids wouldn't go to "that school"--our school, as it turns out.
More and more I've come to believe class is the motivator, which of course has significant overlap with race. People who desire upward mobility will by definition enter a class of people that because of historic reasons and demographic realities will be mostly white.
What I have come to loathe is that desire for more. I see big beautiful homes that remind me of some of my friends homes when I was a teen. But I also hate them because what they represent is a deep covetousness. In fact one of those high school friends and his family moved from a nice spacious middle class house to an even bigger and nicer house. When I asked why his parents decided to move, he replied, "greed."
If Black people wish to attain that same upward mobility agent wouldn't they? *we are all goddamned social primates with the exact same base impulses--then they should go for it. I certainly don't want to see Black and brown people confined to a wretched life of squalor.
I can't help but think that a major driving force behind slow upward mobility is something that is a personal problem for me: lack of ambition. For people mired in generations of poverty and truly, overtly systemic racism, I can understand why ambition wouldn't be on the list of top five life necessities.
How do we get people to believe it's possible to succeed? How do we impart the emotional energy required to overcome that first, most debilitating speed bump: that nobody who has come before you has succeeded?
There are more and more people of color for whom success seems like a possibility now. I'm not sure how much more castigating of the great white evil will move the needle .
Like other people don't self-segregate, too. This is a human characteristic. Why is it bad, in your opinion?
This comment is hilarious on an article that presupposes the entire country is just like NYC when the reality is the vast majority of America is suburban or exurban sprawl where the only private schools are your run-of-the-mill parochial schools. The amount of coverage I’ve seen - between Flannigan’s piece in the Atlantic, Bari Weiss’s coverage, and the new NYT piece - on the cynical woke theater of a tiny number of extremely elite schools is completely disproportionate to how much it reflects the reality of most children/families’ experiences. I have the same wave of irritation I had 5-6 years ago when the coverage of “women’s challenges in the workplace” was exclusively limited to women with degrees from Ivy leagues who worked as executives in Manhattan.
Most suburbanites are there precisely because it is full of people who are very much like them, including class, race and prejudice.
I completely agree, and I definitely think race is part of that story. My comment was regarding not everywhere being like the Bay Area. True, but not everywhere is like NYC either. We are having a conversation about a very niche class demographic so a comment about elite San Franciscans, a different but comparable demographic, is not out of place or irrelevant.
A lot of times these white people don't want to send their kids to the mostly asian schools because the pressure there is so intensely high. It's just a different value set. The value set of striving Chinese immigrants is very different from upper middle class white Americans most of these people don't want to subject their kids to that brutal competition. It doesn't have to be racism.
My oldest begged me to not send her to Lowell (an elite public school that requires high test scores to get into) and went to the public arts school instead. She was afraid of the academic pressure she would be under at Lowell and the pressure from her Tiger Mom to do well there.
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.
Exactly. What separates the "deserving" from the "non-deserving" rich now is that the deserving ones have been socialized to feel bad about it. Or more specifically to feel bad about being white. This is the main dividing line between the Wesleyan grads and the Trump's of the world.
100%. Its not about the education, its about the culture of being "elite".
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 amenable to this. What I mean to say is that the characteristics they're looking for in peers for their students are not a long walk at all from the negation of stereotypes about our minority underclass.
My main complaint about Freddie's writing (which I generally love, I'm a subscriber) is that every day he rolls a d20 to determine the precise link in the chain of reasoning where identity politics goes from bad to good.
In this piece he admits that the most behaviorally challenging pupils are predominantly of minority groups, and admits that the parents are not EXACTLY thinking about race when they think about who they don't want in their school, and clearly the "not EXACTLY" is precisely at the border between class analysis and race analysis that he often speaks so well on, but in this case, this post, today, "those parents are racists btw"
This is absolutely right. In all places, at all times, most affluent and/or ambitious families will aim to send their children to schools perceived as high achieving, if they can. Asian families do this. White families do this. Black families do this. Arab families... well, you get the picture. It is only in the current era that this human tendency is spoken of as evidence of white racism. If even a careful writer like Freddie deBoer is unthinkingly parroting this, then what hope is there?
You guys simply are not in possession of basic facts, like the fact that there is no such thing as school quality https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education
Of course there is no such thing as school quality! I agree! That's why I said: "In all places, at all times, most affluent and/or ambitious families will aim to send their children to schools PERCEIVED as high achieving, if they can."
Put it this way: If a majority black school is getting a 9 rating on Great Schools and sending it seniors to excellent universities, I guarantee you white families will be lining up to attend.
I'd take that bet. A majority black school getting a 9 on greatschools and sending seniors to excellent universities is sending BLACK seniors to great universities. The standards for white students going to great universities are considerably higher, and any white student going to a majority black school would not be assumed to be able to meet those standards.
And overwhelmingly, white families know this.
I think you don't realize how excellent the student body at such a school would be, in comparison to an average existing urban public school that serves either mostly Black kids, or a more diverse student body. I've gone through the public school process as a parent in Brooklyn, and educated progressive White parents would line up overnight to get into such a school.
I'm pretty sure they would not. For example, white parents aren't lining up to get into Success Academy. And I'm not asserting that whites won't tolerate a diverse student body, but rather that they would not seek out an all black school with a 9 rating, because they would know what that meant.
For example, save in certain districts, you don't see whites going into Success Academy, particularly high school.
And my point is not "whites are racist", but rather "all parents prefer to avoid majority black or majority Asian schools" and "all parents prefer a hefty dose of students of their own race and prioritize this above academics". A black parent opting between a black charter school or a mostly white suburban school is more likely to take the black charter, even given the white academics are probably much higher.
Also, and here's something people tend to forget about: if you have a diverse school where 60% of the students score proficient, and a majority black school where 90% of the students score proficient, most parents understand the difference between hitting a benchmark and an average. The average ability level at the first school is almost certainly much higher. It's probably just less likely to dump the weak students than the all black charter (which is the most likely kind of school to hit 90% proficiency).
Does this apply at the bottom end though? I can see how there's gonna be a group of high achieving kids who form a social circle in a sort of lower middle class school and there it doesn't matter. But there's a certain type of school where the kids are just so disruptive that it becomes impossible for learning to happen.
Strong agree. I mean, there are schools with weekly violence and lead in the pipes. "There's no such thing as school quality" is a vast oversimplification.
I’m not convinced that edge cases are the end of the story.
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?
You are, I'm sure, aware of my stance that the concept of "school quality" is a phantom and that the perception of school quality is simply the aggregate of the underlying academic ability and outside-the-home learning conditions of their populations.
Yeah, I've debated Nikole Hannah-Jones about this on Twitter. Many schools really do have students and parents claiming they don't feel the school is safe. Many schools even get shut down frequently in response to gang violence threats -- something that seems underreported in mainstream news coverage. Avoiding such schools doesn't require a shred of personal racism (though it does involve plenty of systemic racism)
Well, I guess I'd opine that maybe it's a phantom until it isn't, I think - and you talked about this yourself recently:
If the physical environment of the school itself sucks (freezing cold, leaking water, rats, all of which happen here despite sky high per student expenditures), your kids come home hungry, or keep getting their asses kicked because of the lack of any sort of security or discipline ....
At that point, it seems like "quality" is not a red herring, but rather, tied to outcomes any normal person would want for their kids when it comes to schooling.
I absolutely agree that there is no "quality" metric tied to per student spending, and few things in education have been made more obvious over the past couple of decades.
What many normal people fail to realize is that few problems in America are due to "lack of resources", and that problems caused by poor planning, waste, even corruption, are actually exacerbated, not relieved, when more people and money are thrown at the problem.
Yes.
But peer effects aren't important developmentally?
If you don't have an aggregate of academic achievement/ sufficient 'n' of smart kids you can certainly get smart kids who are well supported at home to underperform.
Why would I not want my kids to be around high-achieving peers?
"Why would I not want my kids to be around high-achieving peers?"
What the data says is they end up doing less well than if they were surrounded by mediocre peers. Why? Because when surrounded by smart peers kids don't think they are anything special. They think, "I'd love to go to medical school but there are so many people smarter than me, I'll never make it." The same kid with mediocre peers thinks they are brilliant and could easily make it through medical school.
I'm going to copy and paste a comment from a recent Astral Codex Ten post about schooling that I think provides relevant context here. (Comment credit to TGGP.)
>>Evidence that the worst students make things worse for their peers, but not much in the opposite direction:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/helpful-inequality.html
Segregated schools with more than 80% black students do a significantly worse job of educating poor students than more integrated schools. Integrated schools also don't do a worse job of educating middle class parents. I can dig up the research if you want.
I mean I'm not going to say no to interesting citations, if you're inclined to find it, but I don't have much specialized knowledge in this area. I was just re-posting that other comment, because I'd just read it and thought it was interesting and on-topic here too.
I can't imagine this.
You can’t imagine the benefits of being a big fish in a little pond? I mean it’s an actual saying.
But we're not fish, are we? The great value of a really good college or university is that it introduces you to people who are orders of magnitude smarter than you are, and thus gives you an idea of the possibilities in life.
Also, kudos to you for this comment. One of the best things I've seen all year.
If you're a 90th percentile student surrounded by 50th percentile students you're gonna be thee top of the class. If you're 90th percentile surrounded by 90th percentile you're gonna be at the middle. You're probably gonna learn more and be challenged more in the second setting, but you might well have better grades in the first setting since that's how curving works and the tests are gonna be way easier. I don't think this kind of data is meaningful unless it's about externally assessed things like the SAt.
I couldn't speak to "the concept of 'school quality'", but if years of academic study have arrived at the conclusion that there's no meaningful moral, utilitarian, or hedonic distinction between compulsory attendance in an environment where violence and the continuous threat thereof is prevalent and academic study is all but ignored, and compulsory attendance in a safe and secure environment where academic achievement is a high-status accomplishment, then I'm not certain a charge of gross incompetence isn't warranted against the the very institution of educational studies.
The proof is in he pudding. They compared kids who just met the bar to attend the elite public high schools in Boston and New York and the ones that just missed the bar and were forced to attend "inner city public school." There was no difference in SAT score, college attendance, selectivity of colleges they attended.
I'd be interested to see what they meant by "inner city public schools". There are plenty of large, decent public schools in NYC full of children of striving immigrants from working class to middle class backgrounds. The kids who did just bad enough to not make it into Brooklyn tech were probably Chinese kids from places like Sheepshead Bay where public schools are mostly Chinese Russian etc. This is not what most people think of as an "inner city public high school ".
This says nothing about the experience of those at the top of the order, or even at the middle of the order, in selective schools. Which is also interesting, and should not be ignored.
I think Freddie is mostly right that a typical "high-achieving" school is such mostly because of the students' existing capabilities, not because the school's instruction and management are especially effective at teaching a given student, any more than a typical "low-achieving" school is.
But that's very different from saying that the "high-achieving' school's total educational environment is, or isn't, especially effective at teaching a given student! I very much think it does tend to be more effective, for exactly the reason Freddie cites: the aggregate of the underlying academic ability and outside the home learning conditions of their populations.
That is, you go to private school to be going to school with private school kids. The level of the kids (and the ability of the school to lick kids out for failing, which is a significant factor) causes the teaching and learning to be high-quality. But then the teaching and learning really are high-quality.
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.
Don't disagree with this.
We agree about a lot of things, I think. I'm not sure I can think of anyone else with whom I find my points of disagreement simultaneously so predictable and so surprising. Which makes those points just that much more interesting.
' 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?
"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"
The exam schools aren't diverse because Black and Hispanic students perform significantly worse than white and Asian on the exams.
"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?"
I'm guessing this is supposed to say high end private schools - privates in New York are required to provide demographic data, but they do not have a great record for doing so in a timely or systematic fashion, to put it mildly. Typically these schools will make a great ballyhoo about these programs, but the numbers are usually small and the students are still pulled from disproportionately economically secure and highly educated homes. But I don't have good data on that because they aren't exactly looking to produce that data.
' One of the biggest, Prep for Prep, boasts 715 minority kids — snatched from DOE schools, plus some charters and parochials — who are currently enjoying the advantages of $50,000-a-year private schools such as Trinity, Horace Mann and Spence, or boarding schools such as Exeter and Andover.'
Insert Drake meme.
Private schools:
High achieving poor Asian students - 'No! No scholarship!
High achieving poor black and Hispanic students - 'Yes! Give them a scholarship!'
https://nypost.com/2018/06/09/how-nonprofits-are-boosting-nycs-brightest-minority-students/
Wesley Yang has done a bit on this - I think there is a fair amount of data that while black and Hispanic students would still be underrepresented in the flagship NYC public high schools that is in part due to the private schools.
I would probably take Dalton over Stuyvesant.
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)?
I am less interested in the question of an overall moral position on such parents and more on the fact that these schools are almost certainly serving consumer demand in implementing all of this CRT, demand from the very same parents who, I am convinced, are afraid of letting their kids go to school with the Black kids CRT supposedly advocates for.
Fair enough! FWIW, I totally agree that they reek of bad faith.
I'm not so sure it's consumer demand. I think it's more just woke activists pushing CRT, then the great majority of parents (who actually don't want it) are afraid to speak out. In other words, just the standard takeover of an institution by the woke. Parents, even though they are paying the bills, have much less power in these situations that you imagine.
I once witnessed the head of school of an elite private school tell parents "if you don't like it, leave - we'll get another family tomorrow to fill your spot." Parents are quite cowed by that, especially if they are on financial aid.
And even if they're not on financial aid. Competition among wealthy families to get their kids into the perceived-to-be "top" schools is intense at all grade levels, starting with pre-K. The schools can do whatever they want with their academic programs, that's completely irrelevant to these parents, and usually the kids too: https://www.today.com/popculture/lori-loughlin-s-daughter-olivia-jade-speaks-out-candid-red-t202947
I don't think the private schools actually want it either. But they, in their turn, are afraid to speak out. And on it goes.
Maybe the reporting is skewed, but I don't get the sense the parents are demanding it. I think they are worried about objecting to it. It seems to be teacher driven, which is weird--teachers don't have a lot of control in private schools. I've written an article saying it's asymmetrical executation--that is, our silos are all melding together, and objecting to CRT in your public or private school could get you fired.
This is a salient point. And in no way, is the acknowledgement, and hostility towards, our general American anti-black racism going to make any parents of white families in cities where their kids are definitely in the minority, going to feel better when it's their kids getting their asses kicked in schools, either.
And then, when they've had enough and move them to "better schools" where their kids aren't miserable, they're the villains in the narrative.
How? Why? Because their progressive bonafides weren't as strong as their desire not to see their kids have a miserable childhood and a lousy education?
Seriously. What?
Are their kids getting their asses kicked in school or is this a hypothetical you dreamed up to make your argument seem stronger? Because from the research I have seen, smart kids from middle class families do well in whatever teaching environment they are in, so long as basic needs of safety are met.
Just as you correctly pointed out that my experience from the Bay Area is not generally applicable, neither is Providence RI a good example of most of the US. In most of the US there is a poorer urban center surrounded by wealthier white suburbanites who moved to the suburbs for the "good schools" while the urban school district has test scores similar to suburban schools for children in the same race and class demographic.
I think you’re making a good point; a lot of parents are afraid of the possibility of their kids getting abused, but it would be nice to have data on how likely this is. We do have data on expulsion rates, though, and it seems that black males are likelier than any other group to be expelled; this is often taken to be evidence of administrators’ and teachers’ racism, but I’m skeptical.
Guess what? When white kids are in a school where being a white kid is really different, and isn't cool? Just like in any other social dynamic in school, they're either the toughest or the toughest, or get their asses kicked.
And one's social and political left of center bonafides around ideal education policy tend to disappear in a hurry, even among blue city, blue state, upper income people with the most impeccable progressive credentials, when their (white) kids get the shit kicked out of them in public schools for being different.
But please, go on.
Strange I never got my ass kicked in school, even when I was in the extreme minority. It didn't happen when I lived in The Project in Southern California, it didn't happen when I lived in rural Wyoming or rural California either. You must have had the misfortune to live in an extremely violent area. And I am not a large or athletic person, or at least I wasn't when I was younger.
My mixed race kids go to SF public schools and are thriving. I know some white parents who are doing fine with that too. But yes, lots of whites pull their kids out, as I mentioned in another comment. I don't think it is because they got the "shit kicked out of them .. for being different." I think it is because they are racist.
Unfortunately I cannot find any studies of the likelihood of being bullied broken down by race, but perhaps you do. I would love to see some real data on this.
"You must have the misfortune of living in a violent area"
Well, yes, and regional culture plays a large part of that too. You didn't get your ass kicked for being different in CA or WY? Congratulations!
Come up to big cities in the northeast? Hey, look at that - Hartford, Providence, Bridgeport ,Newark and too many others to mention aren't Cheyenne.
Class differences rule, and race is the force multiplier, up here. If you didn't get your ass kicked for being a minority, great, but rest assured, it does happen, which is one factor (beyond shitty buildings, chronic teacher absenteeism, etc.) which causes literally anyone with the means to do so to pull their kids out of public schools.
Do you have any evidence other than assertion to back your claims?
Asses kicked, is not necessarily physical.
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.
You say they handle race well enough. What percentage of the faculty and student body was Black?
Approximately proportionate to the city’s demographics. I’m sure black students were more likely to be there on scholarships though.
And what are the cities demographics?
It’s Toronto. I believe it’s the most diverse city in the world.
That's great!
> 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.)
This is a good point, and we can distill it even further:
If you had the means and opportunity to send your kids to a place like that for a huge portion of your lives, would you? To what end? To have a progressive political flex, even at the price of your own children being miserable?
Get real - not even the tankiest of tankies are going to do that, because the overwhelming majority of parents who can make these decisions love their kids too, and don't want to put them in any danger to prove a point to someone else.
This fantasy than people do or should persists on Twitter (well, of course, right?) but not really in the real world.
Exactly. Everyone with resources keeps their kids out of that school. Black parents included. (Believe me, it’s not just white parents who frantically apply for magnet schools when their kids reach 8th grade.)
Of course, the result is that neighborhood schools like this one are in a downward spiral. Only poor and low-achieving students remain. Enrollment keeps dropping, and the school will be closed or merged with another school eventually.
Why would I send my child there when I have options? One additional kid won’t stop the enrollment spiral. And even if it did, parental instincts override liberal guilt every time.
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?
I'd ammend: they hate poor white trash more than they hate poor blacks, at least in my experience. The attitude to poor blacks is "they can't help it, poor dears", which is its own sort of racism, but nothing like the vitriol heaped on poor whites. Nobody would dare say a word against blacks, even veiled; poor whites are commonly mocked in open conversation.
If we’re talking Dalton, it’s the rich openly mocking the upper middle class.
The evidence does not support your claims that we do not live in a fundamentally racist society. There is anti-black prejudice in the criminal justice system, in banking, in real estate, in education, in medicine, in government and many other systems. This has been well documented by research.