The Problem We All Live With, Pt. 2

Finally listened to part II of the TAL feature on school segregation. Another compelling episode, this time focusing on the challenges of realizing integration given the current legal and sociological climate.

The part at the end, about the insufficiency of Race to the Top's "compensatory" model for school turnaround, didn't seem consistent with the rest of the feature, though. Take the Hartford segment for example: the story insisted that minority students in the magnet schools thrived because of the influx of resources. From the transcript:

"And if [the magnet schools] stop meeting the quota [of white students], they don't get money. If they don't get money, they can't create new schools to reach more kids. In fact, the magnet schools that already exist will lose the money that makes them such great schools. The stars will stop shining in the planetarium."

If that's the takeaway from Hartford--a connection between money and being a "great school" that could not be any more direct--am I wrong to see it as self-contradictory to close the show by condemning a program that has given unprecedented financial assistance to high-poverty, high-minority schools? Instead, the hosts dismiss the approach:

"And it's more comfortable to say that it's not an issue about racism. It's just an issue about high poverty schools that need help and need more money and need more resources."

Good Schools

This article, together with last week's episode of This American Life, heartbreakingly demonstrate how the words "good schools" usually work as nothing more than coded language for segregationists. In both cases it's very clear from white parents' responses that their idea of what made their schools "good" had absolutely nothing to do with anything educators were doing. In my experience, people usually don't back up what they mean by "good schools," but when their preferences are revealed:

"The role of race in choosing schools was so pronounced that parents actually put their kids in lower-performing schools rather than enroll them in a higher-performing school with large numbers of minority students."

The Troubling Ways Wealthy Parents Pick Schools