July 8, 2007
Choosing to End Segregation
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
Over the past few weeks, events have conspired to place race squarely at the center of the debate over public education in the District of Columbia. After appointing Michelle Rhee the first ever Chancellor of District Schools, Mayor Fenty found himself faced with a barrage of criticism and innuendo from the Washington Post drawing attention to the fact that she was not black, and neither were three of Fenty's other key appointees. Hardly had the ink dried on the latest Post piece when the Supreme Court, feeling its conservative oats, decided against integration policies in Louisville and Seattle, calling into question the future ability of school systems to generate mixed-race classrooms where the forces of poverty and history have left concentrated black communities stranded amid a larger sea of affluence.
The intersection of the news stories prompted the Post’s Colbert King to write this week about the dual challenge facing Mayor Fenty and Chancellor Rhee: not only must they face down decades of rot, inefficiency, and neglect, but they must also make sure that success in the resulting school system serves the current—and overwhelmingly black—student population. If instead they simply wait for the forces of gentrification to move to the eastern edge of the District, whitening the schools in the process, then they will have failed. It’s a damnably hard problem to take on; not only must Fenty and Rhee bring to heel the most reluctant bodies in the city’s bureaucracy, they must also struggle against the economic tide sweeping the city. They must somehow successfully educate students of all backgrounds while managing to keep poor families inside a city where the value of space continues to rise.
King's column cites a number of arguments made by Justice Stephen Breyer in his dissent, including that, “black children from segregated educational environments significantly increase their achievement levels once they are placed in a more integrated setting,” and, “black alumni of integrated schools are more likely to move into occupations traditionally closed to African-Americans, and to earn more money in those fields." These points hint at a larger truth underlying the debate over education and policy in the District. That is, the problem is not necessarily that our schools are insufficiently integrated, it’s that our communities are insufficiently integrated, and no matter how hard we fight for affordable housing or against neighborhood change, until children of poor neighborhoods can participate in the local knowledge economy, they will continue to find themselves under pressure from new settlement by richer households. We cannot simply integrate our schools; we have to integrate our neighborhoods and our economy.
Picture taken by hey-helen.
During the era of segregation in America, centers of black population were often home to vibrant cultural and economic communities, such as those along U Street and H Street here in the District. The end of segregation allowed black families with the economic means to do so to move out of those places and engage in society at large. This was an unqualified victory for liberty, but the departure of the best off members of black communities led to the decay of inner city neighborhoods, a process which took off in earnest as regrettable urban renewal schemes gutted social networks and concentrated poverty in public housing projects. The result is that decades later, many black Americans have still not been able to engage fully in society and the economy. They remain in the void, suffering from neglected institutions and attracted into the shadow economy of the drug trade.
It is unreasonable to expect better schools to undo this situation at a stroke or in a single generation. But without a quick fix, the changing demography of the city will render better schools in D.C. meaningless for current students.
But what if, instead of just working to improve schools while redevelopment of neglected areas moves eastward, we could also assist poorer families who’d like to move west out of their current neighborhoods and into areas that already have better schools and local neighborhood economies? That is just what presidential candidate John Edwards is proposing; he has suggested that the Department of Housing and Urban Development abandon public housing projects in favor of affordable housing creation amid mixed-income neighborhoods along with a massive public housing voucher program that would enable willing families to move to areas with better schools and local job markets.
There is considerable debate about how effective such a program might be, but, to quote the New York Times, “most experts — not to mention anybody who has ever spent time in the projects of the Bronx or Boston — believe that finally dismantling the 1960s experiment in warehousing the poor can only be a good thing for the people who live there.” It would no doubt be best for the District, for financial reasons if nothing else, that such a program be administered on a national level. Barring that, a regional program would be highly advantageous (if extremely unlikely), given that the suburban areas surrounding the District have some of the best public schools in the country, and that the process of suburbanization contributed strongly to the decline of urban neighborhoods.
Still, such a program for the District alone might prove helpful. The difference in education outcomes between schools in Northwest Washington and elsewhere seems indicative that the environment in which one lives and attends school can be significant. Though they’re part of the same struggling school system, the relative success of students at high schools like Cardozo, Banneker, Bell, and Wilson stands in sharp contrast to outcomes at Springarn and Eastern, Anacostia and Ballou. Banneker, one of the most successful District high schools, is hardly a model of integration--the student population is 90 percent black—but the neighborhood around the school is far more diverse than that around Ballou, in the heart of Ward 8. School choice policies in D.C. make it difficult to draw a direct connection between housing location and the school attended, but the geographical split in outcomes does make the point worth considering.
In fact, it might be time to do away with school choice in the District in favor of a policy of neighborhood choice through housing vouchers. Not only would such a policy allow the city to address the inherent inequities of the sharply contrasting racial makeup of its eastern and western halves, but it might also strike a real blow at the persistent pathologies of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where poor jobs lead to poor options, which lead to poor choices and poor environments. Paying for the program shouldn’t be difficult. Millions of dollars will ultimately be spent--and made--developing underused land in the eastern portions of the city; the rights to develop that land should be contingent upon contributions to affordable housing funds, from which vouchers could be paid.
There is no getting around the fact that 40 years after the great victories of the Civil Rights movement, many blacks remain segregated away from society by economic forces as powerful as the evils of Jim Crow. There is a divide between the east and west of our city, we need to eliminate it, and we cannot do that simply by waiting for the displacement of those in the east by those in the west. We shouldn’t stop working for the improvement of long neglected parts of the city, but we should also work to open up the entire city to those who wish to take advantage of its opportunities.
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The Supreme Court is established expressly by the Constitution to administer the Constitution. No where in the Constitution is 'diversity' or 'multiculterism' refered to. It is a 'progressive' ideology and nothing more. It is as simple as that. No 'liberal progressive', say in Cleveland Park or Chevy Chase, remotely wants to wake up and find their 'ideological principle' living next door. They only demand laws to administer their ideology and propaganda on others. Do you think their bubble kids go to public schools!!? Not for me but for thee! It's the liberal motto. Diversity,multicultural, illegal alien Amnesty, social welfare, Smoking Bans, Trans Fat Bans are their programs. They don't go to bars, need illegals to cut their grass, bubble kids go to private schools, don't even know what trans fats are. There is also no such thing as a successful 'progressive' idea or program. They have all been complete and total failures in our history. "Don't do as I do, Do as I say"is their mantra.
why not just replace the now unconstitutional policy of using race as a factor in where a kid attends school with socioeconomic factors? Right now, doing that would still accomplish the same goal of integrating schools without ignoring the fact that poor white/latino/asian children would also benefit by attending these "better" schools
I don't see the point in artifically transplanting kids from one school or another just like I don't see the point in section 8 housing. The only correlation I've seen with it is to extend the borders of high-crime areas and ive the city more problems to deal with.
Uh, a lot of liberals are pro immigration reform and a lot will acknowledge hiring illegals. So at least in that aspect you need to get off your tired 'liberal'-bashing if only for a moment, so you can rest up and go at it again, I suppose.
As for there being no successful progressive programs, I'd say ending slavery, ending child labor, and giving women the right to vote were pretty successful, all things considered.
Ryan,
Thanks for taking these issues seriously enough to write this column. You rightly point out that a regional program of affordable housing is unlikely (especially since New Jersey has tried something very similar for the last two decades with very mixed results. See http://zmagsite.zmag.org/oct2002/burzio1002.htm) So how can we create diverse neighborhoods, racially and economically, without this kind of massive program?
I'd say it's already happening in the suburbs. The District has a rich/poor divide: it's getting so you either have to have a huge income or qualify for subsidized units. But out in lots of MD and VA housing is considerably cheaper and schools are more integrated and successful (which Breyer at least thinks go hand in hand).
So, as long as we're talking vouchers, a voucher in MD goes further than a voucher in NW. It's not just that rent is cheaper--you're also getting better schools and services. Better value for each voucher dollar. We should at least consider that it would be easier to help people into housing that already exists in school districts that already succeed than to reform the bureaucracy of the schools and housing department both at once.
I realize that DC can't spend its own money to help people move out of the city. But I think too often we think of ourselves only as DC residents, not residents of a region, and assume it's best for everyone to stay inside the borders. If we want real diversity in the city, we should look beyond those borders. Helping people with lower incomes to move to better off but still affordable areas increases economic diversity and, due to our history of economic segregation, racial diversity in new communities. Integration in other places doesn't seem to me less important than integration in DC.
Of course we need to fix the schools in the city and help people train for jobs and guide development to create those jobs. But in the meantime once people aren't trapped in one place, whether it's a block, a neighborhood or the boundaries of the DC schools, new opportunities might open up for them and their families.
There's a lot of ridiculous rhetoric in this piece, but the overall idea of viewing the resources of the region as one whole is quite sound.
Yes, economic forces are often a huge impediment to good schooling, etc. But I find it hard to feel sorry for people that have been poor in DC for forty years and are in their third generation in public housing.
DC area residents have stunning resources easily available to them, including a very good transportation system (by and large) and a near-constant demand for skilled, semi-skilled, and entry-level labor.
Yet many are still on public welfare forty years later.
Why?
It's not all 'the man'. It's sometimes the fault of the person not doing a damn thing to better themselves for forty years.
The suburbs already offer a much better deal for a very poor single mom. But many refuse to even consider trying to move. Instead, they subject their kids to hellish schools, streetcorners filled with crack sellers, and a home environment that has all the basics (plumbing, electricity, AC, etc..... a lot more than many other poor people in the world have), yet the Mom is ignoring the kids, etc.
Yet they won't consider even trying to move into the burbs, when that is often an option (either with relatives, with a job offer, etc.).
In fact, it might be time to do away with school choice in the District in favor of a policy of neighborhood choice through housing vouchers.
Nice idea, except for the fact that fewer and fewer landlords are accepting housing vouchers in DC. The process started under the New Deal of "rehabilitating slums" in DC (i.e., bluecollar working neighborhoods in SE and SW) proceeded through the Great Society highrise poverty storage boxes that eventually became the squalid crack dens of the 1980s. Today, they're gone, replaced by Tunetown condos and office complexes. The former residents are scattered to the four winds; those who made something of themselves made Prince George's County the riches majority African-American suburb in the Nation. Their less fortunate neighbors were left to fend for themselves, but hey, see you next Sunday at Shiloh! I'll be the one double parking my Chevy Suburban. So much for uplifting the race.
But it's not just a black thing. The current generation of poor urban professionals and DINKs will also take what they need and when they get sick of the costs and hassles of urban life, they too will pack their Samsonites and get the hell out, only to make way for yet another generation of transients. What we've seen is that, given the opportunity, most middle class families (regardless of skin color) will opt out of DC as soon as they can afford it, and for the same boring damn reasons: cost of living, schools, crime.
Until DC manages to stop rivaling Mos Eisley for the Most Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy Award, look for more of the same migration patterns.
Thanks for another worthwhile Sunday read, Ryan.
Guest #1: There are plenty of people, myself included, who would rather do than say. It's sad that you don't see that. It's ironic that you "say" you don't. What is it, exactly, that you do? I mean, besides talk. 'Cause if it's nothing, you're a hypocrit.
Guest #1: It's exactly this sort of nonsense that sabotages real reform in this country. Every time a good idea gets any kind of traction, it only gets implemented halfway because blowhards like you come along and start spewing transparently self-serving balderdash about "mushy-headed liberals" and "big government programs." But God forbid you should ever come up with any ideas of your own--that would be progressive, and we don't want to ever admit that we have real problems in this country. Meanwhile this sort of rhetoric has become so widespread that even the notion of reform--toward integration, toward income equality, toward universal health care, toward anything better than what we have right now--becomes something to sneer at, the victim of retrograde cynicism.
You touch on something that many entrenched factions don't want to admit: it is not about race, but socio-economic status. If one were to enact policies which reflected this, many of the race-bating politicians would be up the creek sans paddle.
HOUSING VOUCHERS?!
That is the most insane thing I've ever heard of. That's all well and good when one refers to renting a place, so that people can afford to rent in other areas, but in areas like MtPleasant, we saw 5 group houses sell and one returned to condos while 4 were sold to young couples or families. Please explain, therefore, how we could have anyone purchase a house on vouchers?
I have a friend who worked herself out of the ghetto thanks to the Panthers. She has 3 siblings who never got out. She gave money to her brother to pay for her niece's college but the money disappeared and the niece came asking in the spring. She has a sister who lost her house to foreclosure without asking for a dime- she mistakenly thought you couldn't be thrown out of a house you owned. She has another sister whose house is always in need of serious repair, such as a leaky roof or nonworking toilets.
Those stories are very real. One cannot force home ownership on individuals who are incapable of maintaining their house. Rental vouchers are a great idea, but how does that create integration? At least the majority of kids I knew at Wilson who weren't white in the 1980s rented apartments. So you give people vouchers to be able to rent in buildings in white neighborhoods where they already live in buildings. What the hell kind of sense does that make?
My father once told me a story. A con man he knew in the Army came back from Korea and worked at the Pentagon. He would put down "earnest money" on houses in Arlington. He was black and this was the end of Jim Crow. He would drive up in a fancy car, duded out to the max on a saturday with his friends and "stink up the place." The next week he'd have an offer $5000 more than he paid for the house and he'd transfer the earnest money to the new buyers and walk away without actually buying anything. $5000 in the late 50s was insane money. He'd try the con again in Alexandria or Falls Church. I can't vouch for the authenticity of the story, but once someone buys a house on a voucher, wouldn't they be able to sell it immediately and pocket at the least the $5k or $10k they had from the voucher.
The only solution to this problem is gentrification. Only when the permanent underclass leaves the city, will the city be saved. Government can't do it, they have had decades and billions of dollars to try and have failed.
There is no inherent right to live in Washington, DC. If you can't afford to live in DC, then you have to find somewhere else to live. I can't afford to live in Beverly Hills, that's life.
It makes sense that the most desireable area (in the city, close to work, close to the arts, dining etc) should be the most expensive. That is the market at work. People that for whatever reason can't afford to live in DC can find somewhere that fits their budget. It might be an inside-the beltway city in PG County, or further south into Maryland.
The result of all this will be a city filled with highly educated, successful, interesting people. The type of people who can appreciate all the city has to offer and who can contribute to the city. Once that happens, you will see real change in the city. Crime will drop, the schools will improve (parental invovlement will play a major role), the quality of the city's leaders will improve (educated professionals won't vote for people like Marion Barry or Sharon Pratt Kelly) and better leaders will clean up city government.
The good news is that this is happening already in DC. It has already happened to a large extent in New York, SF and other cities.
The future and the city belong to the elites.
We earned it.
I agree with above guest(p.s. your new posting system is a drag). How are you going to encourage people to get with the program of a free market liberal democracy which allows you to strive for what you want at a price, when you keep making exceptions for certain people?
Also, with regard to education and integration. African-Americans broadly speaking are the only ethnic group in the nation that did not come to the continent as a function of their own free will and imagination. They are the group most associated with the dominant society's injustices and brutalities. As a result they have an almost entrenched RESISTANCE to standardized academics.
The purpose of public education is not to make everybody a Rhodes Scholar or Math whiz. It's to socialize and edify a young mind to a level where they can maneuver and manage the institutions of the existing modern society.
Black (mass) culture seems to institutionalize bad-english, immoderate behaviour and antagonism to mainstream living. Again there are no absolutes and there are many examples of successful productive african-american men and women. But when you look at our criminal justice system, the large numbers of african-american "bums"(yes I said it) walking around surrounded by the plenty and progress of the day..generalizations are inevitable.
It makes sense that the most desireable area (in the city, close to work, close to the arts, dining etc) should be the most expensive... The result of all this will be a city filled with highly educated, successful, interesting people.
I take it you've never been to Rumors or Lauriol Plaza on a Friday night. I had to stop going though, all those deafening cellphone conversations that devolved into screaming matches about Leibniz and Wittgenstein and whether existence preceeded essence. I kinda felt left out; the crowd was far too successful and interesting for this poor monkey.
And kudos to Ryan for a discussion-worthy topic. Today's Post chronicles the continuing disintegration of the Section 8 housing voucher program. Does not bode very well for anyone wanting to expand it.
The future and the city belong to the elites.
We earned it.
I don't know what's funnier; the fact that this person thinks they're part of the "elite" or that think they have "earned" whatever few baubles it is they have.
He who dies the most self-satisfied wins, eh?
I keep seeing this "this is MY city" nonsense in the guest comments, and I'm going to chalk it up to them all being attributable to one very insecure, self-absorbed person, because the thought that there is some wave of crybaby wannabe new professionals is just too depressing to think about.
The whole point of racism is that different people are allowed access to different resources, and it may not even occur to someone TO "pull themselves up by their bootstraps," much less HOW to do so, and even less to find support in doing so. I think the point of integration is to level the playing field, and a number of recent studies have shown that when minority children attend majority white schools, their test scores rise to that of the other students in that school, so perhaps there's something about the environment that's making a difference.
This is not YOUR city, Guest #12. You don't "earn" your place in any space at the expense of someone else. It's the public's city, and as a member of the public, you can be here. And that goes the same for everybody else, so get used to it. Sheesh.
Not sure how the city doesn't win if an element of the population that isn't doing well moves out to do better somewhere else? DC has failed many blacks and there is no indication that they city will be able to help them. I would assume moving to another area might be a good thing for them. It couldn't hurt or be much worse than the state of things in the district.
Clearly, gentrification isn't moving fast enough! Guest #15 needs to elaborate on his/her "final solution to the underclass question." I wager that it involves re-activating the crematoriums so that that the body fat of said underclass can be rendered into candle wax, their skin into boutique lampshades, and their bones into nutritious animal feed. Only then will the rest of Northeast be made safe for the highly-educated, successful master race, their coffee shops, and tapas restaurants.
Barring that, we need to nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be SURE.
I take it you've never been to Rumors or Lauriol Plaza on a Friday night.
I myself was involved in a Rumors fracas last Friday. The instigant being the legitimacy of various translations of Wittgenstein's seminal work We're Halfway There (Living On a Prayer.)
I dream of a day in which the press and the people look at a candidate's EXPERIENCE not race when vetting their credentials.
Everett - You're obviously unfamiliar with the term "Lebensraum." Guest #12s "highly educated, successful, interesting" demographic needs living space. That space is the East Side of DC. If a few underclass people who are one paycheck from homlessness get shown the curb, well, you can't make an omlette....
Everett:
You are right. No one is guaranteed a right to live in a particular area.
Guest's statement was, well, almost unbelievable. In the strictist sense of the word.
But that attitude, while annoying, is probably considerably less routine than the equally anoying attitude that the habitually very low income non-working have an automatic right to live in certain areas either.
And the argument could be made that they actually have far less of a 'right' to that location than Guest does.
What's missing in this argument is the idea that we need to refocus on workforce housing. For decades now we've provided free housing only to the very poor who made such 'temporary' housing a three generation thing, while contributing very little to the city and usually costing the city far more in resources than they contributed. And somewhere along the way the idea that such an existence was a 'right' was born.
What we should have done was concentrated on reasonably affordable housing for those that actually work for a living.
But that wasn't fashionable.
"The future and the city belong to the elites."
Thats when I say Hello Germantown!.
Hillman - When Guest #12's "market at work" kicks in, DC's housing stock might just expand. That is, if enough of the "elites" were dumb enough to buy in on an adjustable rate mortgage.
And if we're going to keep this guest function, can we please take a cue from Slashdot and replace "guest" with "anonymous idiot?"
I appreciate the article Ryan, but I don't fully agree with the premise: namely that we're struggling to integrate our public schools. How many public schools in predominantly white neighborhoods are even majority white? Perhaps a handfull of grade schools like Janney, but surely no middle schools or high schools. There's already a good deal of black and hispanic integration in NW schools through out of district allocations. I believe that the reason the integrated NW schools are still outperforming the NE and SE schools has to do with the self-selection of students who take the step to apply for a spot at schools like Wilson, rather than remain in their neighborhood school.
The ironic thing for DCPS is that what is missing are the uppermiddle class (mostly white) kids. What's ironic about that is your reference to the Supreme Court. The case underlying affirmative action in schools essentially is based on the somewhat absurd idea that the purpose and legal justification of affirmative action is to provide a diversity for the benefit of the white kids.
I believe that a fundamental key to raising student performance is surrounding children with other students that are already performing well. Moving more kids around the NW isn't going to help much until we get more high performing kids into the system there. However, I'm not sure how that can be accomplished or whether it's even possible.
Housing Vouchers, universal health care, income equality is pure socialism. Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried. It's a 'progressive' pipe dream from the tin foiled hatted crowd. Low income people were suckered into buying homes under the subprime market. They have seen their barely affordable mortgage payments go from $1300 to $2300 a month. The foreclosures that will result will drop all of them back unto the street in another year. Watch everyones property values plunge then. You cannot substitute a dream for an income. The American Dream is for those who work and earn it and owning a home is not a right for anyone of any color. Socialism is a liberal mantra and does not work anywhere. You can't afford it you don't get it!
Thank you, monkey, for handling guest number 12. I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not in comment 15, but that is an interesting article on Section 8 housing. The lesson from that, I think, is that we can't expect private property owners to provide affordable housing out of the goodness of their hearts. If we want affordable housing, we have to work within the economic realities of the city. It will be expensive to provide vouchers for apartments renting at market rates, but it could very well be worth it.
Hillman, do you believe that many of those living in chronically poor neighborhoods would not move if given the chance? Of course, if that is the case, then a housing voucher program would be cheap, but I'm not sure I agree with you.
Reid, you make some excellent points. I do think that more white and wealthy kids will find their way into the public school system as facility improvements take place and as neighborhoods in NW continue to get whiter. There are significant Latino populations in a couple of NW schools, but most, including most in NW, are heavily black. I don't know that housing vouchers will help integrate schools or improve school performance. I was more making the point that segregated classrooms are rooted in segregated neighborhoods and economies, and that we can't properly address achievement gaps without fixing the physical separation of poor communities and the rest of the country.
Look, when market forces are at work, they're at work. You can't stop people from sending their kids to religious cultural schools nor can you stop them from sending their kids to top of the line prep schools where they'll mingle with the biggest achievers (and the inevitable lazy heirs). Not giving people that choice is crazy.
That said, the comment about the elites taking over the city isn't crazy at all. It's happening in our neighborhood where almost every twentysomething newcomer is a lawyer, doctor or MBA. They refuse to have a long commute so they will buy property allowing them to live in the city. Is the problem the terminology "elites?" Well, maybe the issue is more of how you interpret the word than the word itself. I think elites are great, they achieve a lot and they will do my heart surgery when I'm 85. Other people may see the word and feel jealous that they aren't "elites." Well, grad school's calling you when you feel down.
Remember that all real estate is cyclical in some nature and the rise of the suburbs left gorgeous city houses almost dirt cheap (except Georgetown). Now construction of exurb slums means more cars on Route 7 or 50 than every before and the value of living in a big house far from work makes less sense. At some point telecommuting will shift housing. At some other point new developments will shift housing demand.
I am not eager to see the neighborhood I moved into change for the worse, I want it to change for the better. But all of us looked on in horror when a beloved restaurant closed and a laundromat opened. What the heck, we all grumbled, but it's often packed by people who aren't my friends. And that's all it is sometimes- there are people who want amenities that speak to them and a limited number of resources.
Essentially, while I believe that communities need to control businesses, it's unfair to say that if someone took the time to buy property that they can't use it for what they want within the law. No one gets to call me a gentrifier and I promise I won't lobby to shut down the pool hall that was here when I bought the place.
And if we're going to keep this guest function, can we please take a cue from Slashdot and replace "guest" with "anonymous idiot?"
Pretty please? With sugar and cherries on top?
FWIW, school demographics--not counting all the charter schools that are popping up:
Elementary schools with a plurality of white (non-hispanic) students: Key, Janney, Mann, Stoddert, Murch, Lafayette. All in the neighborhoods you would expect.
Middle Schools with white students: Deal (~25%), Hardy (~25%), Stuart-Hobson (8%), Francis (3%).
High Schools with white students: School Without Walls (25%), Wilson (22%), Ellington School of the Arts (9%), Banneker (2-3%). Wilson is the only non-selective HS on the list.
The rest of the middle and high schools have the occasional accidental white kid.
DCist Ryan:
Yes, I do believe that many will not move even if given the chance. For 30 years we've all known that you can get a lot more house and a lot better schools in the burbs. Yet we see very few of DC's continually poor making that move. And, no, it's not from a lack of resources. There are programs out there to assist in just such a thing, and a lot of suburban locales have agencies to assist, churches are available to help, etc.
I forget the context but there was a WP article not too long ago with the DC resident who summed it up quite nicely..... she had several kids and she lived in a crappy area of DC. She had the option of living with relatives in the burbs and putting her kids in a decent school and decent environment, but she chose not to. Why? Because she liked the vibe in her DC neighborhood. So she very selfishly sacrificed her kid's future because of her desire to live in a very specific ghetto-style environment.
And these people are being used to score cheap political points about keeping DC 'chocolate' and about poverty programs in general. Very rarely will you ever hear a DC politician acknowledge the obvious - that the schools in the burbs are way better, the job opportunities for low skilled labor abound both here and in the burbs, etc.
No, instead we pander.
Pretty please? With sugar and cherries on top?
It would help me if we could have the guest comment color modified, it is really hard to read the light gray on my work screen, especially on a contentious issue like this one. And yet to follow the conversation, I cannot just skip them. Perhaps we can turn off that gray as a choice.
"I do think that more white and wealthy kids will find their way into the public school system as facility improvements take place and as neighborhoods in NW continue to get whiter."
But how much whiter can Georgetown get? Yet Hardy still only pulls in only 25% white students. The neighborhood around Wilson could not possibly be whiter or richer.
I think the only way you'd get white upper-middle class kids to go to a school like Wilson in high numbers would be to create a sub-school system, allowing the neighborhood total control over the schools within it and the ability to fund it with specific property taxes. And yes, the ability to restrict the number of out-of-district students. This is certainly not the most equitable means of bringing in more upper-middle class kids, but I think it would be the most, if not only, effective means.
Most NW upper-middle class residents feel no ownership over the schools in their neighborhoods because they are mostly run for the benefit of people outside of their neighborhood. It's sort of a chicken and the egg. Wilson will continue to be filled from people outside of Ward 3 so long as people from Ward 3 don't send their kids there because it's filled with kids from outside Ward 3 because...
I think creating a Ward 3 school system that provides local control and funding commensurate with the ward's wealth (a mini-Montgomery County school system, let's call it) would break that cycle. Whether that's a desirable outcome is the question.
Hillman - Actually, with the local real estate market imploding, A LOT of those low-skilled labor and construction jobs are drying up. Good news if you're in the market for a house in the next 18 months (as adjustable rate mortgages go up and the market "corrects"), bad news if you build houses. Look forward to tax increases as local governments try and compensate for those declining revenues. You didn't expect them to actually cut entitlements, did you?
Reid, that's kind of what I was getting at by suggesting that the District reduce its school choice policies and focus instead on neighborhood choice.
If you look at the region as a whole, isn't this precisely how the Fairfax school district (or MCPS) is differentiated from the DC public schools?
That's just the (evil) way our system of national public schooling works.
Good news if you're in the market for a house in the next 18 months (as adjustable rate mortgages go up and the market "corrects")...
As long as you're not waiting for the single family home market in the District to come crashing down. We've been hearing a conflation between the regional market and the DC market for like three years now.
Ryan-
If you had kids would you send them to a DC public school?
I cannot think of a worse environment for my child than that, and as a result I am forced to move to MoCo.
~anonymous idiot#1
I think the larger issue regarding residential segregation is that people want to live with people who are like them. White people and black people both. More than a decade of opinion polling supports this point, people of both races insist that they are willing to live in "diverse" communities, but when pressed on what percentage of folks should be like themselves, people almost universally respond with 70 percent. That's well and good, but its also a massive collective action problem. If I want to live in a neighborhood where 70 percent of the people are black like me, but 30 percent are white--well the white people ALSO want to be with 70 percent of their own kind...and so you see the problem.
Additionally getting more white people in NW is not going to solve the problem. The schools in NW are by and large not white. I live in NW, in a neighborhood that is probably about 25 percent white and my neighborhood school is 100 percent black. Why is that? The kids grow up in an integrated neighborhood, but the schools still aren't. It hasn't solved anything (and the school is still failing the kids).
I wouldn't say the real estate market is imploding. It's dropping some, which was to be expected. But not imploding. Houses are still selling, new developments are still being built.
And the backlog for unskilled and semi-skilled construction trades isn't in the months - it's in the years. There will be a huge demand for all types of labor in the DC area for pretty much ever.
Even in residential construction slows there's always office construction, which will be a constant in the growing DC area.
My concern with many of the proposals and suggestions made in the article and comments is how difficult social experiments are. Clearly public housing did not work. An entire generation or two forced into substandard housing and living in ghettos. Busing probably had a similar negative effect (how can sending a kid halfway across town on an hour or so bus ride be good for them?).
While, vouchers seem to be a good idea on paper, there is certainly a question of whether or not they will have a positive effect in the end. Plenty of studies have seemed to indicate that when people are given the choice, they tend to live with like people (race, age, monetary value, religious beliefs, political affiliations, etc.). You can argue about whether or not this is a good thing but it seems to be the way most people behave. I have serious questions about whether vouchers can help that. Perhaps, instead, it only ends up meaning the lower class get a lower rent payment, not necessarily a bad outcome if that is the intention, but it probably would not solve the intention of the program.
"Reid, that's kind of what I was getting at by suggesting that the District reduce its school choice policies and focus instead on neighborhood choice."
Well OK, but I think that more financial and adminstrative independence for the local schools is necessary before upper-middle class families will send their kids to DCPS. It comes down to a fundamental distrust. Ever since home rule, the DCPS have been a tool used to benefit politicians and their friends both rhetorically and financially.
All this said, I support Fenty's takeover, because I think it may help disadvantaged kids, but I doubt it will do much to attract the well-off ones.
Anonymous Idiot #1
I do have a kid who will be in DCPS in the next school year. The elementary school I'm in boundary for is something like 65%/35% out of/in boundary. Last I heard, there were something like 21 primary languages spoken there.
Not that the building is pretty to look at, but it has and has had good leadership, and a lot of private resources been applied toward reading, math, sports, and music programs. The neighborhood has applied private and public resources in a way that has cared very well for the school over the years. The test scores and child development reflect both neighborhood involvement, and the diversity of the student population.
There are other good DC elementary schools besides the ones mentioned above. Of course there are good ones in MoCo, too. The key in DC is that people work and sacrifice to make them good.
As for the whole subsidized housing automatically equals ghettos thing, I think the focus on this is because much of it is government owned, and so the government has more (blunt) tools to change it. Think Garfield Terrace, Sursum Corda, and Park Morton. But there are plenty of neighborhoods without mass housing projects that are (or were) ghettos. And the government has fewer direct tools to address those. Think "Columbia Heights East", areas of Petworth, and certain parts of Shaw. I'm just saying government supplied housing does not necessarily equal ghetto, though mixed income communities that spread out benefits and costs seem best to me. Actually, I don't really think either wealth or poverty should be concentrated. That's how we end up with gated communities on one hand (even if de facto), and blighted communities on the other.
I wanted to move to MoCo. I looked at houses. I couldn't find any as large as my DC house without spending $1 million or living well past the beltway. I have friends who bit the bullet. The moved to a neighborhood in northern Silver Spring, they bought a smaller house, they found out that in their MoCo school over 75% of the students were ESL aka not English speakers and the parents who could get their kids out, got their kids out because it was non-functional.
I think people without children who try to talk about what they would do when they have kids don't know what they're talking about. The decisions one makes (public vs private school, city vs exurb vs $1 mill suburban house) are ridiculously hard. I knew a woman who moved to PG County to escape the violence of Northeast and now wants to move back to northeast to escape the violence of PG County. I have another friend who witnessed a machete attack in Arlington who moved to NYC to get away from Latin suburban gangs. Anyone who thinks suburban schools don't have these problems doesn't have kids in suburban schools. Do you think that the new immigrants are living in Penn Quarter or along Route 1? Are they living in Georgetown or Rockville? Are they living in Spring Valley or Fairfax County? Come back to reality and stop spouting 20 yr old crack war statistics.
What happened is that during the postwar era we had good, cheap public schools and we don't now.
Another thing my girlfriend reminded me of was our friend S. He and his wife bought a house in a great neighborhood with great schools and 10 years later found out that the principal who was great in 1991 was a lazy jerk in 2001 and the school was terrible. So the decision was, do they move from a house they loved because the local principal wasn't working?