"We're a bit naive and were expecting schools to be perfectly integrated and diverse cauldrons of social progressivism. However we were disappointed to discover that in the real world, many white parents value high academic standards over politically correct diversity. It's hard to balance our ideals with the real world."
They say that having a family is what stabilizes society and anchors people to the system. It causes their values to shift from the left-leaning idealism and progressivism of youth to a more moderate and centrist view that we must do what's right for our children. This writer appears to be in the midst of this shift, his gratuitous characterization of the President as a "white supremacist" notwithstanding.
1. Counterexample: if I were to become an arms dealer I should have more money with which to educate my children.
It is not narcissistic to give nonzero weight to the greater good. Inevitably one attempts to achieve that by implementing the conception of the greater good to which one subscribes.
2. The author strictly speaking isn’t doing what you call narcissistic, and doesn’t seem to be advocating that either. What is noted is that the result of many parents’ seemingly individually innocuous actions is an overall injustice. The author does not send the child to the worst school mentioned and does not therefore prioritise “ideology” over children. Moreover the author is not saying that this is the obviously correct course of action to take. It is merely noted that to take this course of action is part of a collectively regrettable pattern.
There's a big difference between using your own children to grandstand about your personal political beliefs, and choosing to sell arms to known violent criminals (which is, I presume, what you mean by "become an arms dealer").
> an overall injustice.
An injustice done to whom, by whom? I understand there are tragedies of the commons, but it seems to me that charitable giving or basic activism will solve the tragedy better than some misguided idea that you should weigh a perceived social good (the specific kind marketed to you by activists in the school system) above a known affinal good; and this can be accomplished without lowering the standards for your own children's education.
I get that the differences in level of funding in a catchment/district sometimes seem unpleasant, but I don't see how they're unjust.
To me it seems this is akin to lying to your children to make strangers more comfortable. You have no obligation to do it, and your kids now have the right to resent you. If it's a legal obligation, that's maybe another matter, but as of now there is (in most places) no law stating that people from a given school district should send their tax money to a different school district as a function of their means; and most states don't impose serious restrictions on how the district/catchment boundary lines are drawn.
"Wealthy homeowners had the resources and the motivation to put time and money into their neighborhood schools; good neighborhood schools in turn attracted other wealthy homeowners.
In her New York Times piece, she described the story of P.S. 8, in Brooklyn Heights, which had for years been a mostly black and Latinx school with low test scores, neglected by well-off parents in the neighborhood who opted to send their kids to private schools.
The school clearly prided itself on being both integrated and successful: the leadership of the school was black but the students who helped with the tours were black and white, as were the PTA representatives who led the tours.
As our zoned school was four blocks east of the more successful school I had just visited, so PS 1 was four blocks east of our zoned school.
The school to the east was the just choice; the school to the west was intriguing but out of reach; our zoned school was the laziest choice, though in this case there was a virtue to laziness, in the sense that it mimicked the situation of someone who didn't have six or seven mornings to kill touring schools.
A white couple we knew was mostly happy with their under-resourced school in Bed-Stuy, because it was close and friendly; a black couple we knew was mostly unhappy with their under-resourced school in the same neighborhood because their son was being shown too much TV. Yet another couple we knew had their kids in a school where the bathrooms weren't all working."
> But eventually this second generation of school gentrifiers started pushing the black students out. [..] Gradually those students and their parents began to feel less welcome at P.S. 8. It is still more integrated than the Park Slope schools, but it is at 59 percent white students and rising.
Could this be applied to white students as well? I.e. they leave minority-white schools because they "feel less welcome"?
The sentence you skipped in your quote seems particularly relevant to the question you're asking: "Why should their kids be in class with a child who had serious behavioral problems, because, for example, he lived in a homeless shelter, or because he had seen violence in his home?"
So if the same conditions arise (i.e. classmates with serious behavioural problems), race aside, it's absolutely possible that this can be applied to any students.
>After the election to the presidency a few months later of a white supremacist
This is why skimming is important. It gives you a rough idea of what the author's voice, style, and opinion are; from that you can determine whether you want to invest the time to read the article in full.
“So interesting to see “Progressive” Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly......”
“....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came...”
This is from the president. If telling four non-white American Congresswomen to go back where they came from isn’t white supremacy, then holy hell what is?
Would you please not take HN threads further into political flamewar? Feeding a bad comment by replying to it is against the site guidelines. If you wouldn't mind reviewing them, we'd be grateful: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't understand this:
"We wanted to try to do no more for our child than other people were doing for theirs, because that was bad for both parent and kid, but we felt guilty doing too much less."
They seriously are _trying_ not to do more for their children than others?
So, since one of the criteria they mentioned in the article was the percent of students on the free/reduced cost lunch, will they start underfeeding their child because most of their classmates are probably undernourished?
They want to do everything they can to make their child succeed, and also feel bad that the opportunities their child has are not available to other children because of those children's socioeconomic status
Someone can have two conflicting opinions at the same time.
Everything in the world is not black and white, or all or nothing. Different things can have both good and bad parts that go with them.
This is a good article about a deep problem, but one side point up front jumped out at me:
> Once I began to see the schools, of course, I could not unsee them. I realized how much of life—and by life in this case I mean real estate—was organized around them.
It goes meta as well: JFK was shot by an assassin who had set up in a schoolbook depository. Yes, not only do the schools themselves take up a lot of space but simply looking after the textbooks requires a large physical plant!
Despite the fact that pretty much everyone attended a school and the majority of people have kids who did so at some point, school spending is a small percentage of overall GDP (and tiny proportion of federal spending), and is, as the article points out, distributed and spent in an ad hoc fashion.
If the majority of students in a school were black, the writer describes the school as diverse. If the majority of students were white, the writer described the school as not diverse. I would assume if one race makes up the majority of a school's population, it indicates a school lacks diversity. It's interesting the writer doesn't choose to see it that way.
As a white person who went to NYC schools where white people were the minority, the issue was never so much race as it was the economic differences. I think white middle class people (like this writer), have a very removed perception of minorities and the poor. They may feel pity and want to help, but they do so in the safety of their middle class position. They do not judge the poor as they would a person in their same economic position, but rather give them the brand of the oppressed and fail to acknowledge them as equals (though they believe wanting diversity is good enough). As a kid going to one of these schools--you are equals. Whatever violence, conservatism, and ignorance that pervades these communities will now be part of your life. And yes, while it's a faux pas to criticize the poor for being any of those things, going to those schools made me a part of that life as anyone born into it. I could be beat up like anyone else for wearing the wrong color shirt, yelled at for believing being gay was anything less than a sin against god (or that Jews were anything but less than human). I could watch my teachers relegated to tears as kids would take turns calling him a "fagot". I would learn to fight like everyone else to keep my bus pass, and stay away from the kids with knives in their bags.
Brooklyn isn't as bad as it used to be, but if your kid is in a classroom where the teacher spends half the time dealing with the kids acting out their behavioral issues--their education will be stunted. If the writer feels it's worth the risk for cultural integration, than that's his prerogative, but he shouldn't judge parents for wanting what's best for their children (and no going to a poor school isn't what's best for your kid--maybe it's better for society--but not your kid).
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] thread"We're a bit naive and were expecting schools to be perfectly integrated and diverse cauldrons of social progressivism. However we were disappointed to discover that in the real world, many white parents value high academic standards over politically correct diversity. It's hard to balance our ideals with the real world."
They say that having a family is what stabilizes society and anchors people to the system. It causes their values to shift from the left-leaning idealism and progressivism of youth to a more moderate and centrist view that we must do what's right for our children. This writer appears to be in the midst of this shift, his gratuitous characterization of the President as a "white supremacist" notwithstanding.
It is not narcissistic to give nonzero weight to the greater good. Inevitably one attempts to achieve that by implementing the conception of the greater good to which one subscribes.
2. The author strictly speaking isn’t doing what you call narcissistic, and doesn’t seem to be advocating that either. What is noted is that the result of many parents’ seemingly individually innocuous actions is an overall injustice. The author does not send the child to the worst school mentioned and does not therefore prioritise “ideology” over children. Moreover the author is not saying that this is the obviously correct course of action to take. It is merely noted that to take this course of action is part of a collectively regrettable pattern.
> an overall injustice.
An injustice done to whom, by whom? I understand there are tragedies of the commons, but it seems to me that charitable giving or basic activism will solve the tragedy better than some misguided idea that you should weigh a perceived social good (the specific kind marketed to you by activists in the school system) above a known affinal good; and this can be accomplished without lowering the standards for your own children's education.
I get that the differences in level of funding in a catchment/district sometimes seem unpleasant, but I don't see how they're unjust.
To me it seems this is akin to lying to your children to make strangers more comfortable. You have no obligation to do it, and your kids now have the right to resent you. If it's a legal obligation, that's maybe another matter, but as of now there is (in most places) no law stating that people from a given school district should send their tax money to a different school district as a function of their means; and most states don't impose serious restrictions on how the district/catchment boundary lines are drawn.
"Wealthy homeowners had the resources and the motivation to put time and money into their neighborhood schools; good neighborhood schools in turn attracted other wealthy homeowners.
In her New York Times piece, she described the story of P.S. 8, in Brooklyn Heights, which had for years been a mostly black and Latinx school with low test scores, neglected by well-off parents in the neighborhood who opted to send their kids to private schools.
The school clearly prided itself on being both integrated and successful: the leadership of the school was black but the students who helped with the tours were black and white, as were the PTA representatives who led the tours.
As our zoned school was four blocks east of the more successful school I had just visited, so PS 1 was four blocks east of our zoned school.
The school to the east was the just choice; the school to the west was intriguing but out of reach; our zoned school was the laziest choice, though in this case there was a virtue to laziness, in the sense that it mimicked the situation of someone who didn't have six or seven mornings to kill touring schools.
A white couple we knew was mostly happy with their under-resourced school in Bed-Stuy, because it was close and friendly; a black couple we knew was mostly unhappy with their under-resourced school in the same neighborhood because their son was being shown too much TV. Yet another couple we knew had their kids in a school where the bathrooms weren't all working."
Could this be applied to white students as well? I.e. they leave minority-white schools because they "feel less welcome"?
Why wouldn't it be the case as well? Racism knows no race.
So if the same conditions arise (i.e. classmates with serious behavioural problems), race aside, it's absolutely possible that this can be applied to any students.
This is why skimming is important. It gives you a rough idea of what the author's voice, style, and opinion are; from that you can determine whether you want to invest the time to read the article in full.
“....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came...”
This is from the president. If telling four non-white American Congresswomen to go back where they came from isn’t white supremacy, then holy hell what is?
So, since one of the criteria they mentioned in the article was the percent of students on the free/reduced cost lunch, will they start underfeeding their child because most of their classmates are probably undernourished?
They want to do everything they can to make their child succeed, and also feel bad that the opportunities their child has are not available to other children because of those children's socioeconomic status
Someone can have two conflicting opinions at the same time.
Everything in the world is not black and white, or all or nothing. Different things can have both good and bad parts that go with them.
> Once I began to see the schools, of course, I could not unsee them. I realized how much of life—and by life in this case I mean real estate—was organized around them.
It goes meta as well: JFK was shot by an assassin who had set up in a schoolbook depository. Yes, not only do the schools themselves take up a lot of space but simply looking after the textbooks requires a large physical plant!
Despite the fact that pretty much everyone attended a school and the majority of people have kids who did so at some point, school spending is a small percentage of overall GDP (and tiny proportion of federal spending), and is, as the article points out, distributed and spent in an ad hoc fashion.
As a white person who went to NYC schools where white people were the minority, the issue was never so much race as it was the economic differences. I think white middle class people (like this writer), have a very removed perception of minorities and the poor. They may feel pity and want to help, but they do so in the safety of their middle class position. They do not judge the poor as they would a person in their same economic position, but rather give them the brand of the oppressed and fail to acknowledge them as equals (though they believe wanting diversity is good enough). As a kid going to one of these schools--you are equals. Whatever violence, conservatism, and ignorance that pervades these communities will now be part of your life. And yes, while it's a faux pas to criticize the poor for being any of those things, going to those schools made me a part of that life as anyone born into it. I could be beat up like anyone else for wearing the wrong color shirt, yelled at for believing being gay was anything less than a sin against god (or that Jews were anything but less than human). I could watch my teachers relegated to tears as kids would take turns calling him a "fagot". I would learn to fight like everyone else to keep my bus pass, and stay away from the kids with knives in their bags.
Brooklyn isn't as bad as it used to be, but if your kid is in a classroom where the teacher spends half the time dealing with the kids acting out their behavioral issues--their education will be stunted. If the writer feels it's worth the risk for cultural integration, than that's his prerogative, but he shouldn't judge parents for wanting what's best for their children (and no going to a poor school isn't what's best for your kid--maybe it's better for society--but not your kid).