One of the takeaways from Glennon Doyle’s Untamed was the difficult-to-distinguish line we walk as parents between sheltering our kids from difficulties they can’t yet manage and allowing them to develop resilience through disappointment and struggle. A mantra in her house has become, we can do hard things.
I have been using it a lot with my kids these past couple of months. I said it to them when we were riding bikes at the Great Highway and the wind was whipping sand into our faces, assaulting our eyes and mouths. I said it when we were hiking up a very steep, long hill, and my kids wanted desperately to just turn around and head back. I said it when my daughter was crying that Typing Club was too hard because she never felt like she was getting better. I said it when my son complained that he couldn’t practice handwriting because it made his fingers hurt. I’ve said it a lot lately.
I said it to myself on Sunday night when I scheduled Monday’s post to publish. I repeated it over and over as the day wore on and I wondered what kind of response the post would get. I said it Monday night when I thought about what kind of follow up I would post.
I know it might not seem like much to put up a post like that, but it felt scary at the time. I used to entangle myself in all kinds of unnecessary blog drama, but I am not in the business of writing intentionally controversial posts anymore. At least I haven’t been for a while. So putting that up felt scary; I have been berated by a great many privileged parents who have no interest in recognizing their part in perpetuating inequality. But as I said at the end of that post, if white people aren’t doing things that make them deeply uncomfortable they probably aren’t doing anything meaningful to confront their privilege and combat white supremacy and systematic racism. But there is good news.
We can do hard things.
I appreciate the conversation we had in the comment section below that post. These are hard topics and I certainly don’t have all the answers (or any answers?). I did a lot more reading on the topic of school integration, and specifically if white parents should send their white kids to struggling schools, as a way to promote equality. Here are some of the articles I found, which look at this topic through different lenses, focusing on different data and experiences. Some of the articles seem to assert contradictory conclusions, but that is the nature of most research that attempts to parse out the myriad variables that can affect something as nebulous as “academic achievement.”
Thank you for reading, and asking yourself these hard questions. If, as you read through these articles, you find immediate relief or disbelief in an idea or assertion, I hope you’ll think hard about what possible bias is being supported and or challenged. All humans cling to data and arguments that support our beliefs, while easily discarding that challenges our assumptions. Now, more than ever, we need to do better. We mustn’t squander the momentum of this movement to thrust us into uncomfortable spaces. If not now, when?
We can do hard things.
My White, Northern liberal friends who like to compare themselves favorably to White conservatives may be surprised by a new report from brightbeam (the parent organization that sponsors Chicago Unheard), which shows that the 12 most politically progressive cities in the U.S. have significantly larger achievement gaps in reading, math and high school graduation than the 12 most politically conservative cities. Many of those conservative, gap-closing cities are located in the southern part of the U.S., while the high-gap cities are concentrated in the North.
White People: Here’s Why Moving to a “Good School” in a “Good Neighborhood” Is Racist
Overall, white, advantaged parents appear to be measuring school quality by how many other white, advantaged parents send their children to a given school, said the Harvard report. Integrated schools are seen as educationally inferior, even as, paradoxically, parents recognize their value in the abstract, said Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at the Harvard graduate education school and a study co-author.
White Parents Say They Value Integrated Schools. Their Actions Speak Differently
No one says “I don’t want to send my kid to a Black and Latino school.” They don’t have to. Although the data on test scores, race, and class is endlessly complex, the district — and GreatSchools.com, the site that appears at the top of every online search about every school in the nation — has boiled it down to a simple set of numbers. The school I visited that day is ranked at the very bottom of the scale; another school six blocks away is ranked 8 out of 10, and has won multiple prestigious awards. Its student body is 60 percent white.
The Truth About ‘Underperforming Schools’ That Parents Don’t Want To Admit
It turns out that the kindergarten teacher who advised me was probably right. Several decades of research studies have examined the impact when higher-performing students attend class with much lower-performing students. The bottom line is that the test scores of higher-performing children do indeed suffer in this kind of scenario.2 ¶ Interestingly, however, the same impact is not observed when the ability difference between children is modest. The test scores of higher-performing students grow with nearly the same trajectory regardless of whether they’re in class with other higher-performing students or with students whose performance is middling.
Do High-Performing Kids Suffer When They’re in Low-Performing Schools?
And then let’s get one thing straight: White families are not doing families of color a favor by deigning to attend—and helpfully “improve”—their quaint, struggling schools, and Black and Latino families are not doing you a favor by adding a splash of color to Junior’s classroom.
White Families You’re Not Doing My Kids Any Favors By Sending Your Kids to Our School
For instance, Malcolm Gladwell’s recent Revisionist History podcast discussing the damage done to African-American children by Brown v. Board of Education, made me think of my African-American father-in-law. ¶ He grew up in Virginia under Jim Crow and, to this day, laments desegregation. “It ruined our Black schools,” he tells me. “They took the best Black teachers away.” Gladwell addresses the decimation of the Black teacher corps in his podcast, and the value of teachers of color is covered here.
Do Dual Language Programs Keep The Language of Privilege From Kids Who Need It Most?
For one thing, policymakers and scholars across the political spectrum are beginning to realize that ignoring the social science research on the negative effects of concentrated school poverty is not working to close large achievement gaps between races and economic groups. Diane Ravitch and Michelle Rhee—who represent opposite ends of our polarized debates over education reform—have both recently advocated new measures to promote school integration to raise the achievement of disadvantaged students.
How Racially Diverse Schools and Classrooms Can Benefit All Students
But here’s the thing: The academic and social advantages white kids gain in integrated schools have been consistently documented by a rich body of peer-reviewed research over the last 15 years. And as strange as it may sound, many social scientists—and, increasingly, leaders in the business world—argue that diverse schools actually benefit white kids the most.
3 Ways White Kids Benefit Most From Racially Diverse Schools
On average, students in socioeconomically and racially diverse schools—regardless of a student’s own economic status—have stronger academic outcomes than students in schools with concentrated poverty.
The Benefits of Socioeconomically and Racially Integrated Schools and Classrooms
Over the last 40 years, efforts to desegregate schools have largely been undone and intra-district programs have limited scope to stem the resulting rise in segregation. This is thefirst paper to study the short-run and long-run impacts of aninter-districtdesegregationprogram on the minority students given an opportunity to transfer to majority-white schooldistricts. Students who are given the opportunity to transfer districts attend schools thatare 73 percentage points more white than schools they would have attended. Transferringstudents have higher test scores, and, over the longer run, an increase in college enrollmentby 8 percentage points. At the same time, there is an increase in special education classifi-cation and arrests, which are largely for non-violent offenses. Both the benefits and the risksof the desegregation program accrue to male students.
The Risks and Benefits of School Integration for ParticipatingStudents: Evidence from a Randomized Desegregation Program
Sixty-five is the typical age of retirement in this country, and on this 65th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, segregation desperately needs to retire. Retire the myth that we tried integration for a long time. Retire the misconception that it just didn’t work. Retire the fallacy that desegregation is no longer relevant. Today, America’s schoolchildren are more racially and ethnically diverse than ever, yet half attend schools in which more than three-quarters of their peers are of the same race. Indeed, classrooms around the country are as segregated now as they were before Brown.
Why school integration works
Thank you for reading. Please include links in the comments if you find more to contribute to this conversation!
I know all these studies say high-performing kids do fine. And I kind of believe it.
But there’s a lot more to this than how well they do on standardized testing. I put my kid in one of Washington DC’s lowest-performing elementaries for preschool, and it was fine. But as the years went on, the behavior problems in the cohort became worse. The classroom was more and more chaotic. Some of the behavior problems were from other high-income kids, but the school wasn’t handling any of it effectively. The teachers tried to differentiate, but it was hard to provide a plan for her that was developmentally appropriate, because her reading level was out of sync with her attention span and other markers of developmental readiness. As more and more high-performing kids exited, she was spending a lot of time working alone, and it wasn’t good for her social skills. She enjoyed school less and less.
There were also cultural things like the amount of candy the school used to manage behavior, their reluctance to have outdoor time if the temperature was below 50 F, the idea that it was okay to watch Disney movies during instructional time, speaking very harshly to preschoolers, open celebration of Christian holidays exclusively, lots of cultural things. I went in prepared to compromise on all kinds of cultural issues, with the understanding that this is part of diversity. But there was only so much I could tolerate. It’s not just about the academic performance, it’s about quality of life and meeting the needs of the whole child.
The teachers were pretty good, but there was a big problem in the administrative staff’s incompetence, the lack of communications, poorly planned and chaotic events, lack of centralized planning, etc. And frankly, some rather scary incidents with parents getting into altercations with each other at the school. The after-school care was
Finally, there is the issue of feeder rights. Here in DC, people choose elementary schools because they want access to a better middle and high school. Staying at a low-performing elementary means foregoing the opportunity to lock in access to a minimally acceptable middle school. And elementaries stay low-performing because parents leave for this reason. Until the city can crack this circular problem, retention and academic performance in upper elementary will continue to be poor. People saying “do the right thing” tend to have much younger children– it’s rare to find someone who’s willing to stay the course past 5th grade or so.
I know that people will say the right thing to do is to work on your school. I spent several years with this PTA as my primary volunteer commitment, beginning a year before my child was of age to attend, and I truly feel that I gave it everything I could. But the problems were just more than could be overcome in time for my child’s education. I eventually moved my kid out, and I have a clear conscience about it. The more I volunteered, the more I learned about how fundamentally baked-in the inequities are and how incompetent the management is, all the way up to the top. And I came to see my prior optimism as naive. I ended up feeling that I was beating my head on a brick wall. So I get really frustrated when people say that going to your assigned school is going to solve things. I tried. I really, really tried. But the problems here go way beyond that, and it’s important that we be able to talk about it.
I will also say, if I haven’t already gone on too long, that what DID make a difference in this school is replacing the principal. The new principal replaced the admin staff, and took a much harder line on sloppy operations, making kids watch Veggie Tales while feeding them sugar, yelling at the kids, all kinds of administrative and cultural matters. Slowly but surely, middle- and higher-income white people began enrolling, even in the upper grades. Academic performance is still a problem, but is slowly improving.
The whole experience confirmed my believe that while it’s important to challenge people to overcome their own racism and be willing to enroll in lower-performing schools, it’s important to acknowledge all the reasons for the low performance and that not all of them are due to racism or inequity. Even if you could convince people to attend a low-performing for philosophical reasons, if the school is not actually of adequate quality, they won’t stay long. DCPS could be a lot more diverse, and a lot more high-performing, if it would fix its own internal dysfunction, and the systemic racism inherent in its own funding formulas. And people aren’t willing to make what they feel is a big quality of life and educational sacrifice for their child if they don’t think it will result in actual change, for the sake of propping up a fundamentally incompetent and racist institution. That’s why these discussions frustrate me so much. There’s so much more going on here than parental choice.
I totally understand where you are coming from. I also led the PTA for years and tried to make changes. I also felt like I was hitting my head against a brick wall and eventually recognized that the problem was too big for me to solve. And I will not be keeping my kid there in middle schools for the same reasons you articulated (though I am willing to have less chance of getting a different middle school by staying – our system also makes it harder for us to change since we stayed).
I also saw that when there were more affluent families it felt like things might change – small changes did happen – and when they all eventually left, and no more came in, it felt like it wouldn’t. I get that it’s not enough for a few parents to go to their “neighborhood” school, or a school that is underperforming, but if lots of families did it might make a difference. They might be more inspired to push for administrative changes or policy changes if they saw the issues that weren’t getting solved. I don’t know. Maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t know what the answer is, but I know it’s not for white people to just pick the better school and wash their hands of the whole issue because it works well enough for them.
Yes we need to fund schools more, and make teaching a profession that well educated people want to pursue. But even that doesn’t feel like enough. And I worry those things won’t happen if white people are happy enough where they are.
I don’t know much about CA, but here in DC I do think we’re seeing gradual progress system-wide, at least at the elementary level. Almost the affluent families in my child’s cohort are gone, but in the younger grades there are more than ever before. Why do you think no more affluent parents came in?
Of course, now it’s having gentrification and displacement of low-income kids who used to be able to get in from outside the boundary. Sometimes I wonder if I really did help, or just changed the situation from one kind of problem to another. It’s kind of a puzzle to create a school that has both racial and economic diversity, that stays diverse in the long run.
Also, maybe it’s different where you live, but here in DC there are high-income African-American parents and Asian parents, and they usually won’t touch the Title I schools. At the charter we go to now, there’s way more racial diversity than at the Title I, and there’s way more BLM and other progressive and race-related content taught. There are other non-charter schools that are majority-AA and well-performing. So I think the racial lens is just one part of the picture. It’s about poverty too, and childhood trauma. But also about management and test scores. We have a nearby charter Montessori with 25% white students and a low at-risk percentage, but the principal’s awful and the test scores are bad, so it’ll probably be shut down. Even having 25% white students is not enough if your management is bad, at least not in a dense urban area where people have multiple other choices.
Thanks for the links. I don’t have much to add but to share something I forgot to mention yesterday. We have few MAGAt parents, including one annoying dad who has the requisite truck with bigoted stickers (he marched in our 4th of July parade carrying a huge Trump 2020 flag). Anyway, his stickers include “build a wall deport them all.” Yet, he doesn’t live in the area for our school; he lives elsewhere in the district and obviously got his kid transferred bc our school is “better” (and probably also bc it’s more white) than the one that corresponds to his residence. I just look at him and think of how he’s apparently fine with keeping kids in cages and against desperate families trying to make a better life for their families, but he has no problem “immigrating” to our school to benefit *his* kid. What hypocrisy.
Thank you.
So much.
For the courage.
For the information.
For the help. For YOU.
Just wanted to say thank you for these posts, I have the discussions really thought provoking.
*found