GAPS AND SEGREGATION: Scrooge to the west Texas town of El Paso!

THURSDAY, MAY 10, 2018

Part 4—The Schools of America Present:
Should Mayor de Blasio refer to New York City's schools as "segregated?"

Should he say that some of the city's schools are even "intensely segregated?"

It's pretty much as you like it! In our view, use of the historically fraught term creates a tremendous amount of heat, tends to swallow the light. As an example of what we mean, consider the apology which occurred in New York City last week.

In Mara Gay's essay in last Friday's Times, she said de Blasio tends to avoid use of the term when discussing Gotham's schools. This seemed to be one of the ways the backsliding mayor has refused to "fully come aboard" in the effort "to do the best for all our kids"—has failed to "see the light."

By way of contrast, Richard Carranza, the city's new public schools chancellor, is inclined to use The Word. After reporting de Blasio's reluctance, Gay gave us someone to root for:
GAY (5/4/18): One person with a different view is the man Mr. de Blasio just appointed schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, who last week retweeted video of the angry Upper West Side parents first captured by NY1.

While calling Mr. de Blasio “a true champion in diversity,” Mr. Carranza said: “I’ve looked at issues of segregation. I’ve looked at issues of integration. I’m just not changing my language because I’m in New York City.”
So strong! Carraznza, a good decent person, does use the historically fraught term in the current context. He also had to apologize for last week's retweet.

Gay didn't mention this fact in her essay. One day before, Elizabeth Harris had reported the "partial apology" in this 1200-word news report.

Carranza's a good decent person. De Blasio is the decent person who appointed him to his current post. Almost surely, the flap which led to last week's "partial" helps explain why de Blasio, a politician, is disinclined to "see the light" concerning use of The Word and concerning the somewhat inane desire to help black and Hispanic kids escape "intensely segregated" schools—schools which are only 9 percent white—in favor of the integrationist ideal—schools which are 15 percent white, with the higher-achieving 15 percenters often being taught in advanced classes which may be largely white.

(In truth, the schools would likely end up 13 percent white as parents moved kids into private or parochial schools to avoid the three-hour subway rides required for full "integration." Some kids would even be smuggled out of the city to live with feeble grandparents in Maine, complete with heartbreaking midnight hand-offs at the New Hampshire border. Stephen K. Bannon will shoot the film within weeks.)

That's how the "integration" ideal would look in New York City. Perfervid pursuit of this curious ideal strikes us as the latest sign of the mammoth indifference, bordering on contempt, which the New York Times has long displayed toward low-income and "minority" kids nationwide.

The paper's indifference has only been matched by its astounding incompetence. We'll float a bit more on that topic tomorrow. For today, let's consider one other way in which de Blasio refuses to come aboard.

It isn't just that the backsliding mayor is reluctant to utter the S-bomb. By inference, he may be refusing to "see the light" when he makes statements like this:
GAY: One person who hasn’t fully come aboard is Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has supported local integration efforts but whose citywide plan, released last year, is unambitious and entirely voluntary, allowing districts to opt in.

Mr. de Blasio refuses to use the word “segregated” to describe the city’s schools. And while the Supreme Court ruled 64 years ago in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools are inherently unequal, the mayor says schools whose students are almost entirely black and Latino can provide a good education “as long as the resources are there.”
Good lord! In the face of the Brown decision, the backsliding mayor will even say this:

Schools whose students are almost entirely black and Latino can provide a good education!

What kind of person would say such a thing? Is there nothing this mayor won't say as he fails to come aboard?

For ourselves, we'll only repeat what we said yesterday. Good decent people, including us liberals, need to hope, even fervently pray, that the mayor's statement is right.

We say that for obvious reasons. There are many school districts, all over the country, which can't really hope to match The Gotham Ideal, in which black and Hispanic "lucky duckies" would get to eat lunch in the same room with classmates who are as much as 15 percent white.

In many other districts, even that absurd ideal would be unattainable. That would include the Detroit Public Schools, whose student population looked like this (grades 3-8) when Professor Reardon conducted the recent study on which the glorious Times incompetently reported:
Student population, Detroit Public Schools
White kids: 3 percent
Black kids: 87 percent
Hispanic kids: 9 percent
Asian-American kids: 1 percent
Fiery pseudolibs, go ahead! "Desegregate" that!

Detroit's is one of the nation's big school systems which is almost all black and Hispanic. The district has been a gruesome under-achiever, but here's the lowdown on Chicago, whose system has been getting good press of late in the Times:
Student population, Chicago Schools (#299)
White kids: 9 percent
Black kids: 43 percent
Hispanic kids: 44 percent
Asian-American kids: 4 percent
Desegregate that! And when you've done that on a school-by-school basis, what do you think each school's classrooms will look when you consider the punishing gaps Reardon found within this very large system?
Where the average student stood
Chicago, Grades 3-8, reading and math

White kids: 1.4 years above grade level
Black kids: 1.6 years below grade level
That's probably by the start of sixth grade! After you've "integrated" the schools, what will the classrooms look like within the schools? Or do you think that all those kids should be taught the same "sixth grade math?"

(In case you think we're cherry-picking, Reardon reported a much larger gap in the DC Public Schools, whose white kids tend to come from high-income, high-education homes. The gap in DC was 4.9 years! So go ahead! Integrate that!)

Is it a masterful good idea to "integrate" New York City's schools? Or is it the sort of thing the indolent liberal may tend to do in an attempt at "stolen valor"—in the pretense that we're walking in the footsteps of Mrs. Parks and Dr. King?

We'll tend to ride with the latter construct, but for now, let's return to de Blasio's claim. Here's the question under review:

Is it possible to run good and great schools if the kids are all—ugh!—black and Hispanic?

We'd better hope it is! Consider an unusual flight we took last night.

Last night, we took the mystic's night flight of the soul, accompanying Dickens' well-known character, Scrooge. We took him to one of our largest states to see who our children really are in The Schools of America Present.

The state to which we refer boasts five of the nation's twenty largest cities, along with several others which aren't far behind. We flew to quite a few cities last night, considering the kids in each one.

As we flew over the famous streets of Laredo, we didn't spy that many "poor cowboys all wrapped in white linen and cold as the clay." (To enjoy the old ballad, click here.) But as we peeked through the city's windows with Scrooge, we did spy a students body which, Reardon said, recently looked like this, grades 3-8:
Student population, Laredo Independent School District
White kids: 0 percent
Black kids: 0 percent
Hispanic kids: 99 percent
Asian-American kids: 1 percent
In Brownsville, it wasn't much different. Brownsville, Texas, that is. We weren't in Brooklyn any more!
Student population, Brownsville ISD
White kids: 1 percent
Black kids: 0 percent
Hispanic kids: 98 percent
Asian-American kids: 1 percent
Unless the kids in those cities don't count, we'd better hope de Blasio's right about what can be done in their schools.

Laredo and Brownsville are smaller cities. How did it look in the larger cities of this unnamed very large state?

We went to Houston and Dallas and San Antone. Acording to Reardon, here's how the large Dallas school system looked, grades 3-8:
Student population, Dallas ISD
White kids: 4 percent
Black kids: 26 percent
Hispanic kids: 68 percent
Asian-American kids: 2 percent
San Antone was even "worse;" 97 percent black and Hispanic! Meanwhile, the famous "west Texas town of El Paso" is no longer a west Texas town. It seems to be one of our twenty largest cities.

(To hear Marty Robbins praise Felina, you can just click this. Also, good for him!)

In The Schools of America Present, El Paso's kids are served by four school districts. On balance, we'd say that the former town's kids, grades 3-8, are about 92 percent black and Hispanic. Let's face it! By Gotham pseudo-liberal reckoning, there simply aren't enough desirable kids to make a good school possible!

All in all, we'd better hope that de Blasio's right! Otherwise, what hope do we have for the good decent kids in school systems like these?
Student population, Birmingham, Ala.
White kids: 1 percent
Black kids: 96 percent
Hispanic kids: 3 percent
Asian-American kids: 0 percent

Student population, Jackson, Miss.
White kids: 1 percent
Black kids: 97 percent
Hispanic kids: 1 percent
Asian-American kids: 1 percent
These situations exist widely. We stopped by "The City That Makes" on our way home last night:
Student population, Trenton, N.J.
White kids: 2 percent
Black kids: 61 percent
Hispanic kids: 35 percent
Asian-American kids: 2 percent
We know what you're thinking! Because our lizards never sleep, we're already dreaming of vast suburban/urban busing/magnet schemes to being our children together! In the same lunchrooms!

Our lizards never sleep! But while we play these reindeer games, kids are going to school today, and they'll do so again tomorrow. Their younger siblings will start kindergarten this fall. Is it possible that the Times could send its high horses out to pasture long enough to wonder about how those kids can be served?

The answer to that, quite plainly, is no, and that's been the plain answer for many long years. Except to the extent that they can be used as tools for our self-referential dreams, the liberal world quit on these kids a long, long time ago.

Tomorrow: The New York Times, baffled by Reardon's gaps

30 comments:

  1. Somerby hints at the logistical problems involved when parents do not want to send their kids to more integrated schools, or when white kids (or minority kids) need to be redistributed among schools. It it difficult to address this segregation problem without considering the underlying housing patterns.

    Yes, there are restrictions on housing and informal redlining still exists, but beyond that most people tend to self-segregate when picking where to live. In the Los Angeles area, parents of minority children who move to suburbs or to more mixed neighborhoods have better educational outcomes for their kids. This is more feasible than most people think. While moving for a job is common, moving to find better schools never seems to occur to parents.

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    Replies
    1. I think that it occurs to parents all the time, in my experience.

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    2. But they don't value their kids' educations sufficiently to move?

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    3. Sure. Picking up and moving...no big whoop....
      For many people, moving is either impractical or even impossible.

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    4. That's right, you move whenever you can't pay the rent. So why not move for your kids' sake? The people who can't move easily are homeowners.

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    5. [QUOTE] Distinguished law scholar Elizabeth Warren teaches contract law, bankruptcy, and commercial law at Harvard Law School. She is an outspoken critic of America's credit economy, which she has linked to the continuing rise in bankruptcy among the middle-class. Series: "UC Berkeley Graduate Council Lectures" [6/2007] [END QUOTE]

      LINK

      [38:14] [QUOTE] The next [slide] is to disaggregate a little bit more about housing, we talked just a little bit about it before. [The slide] doesn't fit perfectly with what I'm talking about because the years aren't quite right, this is some government data I found. It only goes back to 1983, but notice what it shows, that increase in housing costs, what families are paying for mortgages [inaudible], [the government] has done it the other way around, what they're paying for the house itself, what the cost of the house is.

      We saw a 50% increase among families with no children, inflation adjusted in what housing costs, but you'll notice with among families with children it's a 100% increase, a full 100% increase in inflation adjusted dollars for what a home costs for families with children.

      Now we're going to save plenty of time here for Q & A because I think that's more fun than having to listen to a lecture. But I'll tell you how I read this chart: families are buying schools.

      People without children don't have to buy schools and so they buy from a wider pool of homes. They can look at a lot of homes in a lot of neighborhoods.

      Families with children are buying what they believe is a shrinking resource, that is places where you can have decent public schools and send your children to public schools. And, in fact, we can triangulate these data in other ways so that, you'll love this, I was going to say it has an only outside Boston [tendency] but I bet it happens outside Berkeley, [but] we just have the data for outside Boston.

      A five point increase in third grade reading scores between two side by side municipalities in the Boston suburbs -that are otherwise matched for access to public transportation and size of the houses, they've matched them for everything, sidewalks, crime rates, racial composition, everything you want to look at- five points in third grade reading scores translates into tens of thousands of dollars of difference in housing prices.

      Parents are buying schools. There was a great one out of San Diego, a study out of San Diego where they were having parents do preferences on where they would buy. Parents would rather live near a toxic dump than live in a place where they thought the schools were underperforming, where they thought their children would not have as good of a chance in school and that's a large part of what we're seeing here. So parents are saying I've got to have those good schools, I've got to get out there, I've got to push, I've got to get forward. They're spending more as we've talked about, so what happens to them when they push this hard?

      Well there comes in just a little touch of what I want to talk about with the safety net, what's happened to the American safety net for these families. Well the first part is the personal safety net, the part you build yourself. We've all ready looked at the data on that, less savings, more debt, more people without health insurance than we've ever had before... [END QUOTE] [There's more]

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  2. "Our lizards never sleep!"

    Where can I find me one of those lizards?

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    1. In the reindeer games section of your local pet store. But check inside your own head first to make sure you don't already have one.

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    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. Asian (think Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos Sr.)

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  4. "We know what you're thinking! Because our lizards never sleep, we're already dreaming of vast suburban/urban busing/magnet schemes to being our children together! In the same lunchrooms!"

    Yes, that's exactly what they're thinking. This is as much about punishing whites as it is helping non-whites. It's obvious when you study their actions and ignore their high-minded rhetoric.

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    Replies
    1. " ...punishing whites ...."
      One of Richard Spencer's spawn.

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    2. Yes, there is a move to punish whites, particularly in some colleges. Here's a brief snippet, but see more at the link
      Today’s college administrators increasingly frame diversity and inclusion as lessons that must be learned by whites alone—and they’re lessons that too often unfold as interventions that force whites to regard themselves less as full partners in diversity than an obstacle to be overcome so that other constituencies might thrive.... and syllabi confirm the prevailing view of whiteness as something of an anachronistic disease that, like cholera, has no place in modern life.

      A tale of two coasts: New York’s Hunter College promotes coursework for poli-sci majors in “the abolition of whiteness.” Stanford examines “abolishing whiteness as a cultural identity.” Elsewhere, to cite just a few examples, classes at Grinnell and UW-Madison confront “the problem of whiteness.” New Mexico’s St. John’s College takes on the “depravity” of whiteness. Moreover, academic theorists crusade to purge whiteness from STEM courses, because critical thinking and research are regarded as tools of “white hegemony.”

      http://quillette.com/2018/05/10/room-diversity-white-people/

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    3. Here's an interesting black and white incident:

      https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-White-Student-Called-the/243395

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    4. Note how a nothing event was blown up into a national scandal. If I were asked to show my student ID, I would simply show my student ID. The matter could have ended right there. But, for whatever reason, Lolade Siyonbola, didn't show her ID as requested.

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    5. "Note how a nothing event was blown up into a national scandal."

      Scandals should be about important things. Like Obama putting dijon mustard on his sandwich.

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    6. Here's another "snippet" from David's anti-diversity go-to website:

      "It’s tempting to snicker at snowflake culture, with its noisy campus gauntlet of trigger warnings, microaggressions, and in-your-face privilege-checking—but transpiring quietly off-stage at academia’s administrative levels is a far more sinister phenomenon undertaken in the name of one of society’s more theoretically desirable goals: diversity."

      Salerno sneers at the liberal snowflakes while boo-hooing poor "white culture." Project much?

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    7. Where did Sarah Braasch get the right to tell Lolade Siyanbola, "You cannot sleep in that room."? Where did she get the right to block Jean-Louis Reneson from visiting Siyanbola?

      After the cops figured out what was going on, they agreed with Siyanbola, not Braasch.

      By the way, I agree that Siyanbola should have shown her ID immediately, but that wouldn't have ended the incident. Braasch's arrogance still had to be dealt with.

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  5. It's wonderful how people will take great effort to put something free on youtube. I love Bob's linked version of "El Paso".

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    1. What Marty Robbins didn't tell you is that the Mexican girl was an illegal immigrant drug mule who got deported by ICE. And the men who killed the singer? Just good guys with guns.

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    2. Perhaps El Paso was still part of Mexico in that time period. Otherwise he wouldn't have been chased down for killing a Mexican rival in a bar.

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    3. "To hear Marty Robbins praise Felina,"

      The cowboy doesn't praise Felina. He says her eyes were wicked and evil while casting a spell. Obviously she was fickle too even though she gave him a good-bye hug at the end.

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  6. Somerby objects to the idea of integration without explaining why it might not work in those areas where it is demographically possible.

    He still says nothing about how he would suggest fixing the achievement gaps.

    And is Somerby using the term "magnet" ("suburban/urban busing/magnet schemes") in the way that people normally do when they talk about "magnet schools?" They are schools with specific curriculum emphasis and provide additional choice for parents. Does Somerby object to them as he seems to here, calling them "schemes?"

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  7. "Is it a masterful good idea to "integrate" New York City's schools? Or is it the sort of thing the indolent liberal may tend to do in an attempt at "stolen valor"—in the pretense that we're walking in the footsteps of Mrs. Parks and Dr. King?"

    Why the attitude about this? If it is possible to integrate to any extent, that seems like a positive thing to do, for many reasons. Why mock the people who support this?

    Next Somerby will start referring to liberals as social justice warriors who are making decisions emotionally and virtue signaling. If we want that kind of attitude, we know which blogs to find it at.

    When someone swings wildly from left to right, I suspect brain damage of some kind, a new girlfriend he may be trying to impress, or a payoff in rubles. What is Somerby's damage?

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    Replies
    1. If it is possible to integrate to any extent, that seems like a positive thing to do, for many reasons. Why mock the people who support this?

      Because it's not possible to any extent in many places.

      When someone swings wildly from left to right

      How long have you been reading TDH? He's been remarkably consistent on this issue for years.

      Delete
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