I didn't spend any time figuring out why, but I disliked SkippyJon and immediately trashed them. Glad to hear you don't like them either.

That site makes me squirm. I still remember a Berkeley Parents Network post by a (middle-class?) African-American parent who moved to Richmond and was told by lots of well-meaning non-black peers that the schools were just fine even if they didn't look good on paper. The point of the post was basically to say: what the fuck is wrong with all of you? That school is terrible. I would like my kids to go to a school that isn't terrible; now, where might that be?

My kid goes to her district school, which is apparently one of the most diverse schools in California (lots of immigrants, no group has anything like a majority). The district has been gentrifying like crazy, but there are still a lot of families who bought homes here when it was affordable and (in theory) have a choice about where to send their kids. So I think it's somewhere between the pity schools* described in the OP link and the privileged schools where our daughter might be "expected" to go (in practice I think no real person expects this). I'm not sure what would lead me to send her to a school with fewer resources than this one. I'm conveniently skeptical of white do-gooder-ism on a case-by-case basis, but I also feel that this limited neighborhood school is good enough academically and invaluable socially: kids don't seem to sort themselves by ethnicity, although the white kids stick together to some degree and I imagine kids who speak the same home language will hang out for obvious reasons.

Also, walking to school is fabulous. If I had to carpool every day to the school on the hill... god.

* squirm, squirm, squirm

I still remember a Berkeley Parents Network post by a (middle-class?) African-American parent who moved to Richmond and was told by lots of well-meaning non-black peers that the schools were just fine even if they didn't look good on paper. The point of the post was basically to say: what the fuck is wrong with all of you? That school is terrible. I would like my kids to go to a school that isn't terrible; now, where might that be?

Wait, but I'm not sure where the contrast is. A newcomer to a town might well look at a school and think, 'no yoga, unimpressive test scores, where can I find a good school?' To which a very appropriate response is 'dedicated teachers, reasonable principal, serving the local kids, doesn't have middle-class markers, but it is a perfectly fine school.' Why doesn't that seem like they were responding to her concerns? Was she reporting from experience that the school was terrible (but she had just moved in)? If not, then people saying 'our experience was that it was fine' is a good response.

Pretty sure it was after their kids had been in the school for some length of time, maybe not a full year.

This is a big decision for us. There's a public charter that is quite popular with most of our peers, and for which the Calabat's charter kindergarten is a feeder school. There are the local elementary schools, which are very near our house and were our first choice, except the district is probably eliminating the gifted program and maybe consolidating some of the schools so they can't tell us which our school would. And complicating matters further is that the Calabat is precocious, and I don't want him to start school hating it because it's boring, and the religion thing. The public school will be full of people who won't play with our kid because we go to the wrong church. The charter is our tribe, and I hate that I'm thinking like this.

except the district is probably eliminating the gifted program

This is illegal! It's quite likely a debate about "pushing in" vs "pulling out" gifted content? which can be executed in good or bad faith, to be sure.

Our school has undergone an odd transition which is partly a function of gentrification but partly a function of it being recognized as "good" despite lower test scores. When our first kid started there it was Title 1 which meant a high enough population of low income that all kids automatically got free stuff and you had the benefits of class diversity. It's bilingual which means they're supposed to give lottery preference to four groupings- native English or native Spanish, and high or low income. There wasn't really a wait list when we started but now it's very popular and the native Spanish kids are usually professional class immigrants (professors, businessmen, etc.) Also now a lot of kids can also pass the placement test for going into either the native English or Spanish bucket (we could have pulled this trick to get our youngest in but it wasn't necessary because siblings automatically get preference). So because it's "good" higher income people use whatever tricks to get in and the economic diversity is gone even though it's supposed to be balanced.
There's no question we're going to the public HS- it's pretty diverse (40/30/15/10/5 white/black/Hispanic/Asian/other) and per-student spending (district-wide, not just HS) is off the damn chart so they have programs and support for just about everything.

the Calabat is precocious, and I don't want him to start school hating it because it's boring

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this. I think lourdes' belief is that nearly any school will be boring, so it's pretty hard to avoid, but my daughter does complain frequently about how dull it is (particularly at the beginning of the year). This year has been better than the last two so far, though. I think if there were a viable free option for her to go to a more challenging school, I would have a very hard time finding good reasons not to take it.

I remember being so bored in class that I was crying and starting fights. I worry a lot about that for Steady, but am not sure what recourse there is. My experience is that even the gifted magnets weren't demanding enough, and that things fell sweetly into place when I went to the highly gifted magnet. But this city isn't big enough to have a highly gifted school, so.

If your kid is having trouble, they have to give them an IEP that meets their needs, which in my friend's case, meant bringing in a retired engineer to do math with their sixth grader.

What do I win? My peer group - that is, my neighbors with school-age kids who I know well enough to comment on here - is mostly white and yet mostly has their kids in the public schools around us. In some cases they're public charter schools, but still, public, and definitely majority-minority.

Atossa is at the school across the street. Literally, we walk by three rowhouses, turn the corner, and walk up one block to get to the entrance. It wasn't our very first choice, but she's only 3 and that level of convenience is worth a lot at this age. We're reentering the lottery next year, more in hopes of getting her into a dual-language immersion school than anything else. Cassandane has voiced a concern here and there about her school and I wonder a tiny bit whether she's being petty, but I'm not quite dumb enough to say so out loud. (I think she doesn't read this blog regularly...)

You win a cookie. But, in order to maintain the warm glow of self-satisfied smugness it represents, you have to give it to Atossa.

I wonder if I just didn't have much of a boredom mode as a little kid.* I spent most of school either happily daydreaming or unhappily ruminating, but on those relatively rare occasions when there was something genuinely interesting or challenging to learn, I think I was happier and more emotionally stable. I knew I had gotten labeled "gifted" and was good with language and shit; but being a weirdo even among weirdos was the dominant self-image. Daughter seems much more conventionally bore-able.

* The ability to be bored had certainly developed by adolescence and has been a daily blessing ever since.

The boredom thing is a problem, especially for us with Pokey who has a wildly low tolerance for downtime. However, here all the private schools and white-flight districts offer shittier pedagogy and they're filled with conservative families, so we get to bask in the schaedenfreude that they're actually worse schools in every important sense.

I meant to say: presumably boredom is equally bad at the whiter schools. They're not cutting edge group project everyone in a glass dome or whatever the latest fad is private schools.

White people are boring.

11: Like hell. We're relatively consistent about the rules for junk food. Dessert is a reward for eating her dinner. She doesn't have to eat if she's not hungry (don't want to teach her to stuff herself, right?), but if she wants dessert, she has to eat her dinner, and not after she's already in pajamas trying to delay bedtime but when Mommy and I are eating. Left to her own devices she'd never touch dinner unless it was fruit (which is good, of course, but can't be every meal) or pasta.

Albany is between Richmond/El Cerrito (part of the same district when I was a kid) and Berkeley and it's one of those places where schools are thought to be good, and they certainly weren't bad, but Berkeley was the better high school clearly. I went to Albany for middle school and Berkeley for high school but had Albany friends as a basis for comparison.

This comment is 20+ years out of date.

We're logistics-driven. The default school, our city "neighborhood" school (about half a mile walk away) is more convenient than any private schools in the area could be, certainly once you grant that there will be no driving to school. The student population there is 55% white, which is my most obvious metric, and is middling for the city - the other schools range from 18% to 72%.

The fractured peer group thing is kind of a drag. Of the four other kids I know on our street, two are in different private schools, and two are at the second-closest public school (we have a "school choice" lottery, but not any school transportation).

cutting edge group project everyone in a glass dome

fractured peer group

I discover I had an unreflected belief that, despite implicit biases, the lie that parents told themselves was "I'm sending Snowflake to the whiter/wealthier school because they're so smart, they'll be too bored in public school" and I would boggle more or less, "Snowflake ain't the kid of an Unfogged commenter, dude. They'll be middle of the pack anywhere."

(I now think the lie goes something like "I'm sending Snowflake to the w/w school because they'll learn more under those better teachers, surrounded by their w/w peers.")

20: I'm sure every family tells themselves different lies.

I haven't thought about it too hard but I kind of assume the second version isn't a lie, or at least, not always a lie. Parental socio-economic status and education level aren't the only factor in education outcomes, and school quality actually makes some difference, right? Parents reasoning like that are a part of a collective action problem because the poorer school would be better with more UMC families in it, and they're prioritizing academic performance over other kinds of education that are also important, and it's a failure of society that some schools are so shitty (it's tempting to blame American government and/or society, but enlightened topless Europe has its own problems with its educational system)... but I don't assume parents who say that are always wrong on the facts.

There's also the self-serving belief that "my kid's protective coating of family money and racial privilege will insulate them against any of the harsh effects of a middling public school," which is clearly 100% true because data + all happy families are alike. And in fact, the poorer school would be better with more UMC families in it probably gets bundled into a lot of enabling fantasies about the marginal benefit of individual families, or the potential benefit of a self-contained clique of affluent students teaching their new friends about the great fun of snowboarding at Tahoe.

I have so much more vitriol than this in my vitriol reservoir. I should probably pace myself.

'S really class all the way down though, innit? And one should always recognize that 90% of everything adults say about kids' experience in school is horseshit. You can be going to the best school in the state and if you're getting bullied constantly, it's hell and you're not learning much. I mean, do we really suppose that kids don't recognize that school is now mostly a credentialing exercise? (Not to mention the hidden curriculum of social control, but that's a story for another time.)

I didn't realize privileged parents who send their children to privileged schools had so much vitriol against privileged parents who don't send their children to privileged schools. I thought the former just saw the latter as naive or lazy.

Do you mean me? 90% of my vitriol is reserved for private consumption; hence the reservoir.

Whaat does being white have to do with the question?

26: The website is explicitly about integrating schools which are tending to self-segregate.

'S really class all the way down though, innit?

This is something I wondered. Like, how would the website respond to the (ostensibly privileged) family in 2 who is privileged but not white? Are they the target audience or are they encouraged to go to the wealthier school and diversify it?

Do wealthy white parents shy away from poor white schools? Or do you only have poor white schools in places with a lot of economic homogeneity, and so it basically never comes up? (I'm looking at you, Moby from Nebraska.)

I was born on the prairie, but somebody put a hospital floor between me and the actual grass.

There's also the self-serving belief that "my kid's protective coating of family money and racial privilege will insulate them against any of the harsh effects of a middling public school," which is clearly 100% true because data + all happy families are alike.

Hmm, this is basically the assumptions I'd been operating under. I don't actually think there's anything wrong with our public schools, but they're surely less stellar than a fancy Austin school.

And in fact, the poorer school would be better with more UMC families in it probably gets bundled into a lot of enabling fantasies about the marginal benefit of individual families, or the potential benefit of a self-contained clique of affluent students teaching their new friends about the great fun of snowboarding at Tahoe.

It's just that technically, my kids have seen a violin, so shouldn't they share?

I found the linked blog post annoying. For example, "It doesn't have yoga, or a PTA, or art classes. ... Because it IS a good school, with loving parents, teachers, and administrators. Without the glossy brochures, the extra fancy professional development, the "team-building."". The author equates yoga classes, a PTA, and art classes and implies that a lack of funding is not important since the teachers are loving.

There's a sane case to be made for the local public school (I believe BitchPhD made one ages ago), but this isn't it.

Yeah, I'm trying (and failing) to pin down the actual issue I have with this line of thought. The white savior overtones are part of it. The poster in the OP link wasn't as concrete as she could have been about the benefits to the school of having her children enroll, but I presume she thinks there are some (at a minimum "raising enrollment"). Maybe it was the breathlessly positive tone. On the one hand I wince every time anyone goes into raptures about the "wonderful diversity" at my daughter's school (have never ever heard a nonwhite person say this); on the other hand, it's just inherently a more interesting social group than, say, my elementary school, and it appeals to my visceral dislike of homogeneity. It has turned out that my daughter is pretty obedient and easy to teach, so in that way maybe it's a net positive that she's there. She has maybe more eccentric interests than the norm, and she shares those with all of her friends, which possibly enriches their lives. I just can't think this way.

My efforts to be realistic about class and wealth have resulted in her boasting about all the rich people she knows and/or is related to, which makes me want to commit ritual suicide.

She is doing math enrichment this fall, and likes it. So the protective coating is working there, so far. It's certainly somewhat true, that assumption, but I think there are clear limits.

Do wealthy white parents shy away from poor white schools? Yes.

I'm curious, heebie, did you read that piece about sexual assault in the Arlington high school? One of the points it makes was that the victim was clearly from the wrong side of the tracks, and that made it easier for everyone to turn on her... (This is a tangent, but taking off from school and class.)

My efforts to be realistic about class and wealth have resulted in her boasting about all the rich people she knows and/or is related to, which makes me want to commit ritual suicide.

Oh man, we have the same kid.

I can't remember the Arlington article?

Rituals are so formal.

33.last: here. Relatively long read.

28.2: I don't really know from direct experience. My town was too small for a choice in schools (except public vs. Catholic). There were kids from poor families in both schools, in a way that I suspect you wouldn't see in a suburb zoned to exclude the poor, but not concentrated poverty.

There were no gifted programs or anything like that either. Just basically a college prep track that wasn't called that.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I had classmates who went to one-room schools through 6th or 8th grade. I have no idea why since the schools bus was invented well before I started school.

I mean, I assume the idea is so that the people paying school taxes could save money, but I don't know why the state allowed it.

Anyway, I'm a middle-aged, straight, white male. The bar for me to better than average for my demographic cohort is now so easy to clear that I'm thinking of starting to take shits right in the middle of the Target just to see if anybody will say anything.

17: Did you go to Berk/eley High?

I went to Oakland Public Schools for the majority of my education and I turned out, I don't know, tame and literate. I was existentially bored for the entirety of my childhood. The gifted program consisted of two years of summer school in 3rd and 4th grade, which I resented bitterly and was happy to see cancelled. I got to see The Wiz a bunch of times, so there's that.

39: "I'm putting the privy back in white privilege."

Heh

Maybe it was the breathlessly positive tone.

Yeah. Or the idea that the school doesn't need funding for arts and physical activities and it doesn't matter, presumably because she'll pay for her kid's activities. She's not wrong, but that's not an argument that she's making the school better. Absent a critical mass of parents and a tax base willing to pay for it, it's not going to matter.

This is illegal! It's quite likely a debate about "pushing in" vs "pulling out" gifted content? which can be executed in good or bad faith, to be sure.

They have a magnet program now, which is housed at the school which is to be closed, and "well, it's only 100 kids across the district so we don't know what will happen." The main attraction of the magnet program was that the school is literally around the corner; absent a walkable school the public charter looks more attractive.

ISkippyjon Jones has always been unbelievable to me - the way it wants to be read out loud is in your most stereotyped, offensive Speedy Gonzalez accent. I cannot believe it is a currently published kids book. If you read it out loud in an office setting you would probably be penalized for creating a hostile work environment.

I had that problem with my reading of Knufflebunny.

45 Is that a Pokemon?

No, but tarot card readings with Pokemon cards could be diverting. In a Speedy Gonzalez voice, well, de gustibus.

40: Yes, in non-googleproofed form. I don't know what the situation is today, but Berkeley was both a diverse public school and a better school than many nearby public schools, including some whiter ones like Albany, when I was there. But it was also heavily tracked, with the "college-bound" courses mostly white. I don't even remember many Asian kids in many of my classes, though I wasn't the only one checking the "two or more ethnicities" boxes.

raptures about the "wonderful diversity" at my daughter's school (have never ever heard a nonwhite person say this)

I don't know anything about your kid's school, but I have seen environments that are both diverse and still clearly predominantly white. Non-white people might be more keenly aware of the latter aspect.

Late add to 49: sorry, somehow skipped the parenthetical about no one having a majority at your daughters school. So, not a predominantly white situation.

48: I just remember you guys had the best drugs.

Probably, but my teenage rebellion was in not doing drugs.

32: Don't you think "diversity" is an intrinsically asymmetric issue? A non-white person going to a white school is going to learn radically different lessons than a white person going to a white school.