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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as a "good school district." In D.C. there is a neighborhood called Capitol Hill. The local elementary school is Brent. 5-10 years ago, rich people would never have sent their kids to that school. It was 80% low-income, and the test scores were terrible. The area has dramatically gentrified over the last several years, and now it's one of the best schools in the city (and less than 15% low-income). Nothing changed about the school or the teachers--what changed is how much money the students parents' have.

The problem in the U.S. isn't that we have "good schools" and "bad schools." It's that we have extreme segregation along racial and economic lines. Our policies create pockets of schools that are 90% low-income (and usually a similar percentage black or hispanic). It's a symptom of a society with extreme segregation and wealth inequality, not a cause.

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A school is made up of buildings and teachers, but most importantly - peers, and that must have changed dramatically.

Also, the home environment of the students has a huge impact on the school itself, and very little is done to mitigate that by American schools.

I agree with the spirit of your comment, but you seem to be contradicting yourself. How can nothing have changed about the school? Schools derive a great deal of their funding from property taxes. You just described a school district dramatically gentrifying and going from 80% low-income to less than 15% low-income. The school now has a dramatically larger budget. They could have completely upgraded the teaching staff. They can now afford better facilities and resources. Even if the teachers are the exact same, they are now literally teaching a completely different student body. That sounds like a school that's changed to me.

> How can nothing have changed about the school? Schools derive a great deal of their funding from property taxes. You just described a school district dramatically gentrifying and going from 80% low-income to less than 15% low-income. The school now has a dramatically larger budget.

This is incorrect. All of the public schools in DC are in one school district, so the changing demographics of neighborhoods don't affect how much money is available for any given school in that district. The property taxes are all going into one pot.

Damn, owned.

Which is different from other municipalities, and would lead to some of us misunderstanding that DC works that way. Where I live, funding is very centered around districts, separate from the county, and there are massive disparities based on the wealth distribution in neighborhoods. People know where the good schools are, and they're typically the ones in which minorities are not. Hell, it's so fucked here that the county voted to sue the state last year.

What jdminhbg described is typical. A municipality (city, town, etc.) funds the schools within its boundaries. If there are affluent and poor neighborhoods within a municipality, there will typically be seen disparities in conditions at the schools that serve those respective neighborhoods. This is certainly the case in the town where I live.

Property taxes might be the same but money available for the school can change dramatically when kids of rich parents attend because of PTA fund raising.

In California schools are poorly funded but some public schools manage to raise thousands of dollars per student through the PTA. http://sfpublicpress.org/news/2014-02/how-budget-cuts-and-PT...

For reference: the $1,500 per student raised by the highest fundraising school is 1/10 as much as the approximately $15,000 per student more DCPS spends than FCPS (a neighboring suburb and second richest county in the country).

> How can nothing have changed about the school?

When you take away having to deal with problems, good things happen. LOTS of resources can turn toward creating academic achievement. That's how. In my town we have a scourge of overachievers who should be told to go fishing. That's the extent our problems.

The real issue is what causes the problems in poor school districts: Is it being poor? Being black? Are the people who blame "black culture" right? Or is it how we treat the poor and black people, from a very young age?

>Are the people who blame "black culture" right?

No. Those people are at best misguided, at worst, racist. If white American culture is the standard against which black American culture is judged, I am still waiting for the evidence that white culture prizes scholastic achievement and general intelligence. The only reason geeks and nerds became cool in America is because, suddenly dotcom riches! Until then there was a long history of media & movies that praised jocks and misanthropes above all else. (Hello, Molly Ringwald, hello Grease.) Today's college sports industrial complex is another sign. So is Fox News. So are the yahoos being elected to Texas schoolbook committees. So are creationists. I could go on....

It is probably an extreme example, but there is always "The Street Stops Here", a docu. about Bob Hurley, who is simply obsessed with keeping kids raised in dire poverty out of prison through the education system.

Of course he coaches basketball but that's almost peripheral (although he also loves winning ). His program is tightly integrated with the rest of a Catholic school. These kids live in a state of despair. He will fight this until his last breath. And he does not fight fair. Bob is a retired parole officer.

If anything, the film leaves me with the unsettling feeling that this is a very hard problem. It'd take decades of failure as a parole officer to make one Bob Hurley, and there seems to be only the one.

First off, I very much agree with you.

I think "good school district" is coded language for what you're making explicit—a district comprised of schools and teachers with necessary and adequate resources to provide "good/better/best" education.

I don't mean to detract from your point, because I think it is definitely key to education problems nationwide.

Edit: My statement about coded language did not include mention of the segregation and amplified economic disparity/inequality. It was not my intention to omit this as a means of saying it is irrelevant. It most certainly is. I was hasty in my paraphrasing. My apologies to rayiner for detracting from his very important point, which was not what I meant to do.

I think the point of the post above yours is a bit different.

A good school is one that has the best students. It is often your classmates, more than teachers, who create an environment that is conducive to learning. What seems to be the case is that rich people invest more in their kids, and their kids are simply better students. They are better behaved, with higher comprehension and math skills, and more likely to be better students. That is what creates a good school.

So it is not that schools get richer with better resources (although that too is a factor), but that richer kids with higher parental investment are fundamentally more likely to succeed. That is the real divide.

Certainly. My ultimate point was that because of the coded language, saying a "good school district" doesn't exist is, to me, equivalent to saying the problems rayiner made explicit don't exist. Just because it's a polite term doesn't mean people don't understand what it signifies, and also doesn't mean the good/bad school divide doesn't exist. I made my point poorly and wish I hadn't, as it has led to misunderstanding.

It is telling that whenever I hear the phrase "good school district", I automatically assume an upper-middle class nuclear white family...

It is certainly no coincidence.

or in CA it is - 25% White American, 25% Indian, 25% Chinese, 25% European

There also is the effect that the grouping matters - other things being equal, your kid will succeed more when put in a class where other students have higher parental investment, rather than when put in class with a lot of poor students having issues with absenteeism and higher incidence crime and/or substance abuse.

In essence, people are willing to pay a premium in real estate prices just so their kids would not grow in a community of kids who cannot afford this premium.

That's not what I'm saying at all. Brent is in DCPS, the same as the terribly-performing schools just blocks away. DCPS doesn't assign it more resources just because the parents have money. And gentrification happened so quickly, the teachers are largely the same as they were five years ago when the school was awful. All that has changed is the makeup of the student body.

"Good school district" isn't code for "rich school district." DCPS is a terrible school district, and spends twice as much per student as the school districts in the surrounding wealthy suburbs. "Good school district" is code for "school district in which we've segregated-out the poor people and minorities."

I wasn't meaning to exclude that from the equation. Again, we don't materially disagree. I said it was coded language for what you made explicit. Guess I assumed you'd include all of it into the equation. I'd go back and edit, but whatever. My bad for not restating everything you said to avoid misinterpretation.

My point was that "good school district" is coded language, and gives people a polite way to wrap up all of that into a nice-sounding term that lets them avoid admitting the nastier things. As all coded language does.

Unfortunately, I haven't kept up on my data for about 15 years, but back then two of the most strongly correlated factors of a student's performance were 1) how many books were in their home, and 2) how many college educated adults lived nearby. The amount spent per student had a tiny positive correlation. That said, I'm sure there's a minimum baseline of spending per student that needs to be achieved.

With all the raise to the top and gates foundation money floating around since then, I'm sure there is better data now. But, those factors really stuck with me.

It would be really interesting if we could factor-identify the problem as one that's fundamentally about racism. I don't suspect that this is going all that well as a project.

What we find is that race matters less than whether or not the kids have the resources and interest to exploit schools properly. The factors behind that are profound - you might consider "The Wire" a dozens-of-hours essay on the nature of the problem and it ended without much conclusion.

My Mom taught poor kids. They were of many races, but they all had the same basic problems.

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