School Daze

> 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"?

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?

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.