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Comment by pyuser583 | Hacker News Reader

My daughter attends a private school that stayed open through most of the pandemic. Lots of kids from public school transferred in. They aren’t leaving.

In addition to actually being open, the local public schools went all in with BLM.

That’s not bad by itself. But in practice it means the local school board is spending its time figuring out how to promote racial equity.

How to assist privileged students who lost two years of in class instruction is less important.

Private schools and rich suburban school districts are flooded.

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This could be my local school district (Seattle public school district). Lots of kids went private or were moved to the east side, blowing a hole in the budget (Washington state funds schools at the state level, so losing students loses money). There is a lot of emphasis on social justice, which while not bad in itself, can lead to fundamentals slipping, or advanced programs that richer families see as must haves. My kid just started in public school, so far so good, so I'm keeping an open mind.

Which school district?

Seattle Public School District (SPS).

I think it's not just BLM, but basically everyone was "too online".

If you were a teacher, you fell into progressively more extreme content streams.

If you were a parent, you read about teachers falling into more extreme content streams.

The actual classroom environment might not have changed one iota, but everyone spending all day reading about bogeymen online for two years seems to have soured the relationship.

> In addition to actually being open, the local public schools went all in with BLM.

As a homeschool family, I can tell you that this is a lot of it. It's not a new change, but having their kids' classroom streamed into their homes made a lot of conservative-leaning families realize that many public schools have chosen a side in the culture war, and it isn't theirs. I've heard it over and over.

You can expect to see school choice initiatives being pushed hard by this constituency.

>How to assist privileged students who lost two years of in class instruction is less important

...as it should be. If the privileged keep playing their privilege games while neglecting equity, society does not work.

The privileged are now going to private schools and suburban schools.

The greatest societies, even or own if it can still be considered great, were not built on the lowest common denominator, they were built to push up, above and beyond, the best of the best.

America was built on slave labor, and used exactly your arguments to justify the slavery.

Not focusing on the lowest common denominator, thus pulling the rest of society down, is not the same as enslaving people.

you are badly over-generalizing; there was always strenuous conflict over slaves and slave labor. Specifically why it was "states" legally.

What is new to me is the extent to which indentured servitude was practiced in Central Asia; no doubt people brought their histories with them to the USA.

Parts of it were and they were utterly destroyed 160 years ago.

Privileged kids have options so they leave the school to somewhere else, causing less equity, not more.

Without a law to force those kids to stay where they are, what can society do? In that case, parents are much more interested in a "raise all boats" story rather than a "raise boats that were lower at the expense of boats that were higher."

> ...as it should be. If the privileged keep playing their privilege games while neglecting equity, society does not work.

Society isn't a game of wealth transfer. Equity is the goal for one ideology, not for the vast majority of Americans. It's fine for that to be your goal, but you should understand that it isn't for most others and that they're going to act accordingly. When you aim to take away from them and their children, even if it's well intentioned and justified by your belief system, many are going to flee.

Most parents are not going to artificially cripple their kids out of some charitable sense of equity.

Decisions about how to raise your kids is where the DEI rubber hits the road.

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