[com2kid]

Growing up in Seattle in the 90s, the school district was obviously racist and classist. Advanced programs were in the richer (whiter) neighborhoods and poor kids got to go to schools with police wagons out front.

The district charter use to have a line in it saying they had to offer each kid the best education possible. My mother used that line to force the school district to send a taxi to every day to take me up to a richer part of the city with better schools. That line of the charter has since been removed as from what I can tell kids now are at the mercy of their circumstances.

There is some fair arguments to make that mixing kids of different backgrounds together improves outcomes, if you take 1 kid from a poor background and surround that kid with a culture of success, there is a very large chance the kid will pick up on that culture of success and start doing better.

So, kernel of truth behind some of these policies.

IMHO the problem is, this plan only works if the vast majority of students are high achievers. If you have 10% of the students who are high achievers and you mix everyone together, after a few years you end up with no high achievers.

America in general needs to seriously look at how we as a culture approach education, until we fix that, there isn't much the schools can do to actually improve outcomes for underprivileged students en masse.

[brianwawok]

> There is some fair arguments to make that mixing kids of different backgrounds together improves outcomes, if you take 1 kid from a poor background and surround that kid with a culture of success, there is a very large chance the kid will pick up on that culture of success and start doing better.

My understanding is research shows this "evens" outcomes. The worst students do better (Teacher has more time to pay attention to them), the best students do worse (can not get into the really hard stuff, get bored).

If you are in the bottom 25%, you WANT integrated classrooms of all levels.

If you are in the top 25%, you WANT an elite classroom with ramped up work and less distractions.

[upsidesinclude]

>culture of success

There is the crux.

Bad cultures exist and we dont need to celebrate them. Bad culture drags everyone down and makes society worse.

[com2kid]

> Bad cultures exist and we dont need to celebrate them. Bad culture drags everyone down and makes society worse.

We need to ask why those bad cultures exist and take steps to remediate the underlying problems.

In Seattle, one of the richest cities in one of the richest countries in all of human history, some of the public schools still have leaded drinking pipes that "may be safe" for kids to drink from.

For the vast majority of working adults in America, a job means unreliable shifts, being treated with outright cruelty by management, and pay that isn't enough to cover health insurance premiums.

Given that, why is anyone surprised that kids don't "apply themselves"? What are their parents going to say? "Work hard and you to can be in debt and barely afford to pay rent!"

[v0idzer0]

People generally do what is expected of them. If you’re dropped into a class with higher expectations, you perform better. Lower expectations and you perform worse. We are all optimized to do what’s required of us and conserve excess energy.

[phonon]

Or you find the difficulty is too high, and you drop out.

[IIsi50MHz]

Or too low, and you mentally check out.

[gnicholas]

> Growing up in Seattle in the 90s, the school district was obviously racist and classist. Advanced programs were in the richer (whiter) neighborhoods and poor kids got to go to schools with police wagons out front.

I grew up in Sacramento in the 80's/90's, and the best schools were not in the rich/white areas. The top-performing schools were in so-so neighborhoods, and the schools were very diverse. Best of all, you could test in and enroll from anywhere. We literally had a kid in HS who drove down halfway from Tahoe each morning. It wasn't perfect, but it was much, much better than what we have now, as this article shows.

[adrr]

Wasn't Garfield the school that had the advanced classes and the smartest kids in the district that were bused in? Its in central district of Seattle which has the highest population of minorities of any other district.

[kridsdale1]

I live close to it, but don’t yet have school age kids and haven’t researched its reputation. This is good to hear.

[seanmcdirmid]

Now its sort of the opposite? We'd love to send our kid to Seattle's Chinese immersion program, but they only offer it in poorer South Seattle while we live in richer North Seattle. There was an effort to make elementary kids go to school before 8AM just to make some more bussing feasible, bussing that only applies to non-neighborhood kids attending the schools from poorer parts of the city.