Replies

Anyone here from Portlandia? I don't know the local pressure points, but experience teaches that if school transfers are reaching critical mass, the city needs to be very, very careful, because the next step after white flight from schools is white flight from the city.

Many posters here seem to assume the issue is discipline. It may be. But my hunch is that a gradual growing unease with the lack of academic rigor is likely the driver. Note that the story emphasizes that selective magnet schools are also a target.

As the percentage of students from poor backgrounds increases, academic rigor tends to give way to remediation. Then the usual suspects show up demanding that that racial disparities in grades be reduced, the standard tactic for this being grade inflation and the further erosion of standards. Parents committed to academic excellence give up on their neighborhood school and bid for the still-good school across town, or give up on the regular classrooms entirely and fix their hopes on advanced/honors/AP/magnet programs. Since there are racial correlates to this, the race police are hot on their heels, and the magnet programs also become targets. Private schools and the suburbs start to look better and better. And so the downward spiral accelerates.

But here is the tricky thing. The U.S. is going to be majority minority by midcentury. In the younger demographic, we already are. I don't know where the 50% divide currently falls in the K-12 continuum, but school systems with a majority white student body are soon going to be the exception, not the norm.

So ... if the race hucksters continue to attack academic excellence as white privilege, the flight of academically gifted students of all races from urban public schools will become a stampede. The race police must learn to accept academic excellence on a color neutral basis, and disregard the median melanin content that this produces in academically rigorous programs. (And if a classroom turns out to be 70% Asian, so be it.) The alternative is to drive academically committed families of all races out of the public school system entirely. This has already happened in many cities. Portland should surely be able to learn from myriad examples, but there seem to be none so blind as race hucksters on a rampage.

As the percentage of students from poor backgrounds increases, academic rigor tends to give way to remediation.

Stealing a few snippets from your excellent, spot-on, post.

I'm an educator. The most important metric in evaluating public school effectiveness is graduation rate.

All other considerations are secondary. Resources are focused on students who are not success-oriented, in attempts to "drag them over the line." This means fewer, sometimes a total lack, of time, energy, and money directed towards the top and middle tier students. The greater trouble a student a gets into, the more resources diverted to "save" that student.

The students who are most likely to be our future leaders, thinkers, producers... get almost no attention at all. It is a major failing of public education.

Academic expectations are dropped so low that other students now longer view a high school diploma as anything to be proud of.

What's really interesting to me, on a personal level, is this: I teach English in an inner-city middle school in Los Angeles. My classrooms tend to have one black kid, two Asians, and the rest are Latino. About once every other year we get a white kid who transfers 2 months later.

Anyway, I do have an Honors class, although our definition of Honors is "Reads at or near grade level, does homework, and doesn't act out." In other words, normal kids in other parts of the country (or other points in time.)

So anyway, I commented about my Honors class to one of my lower-level classes... I just said something about what book they are reading now... and one of the kids said, "That's where all the white kids are."

My first thought was "we don't have any white kids." But my second thought was... Wait... he means how they act, not how they look. To be white is to do well in school, to like rock music and watch mainstream tv instead of Telemundo, maybe even a little BBC (one of my brightest kids is an avid Dr. Who fan). It was just weird to see how academic success seemed to correlate with an appreciation for white culture. Or at least a lack of hostility toward it. But in terms of skin tone, if you looked at each of my classes, you'd see the same range of color, from quite dark to nearly white. But the behavior is radically different.

They are now serving breakfast in the classroom (whole new nightmare) and my lower-level kids bolt straight for the most sugary, carb-laden options possible. They want juice, not milk. They want cereal, not eggs. They want cookies, not fruit.

Then the very next period is my Honors class, and I keep the leftovers for them (I'm not supposed to, apparently we are supposed to throw it away so that ... that ... I don't even know why.) And my Honors kids head right for the milk and fruit. I mean, they pounce on it as if it were Koolaid and cookies. We read our book and I can hear the quiet crunching of my little "white" kids eating apples and reading a book.

The whole thing is just really weird.