Tag Archives: Urban Schools

Listen carefully when people use the terms “good school” or “bad school”. What they think they mean, and therefore what they think they know, is that they have the data necessary to judge how close students in that school come to maximizing their potential in terms of academic growth. 

They don’t know that, I don’t know that, you don’t know that, and no one knows that, unless and until they have a least two data sets. One data set would be as large as possible and would assess as many schools as possible doing all of the statistical work necessary to identify the demographic characteristics which impact on as many as possible significant outcomes. The next would be all of that data on those outcomes from the school being judged. You then have to compare the outcomes the demographic information would predict to the actual outcomes over as many years as possible (especially important if the school has a small population). Then, and only then, can you speak knowledgeably about whether or not that school is “good” or “bad”.

Instead when these terms are used what is really being identified is not the capacity to add value or the failure to do so of the school, but rather the demographic characteristics of the students who attend the school which correlate to better or worse outcomes. 

In the greater Springfield area Longmeadow High School has high test scores and an excellent graduation rate. Is it a good school? I don’t know, and you don’t know either. Given its demographics does it over-perform or underperform? I don’t know, and you don’t know either. Commerce High School in Springfield has low test scores and a high drop out rate. Is it a bad school? I don’t know, and you don’t know either. That can only be known if you have all of the relevant data and you’ve compared the outcomes predicted by demographics and the actual outcomes.

Here comes the important question: Does it matter? My answer is “probably not”. Chances are Commerce High School is an average school doing an average job…because that’s what average means, BUT we know who the students are who are struggling in each subject area, and we probably know who the students are which are at risk of dropping out and we have some idea of the research based interventions which can help them. More students are in need of those interventions at Commerce than at Longmeadow. Many of those interventions are costly. Even if we provide all of the resources necessary for as many of the interventions as can be provided the student population of Commerce will still not achieve outcomes equivalent to the population of Longmeadow High School (a fact which is about as meaningless as any I can think of by the way), but their outcomes will improve if resources are provided to do the things which we know tend to work.

The important issue here is this; when we expend resources in ignorance, whether as a society or as individuals, we stand a greater chance of wasting those resources. Moving children from bad schools to good schools might be a good idea. I mean I suppose we could ask the people of Lake Wobegon how we get all of our children into better than average schools, and maybe the headmaster at Hogwarts would know how we get the good teachers in the good schools to teach 2x or 3x the number of students they currently teach and still remain “good teachers”.

Leaving those little conundrums aside, just taking students out of urban districts and sending them to suburban ones takes a lot of money, money which could be used for interventions in the urban districts. In many cases, it also takes the best of the best students out of the urban districts because the type of parents who expend the effort prioritizing schooling by finding out about and following through on what they believe are better opportunities for their children are likely to have children who achieve better outcomes. All this to send students from “bad schools” we really don’t know are bad, to “good schools” we really don’t know are good.


So the next time you hear someone say that some city has bad schools ask them if they know the overall percentage of students on free and reduced price lunch, and the percentage of students who are English Language Learners, and the percentage of students in the district who are transient and how those numbers compare to what would then be the consequent predicted outcomes on standardized test scores, graduation rates, and the post secondary success of the student body. If they don’t have those figures readily available tell them, nicely, to shut the fuck up, they don’t know what they’re talking about.

When my older daughters were attending the Milton Bradley Elementary School in Springfield I spent two terms on the School Centered Decision Making Team which, in theory, acted like a board of directors of the school. At that time the Springfield schools were under the same desegregation order which saw me bused in 1974 from my neighborhood school to another 1.4 miles away. Back in 2000 the schools had implemented a “controlled choice” program wherein parents selected from three schools and every attempt was made to give parents their highest possible selection in such a way that the each school would fall into the range of distribution which was considered “integrated”.

The goal was for each school in the district to fall within a certain percentage of the district’s overall racial or ethnic make-up. At the time Springfield schools were somewhere around 20% White, 20% Black, 55% Hispanic. What I learned was that a Springfield school could be considered segregated if its population was 33% White, 33% Black, 33% Hispanic, but a suburban school, let’s say for example in Longmeadow, was considered “integrated” even if it had a population made up 100% of White students because its school population more closely reflected the overall population of the district. 
Nothing could better illustrate the fact that city dwellers are held to a different standard than suburbanites. 

My parents very well may have selected the house that they did because the neighborhood it was in was, at the time, as white a neighborhood as existed in the city. My father was a little bit racist. He moved the family from the Berkshires to Springfield because it gave him the chance to move up in the United States Postal Service and earn more money, not to seek diversity. He and my mother chose a house at the end of a dead end dirt road, with well water and a septic tank. It was wedged in between some undeveloped land owned by a nearby synagogue and un-developable wetland owned by the city. My parents had lived in that house for a decade and a half before I entered 4th grade and started being bused to Washington Street School. In retrospect there was an increase in diversity. Tiffany Street School had, as I remember, one black girl.

In my class at Washington Street there were two Puerto Ricans (who spent most of the day in a separate room!).

My dad wasn’t going to “integrated schools”, his life was as insular as ever, he liked his secluded dead end hide-away, and my mom was very close to the neighbors. We stayed. But a look at enrollment in city schools shows a population which was 90% White shrinking to well under 1/3 White in fewer than 20 years. My mom still lives in that house. Its value is probably 1/4 of the value of the suburban home they could have purchased for the same amount of money (or less) before 1974. 

Staying was a stupid decision from a financial standpoint. 

And where did these White people go who fled the cities in the 70’s and 80’s and who have stayed away ever since? The suburbs? The exurbs? The “as far away from any place where the state might tell me I have to send my kids to school with brown people”-urbs? And what has that done to our land use? What has that done to our energy usage?

In combination with the interstate highway system, the defunding of public transit, and red-lining, integration has created the most wasteful society that has ever existed and which sees us spewing more than our share of carbon detritus into the atmosphere destroying the environment and the climate at the same time it immiserates us because it forces us to spend years of our lives enmeshed in metal skins traversing miles of barren asphalt strewn landscapes in order to purchase a gallon of milk.

Isn’t it enough that people who live and work in walkable urban environments do less harm to the environment? Is it necessary to obligate us to involuntarily and disproportionately integrate with people not from our tribe if, within the diverse whole, we choose to group together in enclaves?   

Certainly even someone of average intellect could see that having more people living in cities, even if those cities are somewhat broken up into enclaves, would lead to greater voluntary integration than exists when forced integration shifts the dominant group into enclaves located dozens of miles from minority groups.
Forced integration is a bad idea.