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comment by WanderingEng
WanderingEng  ·  2277 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City

The article annoys me in a way I can't quite explain.

My own childhood education was in a rural town. The idea of picking a school is foreign to me. There was one elementary school and one junior/senior high school (single building slightly segregated by wing). Calling it predominantly white is an understatement. I believe my class was the first to graduate a non-white student. There were three (or maybe four?) in my class of 63 (the biggest graduation ever).

Did we all have the same opportunities? Did we have the same opportunities as our peers in the cities in the area? Did the students from those cities have the same opportunities as the students from the large metropolitan areas? Definitely not. Was it because of race? Definitely not.

Arriving at college, I found people who were sophomores before they sat one day in a college class because they had so many AP credits. I had five credits, and I know for a fact it was five more than every other student in my high school graduating class.

I've been thinking about buying a house for some time. At the top of the list is a city in the area with great schools. I don't have kids and don't plan to, but the schools are a draw to me. It isn't for the education, it's because my neighbors would be the kind of people who value education.

I think America has a race problem. It also seems to me the underlying problem is one of income disparity or maybe more generally economic gaps. My small town had no AP program; there was no money to provide one. Maybe the author would say that was unfair, too, but what's the solution?





kleinbl00  ·  2277 days ago  ·  link  ·  

WanderingEng  ·  2277 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    the exploration of North America has always been a process of "waste people" moving into undesirable lands, dying by the droves, establishing a toehold and then being swept aside by the desirable class

Applied to schools and neighborhoods today but with somewhat less dying. I suppose that's my issue with the article here. The author lists grievances around one type of discrimination while implicitly arguing that it's the only relevant type of discrimination.