×
One of the problems that some low-income schools have is that rather than boasting a lot of intensely involved, fairly affluent parents willing to come together and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to better the school, they find coalitions of intensely involved, fairly affluent parents willing to come together and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to sue the city so their kids can go to a whiter, richer school. So that sucks. Meanwhile, as Dana points out, one of the big problems afflicting urban schools is that parents look at aggregate achievement, rather than achievement for kids with similar demographic characteristics to their kids:
So were the litigious Fairfax parents correct to freak out about South Lakes? Let's look at the numbers.At South Lakes High, 46 percent of students are white, 20 percent are black, 16 percent are Hispanic, and 11 percent are Asian. One-third of the school's population qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch. In other words, this is both a racially and socioeconomically diverse school. How does this affect the most academically talented/privileged proportion of the student body? Well, more than half of white kids and almost half of Asian kids participate in the IB program, as do about 20 percent of blacks and Hispanics. An overwhelming majority of all the students enrolled in IB score a 4 or better, indicating excellent instruction and achievement. As for the SAT, the average combined score for white kids at South Lakes is 1730 out of 2400.Now let's look at Oakton High School, which affluent parents sued to get their kids into. Oakton is 67 percent white and only 11 percent black and Hispanic. Less than 9 percent of students there qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Oakton has an AP program in which white students are just as successful as their similar white peers at South Lakes are on the IB exams; of the black students participating in AP though, less than half scored three or higher. Tellingly, on the SAT, Oakton's white kids score 1730, essentially the exact same score as white students at South Lakes.So there's no evidence that the kids at the richer school do better than the kids at the poorer school. But the parents think the poorer school is so terrible that they'll spend $125,000 of their own dollars trying to save their kids from the hellish fate of South Lakes High...where the data shows they'll do as well or better than they'll do at Oakton. Folks like to talk a lot about how teacher's unions stand in the way of better schools. But no one really wants to talk about the ways in which well-meaning, mostly white parents worsen the problems.
