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Old 05-22-2018, 08:25 AM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
14,060 posts, read 8,932,332 times
Reputation: 10393

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Quote:
Originally Posted by 1ondoner View Post
It's unfair to expect outsiders to move into the city to fix the schools. Why can't those who live in the city fix the schools?

And no, I did not miss the part about him moving back to the city. I was commending him for bringing up his kids in the suburbs. That was a wise decision.
No, it's not. If someone outside wants to live in the city, then - just as someone who moves to the suburbs puts up with driving everywhere unless they move to a suburb where that's not required - they take the bad with the good, and if they want to fix the bad, they can join those already there who are engaged in that activity.

The city doesn't pick up trash in the park? The neighbors organize park cleanups.

You got a nuisance bar on the corner? You lean on the cops and organize with your neighbors to get it shut down.

They do this sort of thing in suburbia too, though most often, it takes the form of:

Some developer wants to block your view of open land with houses like the one you moved to, which may have blocked someone else's view of open land? You gather your neighbors and campaign to have your local government deny whatever permits or zoning exceptions the developer may need.

Our tendency to want to flee rather than solve our problems gets us in all sorts of messes. (By the way, that was one of the subjects delved into in a book whose title I referred to obliquely in one other post on this thread, "Exit, Voice and Loyalty": What leads people to decide to stay and fight or to give up and leave?)

If someone values something highly enough, they usually will fight to preserve it. Or at least they should be willing to. No one should pretend something is other than what it is, but if a newcomer wants to be part of that something, then fill in the newcomer on what they can expect once there. If they decide they want to avoid dealing with it, that's their choice, but they're certainly not wrong for making the opposite decision - and I'd suggest that instead it's you that are wrong for judging the choice in that fashion.

Once again: I live on a rough block near a busy intersection (that's gotten a lot quieter at night since a nuisance business on it got shut down, by the way). My friends often visit, and nothing's happened to any of them yet. Are they wrong for visiting me?
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Old 05-22-2018, 08:43 AM
 
Location: New York City
1,943 posts, read 1,479,556 times
Reputation: 3316
Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post
No, it's not. If someone outside wants to live in the city, then - just as someone who moves to the suburbs puts up with driving everywhere unless they move to a suburb where that's not required - they take the bad with the good, and if they want to fix the bad, they can join those already there who are engaged in that activity.

The city doesn't pick up trash in the park? The neighbors organize park cleanups.

You got a nuisance bar on the corner? You lean on the cops and organize with your neighbors to get it shut down.

They do this sort of thing in suburbia too, though most often, it takes the form of:

Some developer wants to block your view of open land with houses like the one you moved to, which may have blocked someone else's view of open land? You gather your neighbors and campaign to have your local government deny whatever permits or zoning exceptions the developer may need.

Our tendency to want to flee rather than solve our problems gets us in all sorts of messes. (By the way, that was one of the subjects delved into in a book whose title I referred to obliquely in one other post on this thread, "Exit, Voice and Loyalty": What leads people to decide to stay and fight or to give up and leave?)

If someone values something highly enough, they usually will fight to preserve it. Or at least they should be willing to. No one should pretend something is other than what it is, but if a newcomer wants to be part of that something, then fill in the newcomer on what they can expect once there. If they decide they want to avoid dealing with it, that's their choice, but they're certainly not wrong for making the opposite decision - and I'd suggest that instead it's you that are wrong for judging the choice in that fashion.

Once again: I live on a rough block near a busy intersection (that's gotten a lot quieter at night since a nuisance business on it got shut down, by the way). My friends often visit, and nothing's happened to any of them yet. Are they wrong for visiting me?
He's a typical suburbanite who doesn't seem to know much about how the city really works. Sad.
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Old 05-22-2018, 09:12 AM
 
273 posts, read 206,019 times
Reputation: 361
Quote:
Originally Posted by Huckleberry3911948 View Post
There are only two factors —the students and the teachers
Buildings dont do anything -they just stare at each other
The qualifications for being teacher are many and severe consequences for failure to meet them
What are the qualifications for being a student and consequences for not meeting them??????????
This is wrong, and part of the problem. Buildings crumble. Lead paint chips fall on desks. Furnaces stop working in the winter. Bathrooms are not stocked with soap to wash hands.

So much of what we take for granted in our suburban schools are unheard of luxuries to inner city students.
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Old 05-22-2018, 02:36 PM
 
Location: Philadelphia
273 posts, read 315,477 times
Reputation: 750
I’m perhaps at ground zero in the demographic for which this thread is pertinent: Early 30s, two-time college graduate, married to a two-time college graduate, and with a toddler daughter who will be starting school in a few years. We’re both self-employed and work from home, and we can live essentially anywhere we wish (budgetary constraints aside). We’re currently renting a place and would like to buy a home within a few years.

For the most part, we’re quite happy living in Media, and by all accounts, we can rely on having very high-quality schools if we buy a home here. Though we like Media, one of our few disappointments is how far removed we are from the city—about an hour door-to-door to City Hall if we take the train and even longer via the trolley and MFL. The ride is long enough that it discourages short or trivial trips, like an impromptu dinner out at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, for instance. My wife is something of a concert maven, and the transit connections from Pattison back to Media at the late hours that shows let out are particularly tortuous.

For a number of reasons, we would like to live in the city itself, and not just for our own entertainment and enjoyment, but also for philosophical reasons along the lines of what MarketStEl mentioned upthread. And also for our daughter...wanting to give her a broader and richer experience than the suburban sterility and isolation that marked our own childhoods. (Media is already a marked improvement, by the way.)

Obviously the quality of schools is a major consideration for us, but I’m not willing to do the mental gymnastics necessary to buy the direct line of causation that’s accepted as fact by many: Subpar standardized test scores are unquestionably the direct result of a poor quality of education, and sending your child to a Philadelphia public school is tantamount to a guarantee that he/she will never be admitted to a good college (...and never have a rewarding career, never live a meaningful life, etc. etc.).

I firmly believe that the most important educators in a child’s life are his/her parents—not in that they’re teaching the quadratic formula or drilling the child on the periodic table, but because they’re in a prime position to encourage a child’s curiosity and foster a culture in the home where learning is not only frequent but celebrated. This belief is central to the way I approach each and every day with my daughter, and as such, I’m not looking to the school to take her as raw clay and mould her into a good student. That said, I also don’t want a school to undo my efforts either.

If a school is truly dysfunctional, lacking the materials and faculty to properly educate, or if it’s overrun by disruptive children who won’t learn, the school itself can be an impediment to child’s education. But which schools are truly dysfunctional, and which are adequate but underperform on standardized tests due to the number of underachieving students in the student body. And furthermore, which schools are possibly undiscovered gems whose mediocre test scores are actually a testament to the tireless dedication of teachers doing their best with poorly parented students—teachers who would be overjoyed to work with a child who actually wants to learn? And to what extent is the phenomenon of “bad inner-city schools” a perpetually self-fulfilling prophecy? Solid sober parents who care deeply about education—who are the ones most likely to instill an appreciation of learning and hold their children to high standards—steer clear of city schools, thus creating and worsening the very situation they sought to avoid.

This issue seems like fertile ground for a piece of long-term, in-depth investigative journalism; I’m incredibly frustrated by the lack of qualitative data and the incessant repetition of test scores as some kind of cause/effect gospel.

Last edited by briantroutman; 05-22-2018 at 03:59 PM..
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Old 05-22-2018, 08:18 PM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
14,060 posts, read 8,932,332 times
Reputation: 10393
Quote:
Originally Posted by briantroutman View Post
I’m perhaps at ground zero in the demographic for which this thread is pertinent: Early 30s, two-time college graduate, married to a two-time college graduate, and with a toddler daughter who will be starting school in a few years. We’re both self-employed and work from home, and we can live essentially anywhere we wish (budgetary constraints aside). We’re currently renting a place and would like to buy a home within a few years.

For the most part, we’re quite happy living in Media, and by all accounts, we can rely on having very high-quality schools if we buy a home here. Though we like Media, one of our few disappointments is how far removed we are from the city—about an hour door-to-door to City Hall if we take the train and even longer via the trolley and MFL. The ride is long enough that it discourages short or trivial trips, like an impromptu dinner out at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, for instance. My wife is something of a concert maven, and the transit connections from Pattison back to Media at the late hours that shows let out are particularly tortuous.

For a number of reasons, we would like to live in the city itself, and not just for our own entertainment and enjoyment, but also for philosophical reasons along the lines of what MarketStEl mentioned upthread. And also for our daughter...wanting to give her a broader and richer experience than the suburban sterility and isolation that marked our own childhoods. (Media is already a marked improvement, by the way.)

Obviously the quality of schools is a major consideration for us, but I’m not willing to do the mental gymnastics necessary to buy the direct line of causation that’s accepted as fact by many: Subpar standardized test scores are unquestionably the direct result of a poor quality of education, and sending your child to a Philadelphia public school is tantamount to a guarantee that he/she will never be admitted to a good college (...and never have a rewarding career, never live a meaningful life, etc. etc.).

I firmly believe that the most important educators in a child’s life are his/her parents—not in that they’re teaching the quadratic formula or drilling the child on the periodic table, but because they’re in a prime position to encourage a child’s curiosity and foster a culture in the home where learning is not only frequent but celebrated. This belief is central to the way I approach each and every day with my daughter, and as such, I’m not looking to the school to take her as raw clay and mould her into a good student. That said, I also don’t want a school to undo my efforts either.


If a school is truly dysfunctional, lacking the materials and faculty to properly educate, or if it’s overrun by disruptive children who won’t learn, the school itself can be an impediment to child’s education. But which schools are truly dysfunctional, and which are adequate but underperform on standardized tests due to the number of underachieving students in the student body. And furthermore, which schools are possibly undiscovered gems whose mediocre test scores are actually a testament to the tireless dedication of teachers doing their best with poorly parented students—teachers who would be overjoyed to work with a child who actually wants to learn? And to what extent is the phenomenon of “bad inner-city schools” a perpetually self-fulfilling prophecy? Solid sober parents who care deeply about education—who are the ones most likely to instill an appreciation of learning and hold their children to high standards—steer clear of city schools, thus creating and worsening the very situation they sought to avoid.

This issue seems like fertile ground for a piece of long-term, in-depth investigative journalism; I’m incredibly frustrated by the lack of qualitative data and the incessant repetition of test scores as some kind of cause/effect gospel.
(emphasis added)

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!!

I sometimes feel like I'm shouting into the wind when I say that there are more "good schools" than many believe there are, or that test scores aren't the be-all and end-all.

Other factors do come into play. How do I know? My SAT scores were in the 95th percentile in high school. That and my grades were good enough to get me into the best colleges in the country - and I picked the ne plus ultra on the reputational scale over the one I was interested in the most (the University of Chicago).

I was a middling student there. Many personal factors contributed to the disconnect between my high school grades and test scores and my grades at Harvard.

Well, if the best kid in the school can flop at Harvard, so can a motivated child excel at a "bad" school. As briantroutman says here, factors having nothing to do with the school or the quality or dedication of its teachers and staff can make a big difference.

You might also note, Brian, that I seem to be the only person here who considers diversity a value worth seeking out. I "grew up integrated" and benefited greatly from it. I think white kids should try it too, and maybe if their parents let them, they would.

This is the whole point of IntegratedSchools.org, an organization started by a white upper-middle-class woman in California to encourage people like her to consciously choose to put their children in a racially integrated or majority-black school. This, she has explained in a CityLab article on her and her movement, is one of the hardest things for a white middle-class parent to do, and it's because they buy into the thinking in the passage I boldfaced above.

The words she writes on the home page of her movement's website bear repeating here:

Quote:
Because school segregation is as much a story of failed public policy as it is one of white/privileged families thwarting it, our hearts-and-minds campaign offers a new model for integration in which this undertaking falls not on the backs of marginalized communities, but on white and/or privileged families who care about equity.
To put it bluntly, The folks who fled are as responsible for creating the current situation as the people who remained behind. They do have a responsibility for fixing it.

There are two Philadelphia neighborhoods where at least I think the potential for this approach to produce real change and improvement is high: Mt. Airy and Germantown, but especially Mt. Airy, because it has a sizable middle- and upper-middle-class black population, most of whom send their kids to district public schools in that neighborhood and neighboring Chestnut Hill. (Perhaps relevant aside: The man who owns half the commercial property on Germantown Avenue in Chestnut Hill is a childless gay white man in a committed relationship. He is a financial supporter of John Story Jencks, the district public school just down Germantown Avenue from his home. He has told me that he believes the teachers in that school do a good job with the children they educate and deserve his support, which makes him a one-man "Friends of" group [and Jencks has a Friends of group]. Very few Chestnut Hill parents of grade schoolers send their children there; the bulk of the student body comes from East Mount Airy.)

There are others: Fairmount. Graduate Hospital, where Chester Arthur is located. I could give you several more.

Mt. Airy USA, that neighborhood's community development corporation, sponsors tours for real estate agents where they take the agents to the neighborhood's three public schools to show them that good things are happening in them.

"If white liberals lived their values," someone else is quoted as saying in that CityLab article, "we would have significant integration."

Now, maybe none of this has anything to do with what people have been saying here. But I have this sneaking suspicion that it does.
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Old 05-22-2018, 09:27 PM
 
Location: Dude...., I'm right here
1,763 posts, read 1,537,376 times
Reputation: 1987
My educational journey is sort of similar to yours, only that my journey into elite schooling began in high school. I went to an elite boys HS for exceptional students, some who were undisputed geniuses. But when I take stock of my classmates, they are in all ranks of the social economic spectrum. At least 95% of my classmates went to University, though a handful did not graduate because they partied too much, kept bad company or both.

One of my classmate is a multi-millionaire (net worth north of $100M), he dropped out of high school (yes, high school, not college!) and he later went back to finish high school in a mediocre school but never went to college. 2 of the geniuses, one who attended Upenn on a full scholarship and the other studied nuclear physics quit living. They both quit their high flying jobs and went into seclusion.

Some are truck drivers (dropped out of college), at least 2 are chefs in casual dining restaurants, one's a hoodlum conning anyone who crosses his path (he dropped out of law school). Everyone else is in between but the majority are professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, dentists, bankers, scientists, journalists, pilots, pharmacists, accountants, etc etc).

In the news this week, one of my college mates who dropped out in sophomore just closed a $1B funding deal for a 20% equity deal in his company. It's been a hard long slug for him but he is slowly proving his doubters wrong.

Quote:
Originally Posted by MarketStEl View Post

Other factors do come into play. How do I know? My SAT scores were in the 95th percentile in high school. That and my grades were good enough to get me into the best colleges in the country - and I picked the ne plus ultra on the reputational scale over the one I was interested in the most (the University of Chicago).

I was a middling student there. Many personal factors contributed to the disconnect between my high school grades and test scores and my grades at Harvard.

Well, if the best kid in the school can flop at Harvard, so can a motivated child excel at a "bad" school. As briantroutman says here, factors having nothing to do with the school or the quality or dedication of its teachers and staff can make a big difference.
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Old 05-22-2018, 11:50 PM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
14,060 posts, read 8,932,332 times
Reputation: 10393
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1ondoner View Post
My educational journey is sort of similar to yours, only that my journey into elite schooling began in high school. I went to an elite boys HS for exceptional students, some who were undisputed geniuses. But when I take stock of my classmates, they are in all ranks of the social economic spectrum. At least 95% of my classmates went to University, though a handful did not graduate because they partied too much, kept bad company or both.

One of my classmate is a multi-millionaire (net worth north of $100M), he dropped out of high school (yes, high school, not college!) and he later went back to finish high school in a mediocre school but never went to college. 2 of the geniuses, one who attended Upenn on a full scholarship and the other studied nuclear physics quit living. They both quit their high flying jobs and went into seclusion.

Some are truck drivers (dropped out of college), at least 2 are chefs in casual dining restaurants, one's a hoodlum conning anyone who crosses his path (he dropped out of law school). Everyone else is in between but the majority are professionals (doctors, lawyers, engineers, dentists, bankers, scientists, journalists, pilots, pharmacists, accountants, etc etc).

In the news this week, one of my college mates who dropped out in sophomore just closed a $1B funding deal for a 20% equity deal in his company. It's been a hard long slug for him but he is slowly proving his doubters wrong.
I should note here that my "journey into elite schooling" also began in high school.

I spent my first seven years of school in a Kansas City (Mo.) public school - looking back, I consider it karmic that it was named for the founder of The Kansas City Star - but in fifth grade, one of the UMKC education students who taught summer enrichment (not remedial) classes at William Rockhill Nelson took my mother aside one day when she picked me up from school, handed her a brochure about Pembroke-Country Day School, and said to her, "You should consider this, because your son needs more than he's going to get at Southwest High."

That was the best public high school in the city. It was located in the silk-stocking district. Most of its graduates went on to college, including a handful each year who went to the Ivies or to prestigious small colleges like Williams or Grinnell. And this was in 1970, before the Kansas City public schools began their precipitous decline.

So my mom shelled out to pick up the part of Pem-Day tuition my partial scholarship didn't cover.

Now let's look at "success" for a minute.

My 51 classmates followed a variety of paths after high school too. One is a successful and established modern sculptor in New York City. Another went into the family business along with his brother two classes ahead of him: Russell Stover Candies, which the two brothers sold to Lindt three years ago. One went into the Air Force - the first Pem-Day graduate in the school's history not to go to college after graduating.

That student greeted me warmly at our 40th class reunion two years ago. Then, just before I was about to leave, he asked for a picture of the two of us together, and as we shook hands, he said to me:

"You were my hero in high school. I actually lived in the projects on the North Side. I didn't say much at school because I didn't want the other boys to find out. I was struggling in my classes, and you helped me with my homework. You made it look so easy."

I'm slack-jawed in the photo. The guy, for what it's worth, was white. I was one of only three black students in my class.

At my 10th class reunion, the classmate who seemed to me the most content and at peace with himself had chosen to go into the ministry - he was the pastor of a small Methodist church in an equally small town in Illinois. He hasn't come to the reunions since then; I would love to know how he sees the world now. Others in my class may have earned more or garnered more recognition, but he struck me as the one who had found true success first.

I guess the point of this ramble is yet another variation on the one I've been making throughout here: Test scores, like money or material possessions, may serve as a marker for other things, but they do not necessarily signal how a given individual will turn out. They may predict outcomes in the aggregate, but we don't live in the aggregate - we live in the particular. We shouldn't let the aggregate trump that if there are signs that the particular might be different.
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Old 05-23-2018, 09:44 AM
 
5,546 posts, read 6,851,862 times
Reputation: 3826
Good schools means a lot of things, ESPECIALLY safety. How can I trust that my child won't be stuck with nonsense like this?

Toxic City: Environmental perils in Philadelphia - Philly

And it's not just lead paint, there's an entire series about it if you look through the topics. Well-researched and very scary.
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Old 05-23-2018, 10:48 AM
 
Location: Dude...., I'm right here
1,763 posts, read 1,537,376 times
Reputation: 1987
I saw this article among other recent articles which have been very critical of Philadelphia school district. I didn't bother posting them because the proponents of the city public schools are making an emotive argument and don't care what the statistics say.

Beyond the articles, the videos on YouTube are even more worrying. But hey, come ye all from the suburbs and change the city schools.


Quote:
Originally Posted by AJNEOA View Post
Good schools means a lot of things, ESPECIALLY safety. How can I trust that my child won't be stuck with nonsense like this?

Toxic City: Environmental perils in Philadelphia - Philly

And it's not just lead paint, there's an entire series about it if you look through the topics. Well-researched and very scary.
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Old 05-23-2018, 02:02 PM
 
Location: Germantown, Philadelphia
14,060 posts, read 8,932,332 times
Reputation: 10393
Quote:
Originally Posted by 1ondoner View Post
I saw this article among other recent articles which have been very critical of Philadelphia school district. I didn't bother posting them because the proponents of the city public schools are making an emotive argument and don't care what the statistics say.

Beyond the articles, the videos on YouTube are even more worrying. But hey, come ye all from the suburbs and change the city schools.
When I moved here in 1983, there were no neighborhoods at all in the city of Philadelphia that were gaining residents. Yet the slope of the population loss curve, which was steepest in the decade 1960-1970, was decreasing.

And in the 1990 Census, there were two gainers. Then there were more with each passing year's estimates. Then, sometime shortly after 2000, the slope of the curve reversed and the city was gaining residents again.

Now, there are dozens of neighborhoods gaining residents. The slope of the population gain curve, though, is getting shallower because immigration from abroad is slowing.

Nonetheless, even though the statistics are what they are, change begins somewhere, and it usually begins small. That series AJNEOA posted certainly does not inspire confidence in the administrators at 440 North Broad who are still in charge of keeping the buildings up to snuff. And no, I wouldn't send my kids to a school like that either. And I've seen pictures of other school buildings in bad shape where lead hasn't yet become an issue.

I hope someone at 440 was taking notes.

But I don't think any of this refutes the points I was making. Again, change has to start somewhere. And no, it isn't fair to insist that those left behind when others who could have made a difference fled do all the heavy lifting.
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