Not Good News: Austin #3 in overall economic segregation in the nation (West: neighborhood, school districts)

[sojourner77]

Originally Posted by centralaustinite

Shoot, as the suburban districts wrestle with rapid expansion AISD might become more desirable. Slipped into a story on Manor HS becoming a one school/two campus system was the notice that Lake Travis HS converted an on-site MS to become a 9th grade center, setting the stage for Lake Travis HS to grow to 3500 students!! I cannot imagine anything less desirable than that!

You're right, the cost of AISD is already baked in, and you don't have to pay for more facilities for future transplants like LTISD, DSISD or LISD

How would you like to be a homeowner in Leander ISD (Steiner Ranch/Cedar Park)?

"The district’s $3.7 billion in projected debt is higher than all but Houston and Dallas, school districts with several times the number of students. Leander’s debt per student, projected at more than $114,000, is by far the highest in Texas for comparably sized districts."

Texas schools pass debt on to the next generation « Watchdog.org

[Dopo]

Originally Posted by ImOnFiya

The results of this study explained by Richard Florida should be a warning sign that Austin needs to invest in the "missing middle" in housing types or we risk jepardizing the competitive landscape that has made the city so attractive to aspiring job seekers.

What an idiot (author)
This is not called segregation, it's called "Economic disparity"

But of course, "segregation" will get him more publicity with national news that love story about racial warfare.

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by sojourner77

You're right, the cost of AISD is already baked in, and ou don't have to pay for more facilities for future transplants like LTISD, DSISD or LISD

How would you like to be a homeowner in Leander ISD (Steiner Ranch/Cedar Park)?

"The district’s $3.7 billion in projected debt is higher than all but Houston and Dallas, school districts with several times the number of students. Leander’s debt per student, projected at more than $114,000, is by far the highest in Texas for comparably sized districts."

Texas schools pass debt on to the next generation « Watchdog.org

Seems like a bogus article. $114k of "projected" debt. Which I guess means the total debt at maturity, given the type of bonds. Of course, that'll be $114 k in _2050_ dollars (which is way less in current-dollars). And divided among way more students (the article forward-projects the numerator, but not the denominator, seems biased).

[verybadgnome]

Segregation is a hard topic to analyze simply because a lot of it is self-segregation in which case it is not necessarily negative but is also a means of community-building with other people of similar backgrounds. Also when you have minorities at very low percentages, e.g. AAs in Austin, they will not want to dilute further and will cluster in certain areas, e.g. Manor.

I am less concerned about segregation than I am about the crime rate, educational attainment, income growth, physical health, etc. If someone can correlate these issues to segregation and provide some evidence of causation then I'm all ears.

[centralaustinite]

Florida claims that it is the wealthy self-segregating that causes the disparity he identifies.

[Trainwreck20]

the article forward-projects the numerator, but not the denominator, seems biased

Ha! I did not read the article, but if that is the case, that is a huge 'sleight of hand'; the massive debt is in response to the massive growth - that is the fastest growing district in the state.

[Aquitaine]

AISD LASA is the best high school in central Texas. Anderson, Austin, Bowie and McCallum

This is answering a different charge. The point is "Central Austin AISD schools are terrible," and secondarily, "AISD is poorly run."

You are pointing out, correctly of course, that there exist good schools within AISD, and in one case a truly excellent school. These things aren't mutually exclusive.

Let's go back to our typical CD poster looking for a place to live. I certainly wouldn't move here on the assumption that I could land in LASA with my family, since it's a pretty tall order to get in. There's Bowie, which is probably the biggest reason people recommend SW Austin, in spite of its overcrowding and the general 'too many people' problem for South Austin, where AISD is still paying interest on money borrowed, what, 7 years ago now to buy land they haven't bought to build a school they haven't built. That AISD does score some wins doesn't mean we shouldn't praise them when they do, but this is the kind of thing that can only happen in government, or in the private sector when you've got crony capitalism going on (in which case the market would shut down the private school, or the charter authorizer would revoke the charter; problem solved, either way).

More to the point, you run into more truly terrible schools as you move closer in. Crockett, Travis, Eastside, LBJ, Reagan, Del Valle, Akins. Sure some are 'less bad' but you have to be pretty forgiving to think AISD is a successful institution when it can produce exactly one top school, a handful of good ones, and a much larger number of mediocre to poor ones.

[gpurcell]

Del Valle isn't AISD.

Edit: Austin High, LASA, Bowie, Anderson, McCallum are all good high schools.

[centralaustinite]

Actually, I'd put even AISDs "bad schools" up against schools with similar demographics (Travis HS for example is over 80% economically disadvantaged and about 90% Hispanic) in ANY other urban district. AISD does better than its urban peers with the population they are working with!

Entire books have been writing about the turn-around at Reagan!

And no one would ever consider LBJ to be "central."

[Aquitaine]

(Travis HS for example is over 80% economically disadvantaged and about 90% Hispanic) in ANY other urban district

That other urban, government-run public school districts are abysmal doesn't tell me that AISD is any good. It just tells me that the government is terrible at running urban school districts.

"Blame the demographic" has been proven as false as "blame the money."

I'll concede "many other urban districts" but not "any other urban districts." Let's look at Harlem.

Ranked in the top 1% of all New York State schools in math, and the top 7% in
English Language Arts on last year’s state exams, Success Academy has reversed the
achievement gap for African American and Hispanic students, which are about 86%
of its enrollment. On the 2013 state exams, 80% of Success Academy’s African
American students and 88% of its Hispanic students were math proficient, compared
with 50% and 47% for the city’s white students.

This is not one school, but a few dozen public charter schools. They decided to stop buying the old lines about "we need more money" or "minorities don't do well" and I have yet to see a convincing argument against the results. I've seen plenty of unconvincing ones, like "they cherry pick students" (union myth) and "they counsel out special ed" (also a myth - they retain a slightly higher percentage than traditional public schools do).

My point here is not that you're totally mistaken about AISD, because clearly you know what you're talking about in the arena that is traditional public school districts in a lot of the United States. You're also quite right in contrasting some of the good ones with many of the failing ones, but we've always known that the government is capable of running a good school, under the right circumstances; it just isn't capable of running a good system that includes schools that don't have good circumstances, and so my goal post for "is this a good school" is higher than it would be if I still believed that the issue was about money or demographics.

I feel particularly strongly about AISD because, unlike New York or California, they aren't bound by union contracts if they want to make a change in how they run their school. Operationally, they can hire and fire whom they please; they don't have things like the "ten foot rule" where a custodian can paint up to 10 feet but the painter's union has to do everything over that. There's no play book from the 60s that determines every little detail of how the system is run. There's just AISD and how they choose to run their system.