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I can tell you that, through most of the bay area at least, those policies are mostly about intentional socioeconomic segregation. My family has deep ties to l

I can tell you that, through most of the bay area at least, those policies are mostly about intentional socioeconomic segregation. My family has deep ties to local education infrastructure and its well known that most of the advocates for these policies are trying to keep poor kids out of their schools. While they don't say it in public forums they're generally more than happy to tell you in private.

rolltiide 7y ago
Exactly, gatekeeping everyone that doesn't have two Au Pair that are taking turns sunbathing on your terrace also, squad goals.
lonelappde 7y ago
You are claiming that poor parents will changed their school choice based on the availability of parent-teacher conferences? And that the problem of poverty is overemployment, not underemployment?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Poor parents often don't have a choice: they can't afford to take time off from their job(s).
  - protomyth 7y ago
    Yeah, it's the easiest way to discriminate against poor people without getting into trouble. Hell, you can even point to papers that say parental participation in schools helps the children. All the while you know poor folks won't apply.
  - tripzilch 7y ago
    Am I understanding correctly that this is in fact literally the same issue as the voter registration problem in the US? (or was it the voting booths. anyway, the problem of being too far away and during "working hours" strongly selecting against the underclass) Same thing right? There's a large underclass in the US that simply cannot take part in public society activities because they are indentured?
- marcinzm 7y ago
  This isn't about poverty, this is about those trying to move themselves or their kids out of poverty. The people who work hard at jobs and push their kids to go to good schools. Poverty is a complex issue that cannot be summarized in a single word.
- hwbehrens 7y ago
  I can't speak for the Bay Area, but my region exhibits similar patterns. Consider an example. A "good" school might have 100 slots for out-of-area kindergartners, distributed via a lottery system. However, the lottery system uses a biased distribution which preferentially selects from students who have been on the waitlist longer. This system is easily defensible by school administrators in the name of "fairness" to students who have waited longer. The unspoken desire, however, is to preferentially select students with a higher socioeconomic index, because such students tend to score higher on standardized tests (and therefore maintain the school's current "good" ranking). Asking for this information explicitly is, naturally, forbidden. Instead, the school waits for parents to come for site visits during working hours. These visits are attended overwhelmingly by stay-at-home parents, which correlate with socioeconomically-advantaged families, for the simple reason that they can afford to have a parent stay at home (the -economic side of socioeconomic). Underemployed parents cannot attend, because they are still working, but usually at jobs which do not offer flexible work hours. Unemployed parents can attend, but rarely do so, because the chronically unemployed statistically come from lower social backgrounds (the socio- side) that either do not value education as highly, or may not know that the concept of "school visits" even exist. Then, when these parents visit, the schools inform them of the existence of the waiting list. However, information about the wait list (and especially details about its biased selectivity) will not be available by phone or website until enrollment opens. Thus, parents who attend the tours will be preferentially selected, since they are on the waiting list first, and the school can put their finger on the socioeconomic scale without ever asking parents for sensitive information. For purely public schools which do not allow out-of-area students, this approach isn't relevant, because they are required to accept students from the local area and only the local area. These schools don't care, because the locations themselves correlate with socioeconomic factors, due to property values tracking school achievement. For charter schools, which pass all students through similar systems, it allows them to accept statistically-advantageous students across all levels, leading to better outcomes overall (and shifting the remaining disadvantaged students, and the correspondingly lower level of achievement they statistically will achieve, to low-income public schools).
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Spooky23 7y ago
  People know when they aren’t welcome, and anticipate the passive aggressive treatment they will likely expect.
- Hermitian909 7y ago
  So the following is a true story: In a district in the bay area, one of the elementary schools was given a certain special designation that allowed them to accept kids from the district by lottery. The condition of entering the lottery was as follows: 1. A parent must take a 2 hour tour of the school, tour times were between 9 am and 3 pm. 2. A parent must sign an agreement to volunteer at the school at least 3 days a year. Number 2 was unenforceable, and many flouted it, but poorer (mostly non-white) families who actually managed to schedule the tour generally backed out upon hearing that requirement. Diversity plummeted, the school went from 60% white to 90% white in 5 years (though the district as a whole became less white). This lasted over a decade, and only recently was the system overturned by popular vote. Every incoming class since then has been significantly more diverse. -------------- The point is that those who can afford to live in the bay area and not work every weekday are the well to do. As a software engineer I can usually just tell my boss "I've got an important personal matter" and get the day off. People I know who work as janitors or barista's often get told "well, if you don't show up you're fired" for the same request.
  - georgeburdell 7y ago
    Sounds like an elementary school in my Bay Area district. Lottery admissions. Parents are required to volunteer ~10 hours per year and pay for uniforms. The school is 90% Asian even though Asians make up 1/3 of the city. Another one that's more art focused and requires 4 hours of volunteering PER WEEK is majority white even though whites are 1/3 of the population.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      > and pay for uniforms It's bad enough that the school enforces a school uniform in the first place, let alone has the nerve to make parents pay for it.
      - jclulow 7y ago
        There are lots of benefits to uniforms. In NSW (Australia) public schools have uniforms, and parents pay for them. Low income families are generally able to obtain financial assistance through some grant, or fundraising programme; sometimes through donated uniforms. Uniforms actually help with socio-economic gaps: everybody dresses the same, regardless of whether you can afford more expensive status symbol clothing or not.
plughs 7y ago
Every year I see what a insurmountable advantage my kid has by having educated, comfortably well off parents. He's in 3rd grade and last week he had a homework assignment that had to be completed on a computer. What, your kid doesn't have their own computer at home? Tough luck! We're also already into 'projects' - more hours of work, more resources to buy. "oh you can do it with stuff around the house" (no you can't) No one wants to talk about it and it infuriates me. There are kids who are just out of the running from the moment they enter kindergarten, and everyone is going to blame their parents or their 'culture' and refuse to see what's right in front of them. There is no more 'public' education, only middle-income private education. It's a disgrace. edit: raspberry pi A lot of middle class parents I know would spend 10 minutes trying to understand the raspberry pi site and give up. HN tends to vastly overestimate people's technical skills. For poor parents with no tech background - forget it.
- corey_moncure 7y ago
  Are grade schoolers doing assignments that can't reasonably be completed on a raspberry pi grade computer or lower? It's difficult for me to imagine it, or the family that has two working parents yet legitimately can't fit $40 into the budget over the entirety of their child's career in school.
  - kbrackbill 7y ago
    That's a little disingenuous, you can't just use a raspberry pi by itself. You need an SD card, keyboard, mouse (probably), display (maybe could use a TV for this if you have one). It seems like it'd be at least $100. That's still not a ton, but for a family working a bunch of minimum wage or gig jobs it's not nothing. edit: not to mention internet, router, wifi dongle or ethernet cord, etc.
    - rhacker 7y ago
      And the know how to do all of that and what to buy and where to buy it.
yellowapple 7y ago
Reminds me of how my high school's borders (for which neighborhoods would be assigned to that high school) just so happened to only include affluent (or rural, in my case) areas and excluded less-affluent areas (instead of basing it purely on distance). It was a new school, too (it and the adjoining middle school opened for my 8th grade year), so of course it got all the nice stuff while the kids in poorer neighborhoods had to make do with older stuff in older buildings (and/or portables).
algaeontoast 7y ago
The same could be said about the Bay Area in general... A place where affluent Palo Alto teens made fun of me (an adult) for driving a “2012 VW”...
C1sc0cat 7y ago
Its pretty common world wide and has been so for ever. Even in My grandfathers day (Head teacher in WW2 era) all the poor kids left school at 14. And only a few smart and lucky kids from better off working class families made it to apprenticeships and the really lucky ones Grammar school. If I had stayed in Birmingham (UK) my mum told me they would have tried to get me into King Edwards and use Granddads Influence to help. BTW this is The King Edwards that Tolkien went to and is normally in the top 3 selective schools in the UK

rolltiide 7y ago

Exactly, gatekeeping everyone that doesn't have two Au Pair that are taking turns sunbathing on your terrace also, squad goals.

lonelappde 7y ago

You are claiming that poor parents will changed their school choice based on the availability of parent-teacher conferences? And that the problem of poverty is overemployment, not underemployment?

saagarjha 7y ago
Poor parents often don't have a choice: they can't afford to take time off from their job(s).
- protomyth 7y ago
  Yeah, it's the easiest way to discriminate against poor people without getting into trouble. Hell, you can even point to papers that say parental participation in schools helps the children. All the while you know poor folks won't apply.
- tripzilch 7y ago
  Am I understanding correctly that this is in fact literally the same issue as the voter registration problem in the US? (or was it the voting booths. anyway, the problem of being too far away and during "working hours" strongly selecting against the underclass) Same thing right? There's a large underclass in the US that simply cannot take part in public society activities because they are indentured?
marcinzm 7y ago
This isn't about poverty, this is about those trying to move themselves or their kids out of poverty. The people who work hard at jobs and push their kids to go to good schools. Poverty is a complex issue that cannot be summarized in a single word.
hwbehrens 7y ago
I can't speak for the Bay Area, but my region exhibits similar patterns. Consider an example. A "good" school might have 100 slots for out-of-area kindergartners, distributed via a lottery system. However, the lottery system uses a biased distribution which preferentially selects from students who have been on the waitlist longer. This system is easily defensible by school administrators in the name of "fairness" to students who have waited longer. The unspoken desire, however, is to preferentially select students with a higher socioeconomic index, because such students tend to score higher on standardized tests (and therefore maintain the school's current "good" ranking). Asking for this information explicitly is, naturally, forbidden. Instead, the school waits for parents to come for site visits during working hours. These visits are attended overwhelmingly by stay-at-home parents, which correlate with socioeconomically-advantaged families, for the simple reason that they can afford to have a parent stay at home (the -economic side of socioeconomic). Underemployed parents cannot attend, because they are still working, but usually at jobs which do not offer flexible work hours. Unemployed parents can attend, but rarely do so, because the chronically unemployed statistically come from lower social backgrounds (the socio- side) that either do not value education as highly, or may not know that the concept of "school visits" even exist. Then, when these parents visit, the schools inform them of the existence of the waiting list. However, information about the wait list (and especially details about its biased selectivity) will not be available by phone or website until enrollment opens. Thus, parents who attend the tours will be preferentially selected, since they are on the waiting list first, and the school can put their finger on the socioeconomic scale without ever asking parents for sensitive information. For purely public schools which do not allow out-of-area students, this approach isn't relevant, because they are required to accept students from the local area and only the local area. These schools don't care, because the locations themselves correlate with socioeconomic factors, due to property values tracking school achievement. For charter schools, which pass all students through similar systems, it allows them to accept statistically-advantageous students across all levels, leading to better outcomes overall (and shifting the remaining disadvantaged students, and the correspondingly lower level of achievement they statistically will achieve, to low-income public schools).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Spooky23 7y ago
People know when they aren’t welcome, and anticipate the passive aggressive treatment they will likely expect.
Hermitian909 7y ago
So the following is a true story: In a district in the bay area, one of the elementary schools was given a certain special designation that allowed them to accept kids from the district by lottery. The condition of entering the lottery was as follows: 1. A parent must take a 2 hour tour of the school, tour times were between 9 am and 3 pm. 2. A parent must sign an agreement to volunteer at the school at least 3 days a year. Number 2 was unenforceable, and many flouted it, but poorer (mostly non-white) families who actually managed to schedule the tour generally backed out upon hearing that requirement. Diversity plummeted, the school went from 60% white to 90% white in 5 years (though the district as a whole became less white). This lasted over a decade, and only recently was the system overturned by popular vote. Every incoming class since then has been significantly more diverse. -------------- The point is that those who can afford to live in the bay area and not work every weekday are the well to do. As a software engineer I can usually just tell my boss "I've got an important personal matter" and get the day off. People I know who work as janitors or barista's often get told "well, if you don't show up you're fired" for the same request.
- georgeburdell 7y ago
  Sounds like an elementary school in my Bay Area district. Lottery admissions. Parents are required to volunteer ~10 hours per year and pay for uniforms. The school is 90% Asian even though Asians make up 1/3 of the city. Another one that's more art focused and requires 4 hours of volunteering PER WEEK is majority white even though whites are 1/3 of the population.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    > and pay for uniforms It's bad enough that the school enforces a school uniform in the first place, let alone has the nerve to make parents pay for it.
    - jclulow 7y ago
      There are lots of benefits to uniforms. In NSW (Australia) public schools have uniforms, and parents pay for them. Low income families are generally able to obtain financial assistance through some grant, or fundraising programme; sometimes through donated uniforms. Uniforms actually help with socio-economic gaps: everybody dresses the same, regardless of whether you can afford more expensive status symbol clothing or not.

plughs 7y ago

Every year I see what a insurmountable advantage my kid has by having educated, comfortably well off parents. He's in 3rd grade and last week he had a homework assignment that had to be completed on a computer. What, your kid doesn't have their own computer at home? Tough luck! We're also already into 'projects' - more hours of work, more resources to buy. "oh you can do it with stuff around the house" (no you can't) No one wants to talk about it and it infuriates me. There are kids who are just out of the running from the moment they enter kindergarten, and everyone is going to blame their parents or their 'culture' and refuse to see what's right in front of them. There is no more 'public' education, only middle-income private education. It's a disgrace. edit: raspberry pi A lot of middle class parents I know would spend 10 minutes trying to understand the raspberry pi site and give up. HN tends to vastly overestimate people's technical skills. For poor parents with no tech background - forget it.

corey_moncure 7y ago
Are grade schoolers doing assignments that can't reasonably be completed on a raspberry pi grade computer or lower? It's difficult for me to imagine it, or the family that has two working parents yet legitimately can't fit $40 into the budget over the entirety of their child's career in school.
- kbrackbill 7y ago
  That's a little disingenuous, you can't just use a raspberry pi by itself. You need an SD card, keyboard, mouse (probably), display (maybe could use a TV for this if you have one). It seems like it'd be at least $100. That's still not a ton, but for a family working a bunch of minimum wage or gig jobs it's not nothing. edit: not to mention internet, router, wifi dongle or ethernet cord, etc.
  - rhacker 7y ago
    And the know how to do all of that and what to buy and where to buy it.

yellowapple 7y ago

Reminds me of how my high school's borders (for which neighborhoods would be assigned to that high school) just so happened to only include affluent (or rural, in my case) areas and excluded less-affluent areas (instead of basing it purely on distance). It was a new school, too (it and the adjoining middle school opened for my 8th grade year), so of course it got all the nice stuff while the kids in poorer neighborhoods had to make do with older stuff in older buildings (and/or portables).

algaeontoast 7y ago

The same could be said about the Bay Area in general... A place where affluent Palo Alto teens made fun of me (an adult) for driving a “2012 VW”...

C1sc0cat 7y ago

Its pretty common world wide and has been so for ever. Even in My grandfathers day (Head teacher in WW2 era) all the poor kids left school at 14. And only a few smart and lucky kids from better off working class families made it to apprenticeships and the really lucky ones Grammar school. If I had stayed in Birmingham (UK) my mum told me they would have tried to get me into King Edwards and use Granddads Influence to help. BTW this is The King Edwards that Tolkien went to and is normally in the top 3 selective schools in the UK