seperis | the children (of the wealthy districts) are our future

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the children (of the wealthy districts) are our future

Picked up from my flist and also rage_free:

Woman Gets Jail Time in School Residency Case

Short version: she established residency for her kids with her father so they could go to a better school. She's doing jail time, has huge fines, and she's currently a teaching assistant actively working toward a teaching license and a felony strips her of both.

[Note: it has been reported the judge is writing a letter on the woman's behalf to recommend she keep her license and still be able to get her teacher's license. Not that a moment of not-quite-as horrible is an improvement, but at least there's a chance she won't lose her future employment opportunities while carrying around a fucking felony conviction.]

So this is where the defense goes, "I know it's wrong, but..." but seriously, even starting with that I'm already tuning this shit out. She did absolutely nothing wrong; those policies are evil.

Public school funding is based on and adheres to some of the least subtle and most defended racism and classism based economic policies that pretend they're about education and are actually about assuring that Black, Hispanic, and lower class children, of which many are those horrific single mothers who are destroying America, get an unequal education that makes it difficult to impossible to get out of poverty; I mean, that's the entire point of its existence. When people talk about how it just needs reform but aren't based on outright racism and classism, really? Really? Like what, Jim Crow laws just needed fine-tuning but weren't exclusionary by the very nature of their existence?

The system isn't broken; this is exactly how it's supposed to function, okay? It's doing a wonderful job. There is no bootstrap shit; kids shouldn't have to fucking bootstrap, period.

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... I'm taking from this that wealthier districts in the US get more public funding for education? Which, if so, is unutterably disgusting.

It's so incredibly dumb; money is based on the property taxes of the school district. So it's not even subtle; if your neighborhood is poor, the property taxes are low, and the school gets less. You also get allocated money based on representative sample of the number of students that show up every day for a certain period of time. Especially in neighborhoods with a high immigrant population and in areas where the school isn't in walking distance or very long bus ride away and few people can afford cars--or gas--or parents who are migrant workers/farmers or day laborers, etc.

It's fucked up. I mean, I'm continually surprised anyone with a straight face defends the current system.

:(((( That is just totally indefensible.

I mean. NZ does not have a perfect system: money is based on school population on the first week of the school year, so the same thing with immigrant or mobile populations applies - but schools in poorer areas get some top-up money from the state, to partly compensate for what the school loses out on in "voluntary" fees. It doesn't compensate, but it kind of tries to. We do have zoning, and there are a few schools which have such a good reputation that they affect the property prices in their area (but at least that doesn't, in turn, affect the school's state funding, omg).

Every time anyone tries to equalize, people act like someone is stealing their guns and lungs. It's unreal.

I am liking your system. It's not quite so hopeless.

Seconding this. There are huge, *huge* differences in funding in the US across states, and between districts within states. It doesn't begin to address differences in relative costs of living in one district over another, either. It may cost less for a parent to live in Mississippi, for instance, but they're still spending radically less on the kids for the most basic things than in places like Rhode Island or Maine. This is also where property taxes and voter registrations in districts get into political power, because where you live determines who's writing laws for your area.

This very week I'll be entering the public preschool lottery for my 3-year-old daughter. (DC is awesome in that it offers free full-day school beginning at age three -- but it doesn't guarantee a slot until kindergarten (age 5), so there's a lottery for the preschool(3)/pre-K(4) slots.)

It has been so disheartening to research schools. Technically all the schools in DC are in one district with the same amount of funding, but in practice the disparities are enormous; some parents have enough time and money to allocate some to their child's school, and others simply don't; some neighborhoods are crammed with prosperous businesses ready to partner with their local schools, and others simply aren't; and so the economic inequalities are passed on.

The top schools are 70-80% white (in a city that is predominantly black); scores at those schools average in the 80s & 90s, and meanwhile there are schools on the other side of the city that are 100% black with scores in the 20s -- some in the teens, even.

Oh, and the top schools, in the most prosperous neighborhoods, don't even offer preschool at 3 -- they begin with pre-K at 4. And I'm sure the thinking there is something like, "why should we offer free preschool to families who can afford to pay?" But the result is, less affluent parents wind up settling for a lesser school because they can't easily afford to pay for another year of child care.

God. I'm so sorry. That's--argh. It's like, how do people look at these numbers and think this is okay?

They think it is okay. This is working out exactly as they wanted. They do not want their kids to compete on an equal footing with people of other ethnicities and races.
They'd also love to redline housing the way the banks used to do; it means refusing to offer any money for purchasing or repair loans in ethnic neighborhoods. Whcih means poor and colored folks couldn't get loans to buy or sell houses, they had to finance themselves, slowly, or let the places fall apart. Another phrase for this is ghetto, both in the old WWII Jewish quarter sense and in the LA rotten gangland sense.
It's really obvious and shameless.

Edited 2011-01-26 05:25 (UTC)

This is just fucking depressing. I appreciate your rant. :(

Austin is losing two high performance inner city schools possibly; it's on the list for the huge public education budget cuts. I just stared at teh reports on that, because--closing the high performing schools in budget cuts? Really? That's not even subtle. They don't even have the shitty excuse of "low performing".

ETA: They're keeping the 30 million dollar building for the school board, though.

Edited 2011-01-26 03:04 (UTC)

I. I can't. I just can't!

I'd read recently that North Carolina is going to 'discontinue' the 'redistricting' of the school systems because there's no more need for it. Seems we're all equal now, doncha know. Yeah. Separate but equal. Where have I heard that before??

I live in a majority Hispanic neighborhood. I have totally not noticed the school disparity here and say, up in Cat Mountain. We are living in a race-free world.

*bitter*

Oh, I myself live in one of the most ethnically-mixed cities in the country, we have the stats to prove it. Here, what we deal with is discrimination by economic class. We don't care what you are any more, except poor, or really, really rich. Ain't true of course, but the economic disparities are so huge it trumps everything else.
Middle class is right out. You middle class folks with your unions are too damn uppity, you speak up at meetings and you go out and vote and you just cause trouble. (Remember seeing anti-union rants against state employees? Against teachers? Against "greedy auto workers?" ) So, hey, we have pundits and we have media and stuff to work on turning everybody against you. We have ways of dealing with *you*.

Now, one thing I really don't understand about all of this... if a ruling elite of a very few families is running the place, and they consider the rest of us about as useful as a few more Haitians dying of dysentery in those cardboard shacks outside the barbwire fences, then why do they even bother acting like we're any threat? Why are they trashing the place into a third world country? (There's stats on the economics of that, too.)
Mexico has regular issues with their ruling elites being stupid about things from ignorance, but they aren't all idiots. And it's not just a difference in population we're talking about here.
China has a lot more bodies to deal with than America, and they want economic prosperity as much as possible, as widely as possible. (And clamp down the censors so nobody talks about the pollution they're grappling with, or failing to.) Doesn't mean they're gonna share much of it, but they're not trying to tear down *all* of their own people.
Another thing... I understand any given corporation (like Wallyworld) wants to minimize their expenses and push as much of the cost of, say, their employees' health care off onto the common tax burden. Many of their people have to go on welfare when they get sick. Makes perfect sense, right?
Besides, the oligarchic streak of Republicans love high unemployment--everybody shuts up about abusive supervisors and nobody dares report safety problems and labor gets cheaper and cheaper. If your corporation has deep enough pockets, you love the failure of smaller business, it means you're squeezing out competitors and you'll eventually be able to jack up your monopolistic prices, when nobody has anywhere else to go for energy or property loans or media or cars or whatever. (Yeah, Comcast, lookin' at you.) Hey, from a robber baron POV, it's all good news.
But how useful is it to maintain all your young black and Hispanic or skinhead guys as drug runners? Sure, useful for armies, lots of desperate cannon fodder. But drugs? Whut? There's no return on investment generated there. The junkies are a net drain on resources, though they extract money from their relatives and robbery victims pretty well. Drug gangs are like pyramid schemes, nobody at the bottom makes any money. They engender fear and disruption, make people cower in fear of both them and of the police.
Sure, individuals may be scrabbling along and getting a little wealthier from organized crime, so that's enough to explain why they're all promoting another type of pyramid scheme--same as all those collapsed Wall Street schemes.
But why is that tolerated at the top? Why am I looking at a pack of blithering Xtian idiots in office shamelessly trying to extract wealth like a sucking drain? ("We're not arguing about the label, we're just arguing about the price, madam.") Going too far, taking it to the point the place isn't even able to function as a consumer culture, which is what we've been raised to produce.
Stack all of this up together, and it means *nobody* has any money for consumer goods.
"Hey, we're all livin' under the bridge as long as we can 'fore the cops roust us, bro, where you bin?"
I'm sorry, 12 per cent unemployment is not a functioning consumer culture buying weird doodads of plastic from China any more. People stop buying things like food, it's so *downer* you know.
Which leaves us with a mystery. You'd think various of the monolithic authoritarian religious groups would be alarmed by all this failure of investments--talk about the long haul. Even if they're into shame and guilt as power tools, and fear is great for controlling the unwashed masses, a wealthy elite who's in it for the long term should want prosperity with a steady net improvement building their investments, not devastating "oops!-wreckage!" in all directions.
I can't help but wonder what the logic really is.
And if it really is entirely fallout from "oopsie, my bad!" from Wall Street's games, shouldn't we be seeing cracks as the retribution begins?

Edited (typos, argh!) 2011-01-26 06:02 (UTC)

two words for you: private prisons. If you keep poor persons of color poor and uneducated, that forces them into illegal jobs, which lets you jail them, which lets you bleed off huge amounts of public tax money from the government. the more of them you jail, the more money you get to warehouse them. not to mention all the free labor you can get out of them. free labor gives you a higher profit margin than actually paying for it.

and no one cares about the long term. fuck every else, man. they got theirs.

Thank you, you've made a very good point. I knew about that, and from the information I've seen, you're absolutely right about the shocking amount of money extraction in such systems. Well, so long as government *has* any money, given the rhetoric that everybody wants to throw out government--and I daresay somehow the corruptioneers will manage to maintain enough of a government for that.
It just drives it all the harder toward a rigidly segregated crime/police state, of course.
*gaaah!*
Do we have any counter-pressures mitigating against any of this?

Thank you, you've made a very good point. I should have put that bit of the puzzle in place, and didn't catch it.
I agree you're right on the size of it, too. From the information I've seen, you're absolutely right about the shocking amount of money extraction in such systems. Well, so long as government *has* any money, given the rhetoric that everybody wants to throw out government--and I daresay somehow the corruptioneers will manage to maintain enough of a government for that.
It just drives it all the harder toward a rigidly segregated crime/police state, of course.
*gaaah!*
Do we have any counter-pressures massive enough to go mitigating against any of this?

Edited 2011-01-26 06:39 (UTC)

What's stunning about this is that it worked. Raleigh had less of an achievement gap than any of the neighboring school systems. There are a couple of major comparative studies that show that Raleigh had less of an achievement gap than demographically similar school systems in the Northeast that had never been segregated.

Oh shit, it's working! Quick, let's shoot ourselves in the foot.

I have a friend who's a teacher in the Austin school district, at a school that has been on the NCLB brink of shutdown every year. Her stories are painful to hear, with the ESL and poverty-level kids that they're trying to serve while having to jump through all the mandated hoops.

NCLB has fucked up our educational system even worse than it was before.

A-fucking-men. Public schools in America are organized in the most mind-bogglingly stupid ways. It's not even the lack of basic human decency that gets me - it's the sheer illogic. I mean, how short-sighted to you have to be not to realize that higher volume of well-educated citizens -> more efficient work force -> higher standard of living for everyone including you? I've often considered giving up computer science and becoming a lobbyist for education reform - but then I remember that I am bad with people. sigh.

So, yes, my grandfather used to be a school administrator, and my father told me about his distaste for the state of education back in the 60s and 70s: Schools were there to serve as glorified babysitters, not to actually shape children into productive adults. (And then there's the point I've run across about how an ill-informed populace with no real grasp of history is more easily manipulated by punditry and propagandistic talking points into voting against their own best interests. Which, again, is a strong motivator for the people making the rules to want their own children getting a head start and the faceless masses getting handicapped from the outset.)

The school district spent about $6,000 to bring the case to trial. That included hiring a private investigator who followed Williams-Bolar and her children around while secretly videotaping their movements.

My God. Oh my God. Why is the school system not being prosecuted for that instead, and why on earth are they not using that six thousand dollars to spend on something else.

Sorry, can't read more. :(

*closes eyes* Gods damn it.

I...

No, I've got nothing, here.

This is really depressing.

I worked in one of those school districts. the ones where they only get so much money, and the kids have to be in school the first few weeks because that's how they get the money in the first place, but after that, well, as long as they show up for the standardized tests, we're pretty happy.

And I worked with teh little babies would loved coming to school, but you could see by the time they got the third grade, THIRD GRADE, most of them were already jaded about the whole process. Much less when they got to middle school, or high school.

Two years was more than enough for me. My mom is still working there. She has been for almost ten years. Which really isn't a lot of time, but she's fifth in line in seniority now. They can't keep teachers. They can't keep principals! I just...it drives me crazy. the kids want to learn. but they get burned out by all the stupid tests to get the money. god damned No Child Left Behind.

It's actually Every Child Left Behind.

God. You know, my parents pulled something like that when I was in junior high: We moved to another county over Thanksgiving weekend of my 8th grade year, and I was at one of those Talented-And-Gifted junior highs with advanced classes and stuff, and my parents thought it was worth keeping me there for the rest of the year. So we gave my father's office (still just within Dallas County) as my new address, and my mother drove me to school in the mornings instead of me being picked up by bus like I had been before (the school was pretty close to downtown Dallas, where she worked, so not too far out of the way for her) and I took a city bus to her office after school and sat in an empty neighboring cubicle doing my homework or reading and then rode home with her at the end of the workday. (I loved it because her office was mere blocks from the city library and I'd get off the bus a few stops early and swing by there at least once a week.)

Also, completely OT, happy birthday!

Helpful infographics:

Ethnic makeup of Copley-Fairlawn Middle School.

Akron school system demographics.

Very sad picture of Ms. Williams-Bolar.

Hmm.

There is no bootstrap shit; kids shouldn't have to fucking bootstrap, period.

This.

Ugh. That is disturbingly close to where I grew up and just...yeah. There are no words for how fucked up that is.

That is disgusting. Man...ugh.

Oh, UGH. [winces] The grand theft thing, I feel actually physically sick about that. How dare she "steal" something for her kids that doesn't rightfully belong to them, like an education. God, that poor woman. :(

My aunt and uncle did something similar for their son; he wanted to go to a performing arts magnet school for performing arts (he's a dancer), and the nearest one was 3 counties away. So a friend of theirs who lived near the magnet school agreed to transfer one of her bills into their names, and they used that bill as proof of residency. He graduated from there last year, and is now at a performing arts college in Pittsburgh.
Everything you said about the system, I fully agree with

There's actually a petition to reduce her sentence on appeal:
http://criminaljustice.change.org/petitions/view/calling_for_reduction_on_appeal_of_ms_kelly_williams-bolars_unfair_sentencing_for_fraud_and_theft

Jesus HMFC wept.

I'm slightly embarrassed to admit it, but I was well-grown before I understood that school funding is based on property taxes. I just could *not* understand for the life of me why some schools had more money than others. Now that I know...I still don't understand it.

Just wandering by to look at your fic. Amen to that last paragraph. Fucking structural inequality.

AAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGH

*RAGE*

I have...incredible amounts of, I guess, educated liberal guilt about this topic. Generally lurk here, but I guess I have something to say for once.

Even though I grew up living in one of the richest counties in the US, even there, we saw incredible disparities between what was available between school districts. There were entire neighborhoods where the house prices were high due to the school districting, and when rumors went about about how some were going to be allocated to a new school to be built, property prices plummeted.

While I cheerfully denigrate my public high school as being a sucky high school, I was still incredibly privileged to attend a school with a relatively stable teacher and admin population. (In fact, I had some incredible teachers during my time there.) The scariest thing may be that, for all that everyone who knew anything about schools in the area where my family lives would agree with me, my high school still makes the lists of top high schools in the country?

This scares me. Our public education system is incredibly broken, and I don't know why it isn't being fixed. When a bunch of bitter high schoolers (ah, those were the days) can figure out that the way things are done is FUCKED UP, why doesn't anyone agree to actual changes?

One of my cousins is currently in the middle of making himself broke by moving into a new home before selling his older one. Simply for the sake of school districts.

...for his three-year-old.

In my extra-bitter moments, I can't help but think that the public education system is a giant, screw you, to the middle class. As now, heeeey, a college education is practically mandatory. Good luck with that, suckers!

The system isn't broken; this is exactly how it's supposed to function, okay? It's doing a wonderful job. There is no bootstrap shit; kids shouldn't have to fucking bootstrap, period.
This.
I'm in London, England, and we have similar problems here. Last night, there was a tv documentary showing how social mobility is worse than 30 years ago: The Prime Minister and most of his Cabinet are public school (i.e the most expensive type of private school- thus NOT actually public, a great misnomer.Schools open to the general public= state schools)and Oxford educated. In fact, many of them are from one particular school, Eaton. The US equivalent is, what,Choate+Harvard???

A local Council here used frigging terrorism legislation to spy on a mother who had registered her and the children's address at an area where there was a highly sought after state school.They wanted to mount a criminal prosecution. THey got it wrong-she then brought proceedings against them.
So...wanting good, free schoolingfor your kids is a crime. :D

Anyhoo, came over here, as a HUGE fan of your writing, to wish you Happy Birthday.

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the children (of the wealthy districts) are our future

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