“School Choice Policies and Racial Segregation: Where White Parents’ Good Intentions, Anxiety, and Privilege Collide” by Allison Roda and Amy Stuart Wells and “Is Demography Still Destiny” by Norm Fruchter both explore the relationship between our school choices and racial diversity, which is a common theme that has been discussed over and over through the course of the semester.
Roda and Wells explore how As Roda and Wells state, “Given that these more advantaged parents have the most knowledge and resources to navigate the school choice system (see Bifulco et al. 2009), they are more likely to get their children into the highest-status schools regardless of the specific school choice policies in place.”, Parents always want their student to get into the best schools possible (264). However, such desire leads to more separation and imbalance among students by race and ethnicity throughout schools and programs. It is interesting that while many parents believe that diversity is such a really important part of a school’s success and they hope their children to attend racially diverse school where students are able to interact with people from different background, they also try to get their children into the “best” (mostly white) schools. In a sense, those parents who “value” diversity, define the quality of the schools by examining who goes to the school rather than what is offered in school.
In the meantime, Norm Fructher examines a different aspect of the problem where college readiness is highly correlated with student racial background. As Fructher illustrates, under Bloomberg administration, “educational option program offerings, which control school choice to increase equity of student opportunity, have significantly diminished” (8). Although Bloomberg administration expanded students’ school choices and invest heavily in narrowing students’ achievement gap, it seems not enough to achieve a greater equity.
As far as I am concerned, what makes a school great should be determined by the school itself instead of by the type of students who attend the school. If every school is able to share the same amount of resources, there will probably be no such thing as good or bad school. As Fructher argues, rather than focusing on creating new schools, we should concentrate on improving the condition of existing schools.
Similar to Fructher’s idea of improving the conditions of existing schools, my beliefs strongly align with that concept. I personally believe that there is no such thing as a perfect school in which everything will be ideal. Lets be honest, every individual has different factors that they want in a perfect school and meeting the demands of every individual is just not a feasible idea. It is really hard to come up with the term of having a perfect school or even a good or bad school.
In my opinion there is no such thing as a good or bad school, rather schools are determined by the amount of resources and funding available.
In NYC, every school gets different funding based on the number of students that attend the school and how many students qualify for free or reduced lunch. The higher the amount of students in these categorizes, the bigger the amount of funding for the school. Additionally we have to factor in the school recognition and whether or not it has a certain program that is unique to it. Schools with specialized programs attract more attention given that they challenge the students academically. At the end of the day, if every school was given the same resources and opportunities, the idea of good or bad schools would not exist. However, since our school system was not built that way, some schools have to be at a disadvantage for others to be at an advantage.
Thanks for these thoughts. You both seem to think that the only difference between a school that many parents and students choose and schools that are less desirable is how much money each school has to spend. So does this mean that you think the only reason students want to attend Brooklyn Tech or LaGuardia is that those school have a little more money per pupil to spend than other schools? Do you think there are no other explanations?