{"id":489,"date":"2015-11-30T13:58:50","date_gmt":"2015-11-30T13:58:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/?p=489"},"modified":"2015-11-30T13:58:50","modified_gmt":"2015-11-30T13:58:50","slug":"the-myth-of-good-schools","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/2015\/11\/30\/the-myth-of-good-schools\/","title":{"rendered":"The Myth of \u201cGood Schools\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

One aspect of Tom Shapiro\u2019s The Hidden Cost of Being African American<\/em> that I found particularly interesting and brought up in last week\u2019s discussion was his analysis of why white parents avoid schools that are predominantly black. Shapiro demonstrates that in their quest for \u201cgood schools\u201d, white parents are actually seeking schools where the majority of students look like their children. As Shapiro writes, \u201cMany white parents, as well as some black ones, determine school quality not by academic excellence, teacher skills, or classroom curriculum but by who sits next to and who will associate with their child.\u201d (172) Many white parents assume that schools whose student bodies are mostly students of color are bad schools without actually visiting them or talking to their teachers and administrators. This made me think about my own community, and the Huffington Post<\/em> article that I brought up in class, which was written by Abby Norman, a white Atlanta parent who decided to send her daughter to her local neighborhood school, despite the fact that she was one of the only white students.<\/p>\n

One of the most important consequences of wealth, as Shapiro describes, is the ability to move to an area whose local schools are considered \u201cgood\u201d. Schools play such a big role in where people decide to live that, as Norman writes, real estate agents will advise potential buyers against certain areas solely because of the perceived quality of the schools. But for the white families who do decide to live in relatively integrated neighborhoods with significant black populations\u2014which is increasingly happening in many neighborhoods in Atlanta\u2014they refuse to send their children to the local neighborhood schools almost as a rule. Many white parents in my neighborhood sent their children to the local elementary school, which was almost all white, and many sent their children to the middle school, which was about half white and half black. But by the time their children got to high school, many parents removed them from the public school system or moved away to avoid sending them to my high school, which was two-thirds black. Going to a school where I was in the minority by no means hurt my education\u2014in fact, as I wrote last week, I think it helped\u2014but some white parents\u2019 perceptions of my high school\u2019s quality, which I can only assume was based on its demographics, convinced them that it was not good enough (read: white enough) for their children. Until we can rid ourselves of the notion that black students hurt the quality of a school, school integration will be impossible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One aspect of Tom Shapiro\u2019s The Hidden Cost of Being African American that I found particularly interesting and brought up in last week\u2019s discussion was his analysis of why white parents avoid schools that are predominantly black. Shapiro demonstrates that in their quest for \u201cgood schools\u201d, white parents are actually seeking schools where the majority … Continue reading The Myth of \u201cGood Schools\u201d<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7864,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[142777],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wealth-week-12"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7864"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":490,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions\/490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/aaas16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}