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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

>What I'm really postulating that the only way to improve the educational outcomes of students that come from families who don't emphasize education is to surround them with students who come from families that do emphasize education.

I was the product of one of these experiments. The school district I lived in was the result of a redistricting to pull in us white students into a large neighboring nonwhite school.

I can guarantee I didn't improve the educational outcomes for any of my classmates. And all I received from it was random beatings, violent attacks against me, and a subpar education. I did learn something though... Once out, I studied my ass off and work as hard as possible so that neither I nor my children will live through such an experiment again.

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> The school district I lived in was the result of a redistricting to pull in us white students into a large neighboring nonwhite school.

Sounds like this was done the wrong way around. What percentage of the students at your school were white?

You got your ass beat because you were in the minority, and you were in their school. The best way to change behavior is to intimidate the students through intense peer pressure. If the minority students are going to a school where they are the minority (and properly integrated into the student body), the results will be very different from what you experienced.

Normal people feel uncomfortable betting their children to prove somebody's else theories...

"In perhaps the biggest surprise, Armor's studies found that black elementary students who go to magnet schools (which have the highest percentages of whites) score no better on standardized tests than do blacks who go to all-black nonmagnet schools.(97) In short, Armor found that, contrary to the notion on which the whole desegregation plan was founded--that going to school with middle-class whites would increase blacks' achievement--the Kansas City experiment showed that "integration has no effect."(98)"

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-298.html

First of all, one person's opinion does not make a truth. Second, and more importantly, many of these desegregation programs do not achieve true integration. Sure the black students are in the same school as the white students, but they're not in the same classrooms as the white students who are doing well in their studies. This is exactly what I experienced.

You also have to ask questions like "Are these students receiving extra help to make up for what they aren't getting at home? Do they feel isolated because they're the only poor black student in the class, or do they feel motivated to find a way to fit in with the high-achieving white students?" That is the difference between desegregation and integration.

Yeah, I'm in a similar camp. I'm white, and a product of the LAUSD (Los Angeles) magnet program, which attempted to integrate schools well. Problem is, you're mostly integrating white kids with the minority kids who have parents motivated enough to put them in the magnet program.

My schools had both magnet and non magnet kids in them. What this wound up accomplishing was pretty obvious, there was segregation between the two populations. Walking out at lunch one could see the school was divided by a stark line, a line that was about 70% white where the magnet kids hung out, and mixed elsewhere.

It probably helped some people from minorities in the magnet, but I'm sure the dividing line just reinforced race and class barriers in the minds of those on both sides.

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