Sally Brown Returns

Yes, I know this has been done to death. But today it jumped right off the page.

From Sara Toth's article on middle school re districting, this quote really bugs me.

"I was pretty upset that Emerson was going to be split from the majority of the Murray Hill community, but even more furious that you would send our kids to a school with significantly lower standards," said one parent. "How would you feel about your children attending the school with one of the lowest (Maryland School Assessment) scores in the county?"

- - October 30, 2013

Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose...

There are many factors at play in our redistricting process in 2017. There is frustration that the Board of Education put us in this difficult situation by a lack of proactive involvement. There is concern that over-development is placing a burden on school facilities that we are not keeping up with. Neighborhoods that have enjoyed a long-time connection with a particular school are alarmed to see that could change. Parents worry about the impact on their children of longer bus-ride times.

But those test scores.

Can we just lay down those test scores, folks?

Test scores are not what makes a school. And the continued reference to them feels more and more like a dog whistle to me. “Let’s preserve de facto segregation in our schools so our numbers look good.” (To heck with the other schools’ numbers, by the way.) “Let’s fight for the status quo so my children can go to school with the right sort of children.”

Of course, no one says it like that. It’s couched in careful and concerned language.

Underneath this all I hear the plaintive voice of Sally Brown in “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.

All I want is what’s coming to me. All I want is my fair share.

In study after study, standardized test scores are shown to correlate most strongly with socio-economic factors more than anything else. They won’t tell you what you really want to know about whether a school is a postive learning environment. Fighting to preserve the purity of test scores is about keeping people out. Or shrinking from sending our children to a school where children are “different.”

Here’s the thing. The more that white children are shielded from those who are different, the more likely they are to end up doing something like this. And I would suggest that understanding that all human beings are worthy of respect is far more important than test scores. These are private school kids from Baltimore but they very well could be privileged white kids from Howard County if we don’t stop clinging to precious test scores.

We all need to learn how to work in the world together. Our schools are one of the best places to set the stage for a life-long ability to interact with respect. We are fools if we throw that away in pursuit of numbers on a page.








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