yep. Say it. Say Race. Say it Say it SAY IT!!!!!!!!
And stay tuned… The You-Don’t-Deserve-A-Cookie post is coming.
Kristen Graham, a Pulitzer-prize winning education writer for the Inquirer, wrote the piece published today titled “Public school pays off for Philly family.” It detailed the decision-making process of Jill and Mark Scott, a couple who lives in the Graduate Hospital area with their two children. Graham wrote about how the family decided to send their oldest son, Henry, to Edwin M. Stanton Elementary, which is “becoming a possibility for families in the gentrifying neighborhood near the old Graduate Hospital.”
But Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine writer specializing in writing about modern school segregation, slammed the piece in a tweetstorm today, writing that the story was “ALL about race without ever mentioning it” and saying the headline should have read: “white Philly family goes into well-functioning school.”… Read more…
Integration is gentrification– What do you think??
From an article discussing the above — “While these families are advocating and securing better things for the neighborhood and schools, they do it on behalf of themselves and not so much the community. It’s almost an air of “be happy you have this now.” It’s unspoken but the message is passing through the community. These newcomers aren’t talking to the families who presently live in these neighborhoods when the advocacy ideas are in formation. They aren’t inviting the current residents of these communities to sit at the organizing table. So changes begin to take shape in spite of the longtime residents instead of for them. So again I say, “Integration is now White people’s word for gentrification”.
http://www.yophillyed.org/…/public-school-integration…/
I’ve also heard a few discussions around “school flipping” which is, I believe, part of what the author is talking about…
In our community (majority Latino), parents helped create a Spanish Dual Immersion program where all kids learn both English and Spanish and, ideally, the classroom should comprise 50% native Spanish speakers and 50% native English speakers. We did this intentionally, hoping to prevent a full colonization of the school. But of course, nothing is ever without its own politics…