I ain't going to school with them folks.

I see in the paper today that schools in the US have never been so segregated. We know this in NYC because we have all seen it. The city created a bunch of specialized schools throughout the system that allowed middle class parents to send their kids to "good" schools. Of course the affect was to segregate the schools.

In my neighborhood there were always big hustles going on to get kids into non-zoned schools. I did it and so did many other parents. Before these specialized schools were created there was much middle class flight. Some parents left the city, some parents went to parochial schools and some parents chose private schools ($20,000/ year)

I remember a family that I was friendly with. Their boys played with my son. As soon as the oldest kid became 5 they sold their house and moved to the suburbs. This was a common New York story for those people who could afford it. This is not how you build a strong city.

What happened was the city, in order to stop white flight, allowed parents to manipulate the system and allowed schools to become increasingly segregated. The emphasis that Bloomburg placed on education was very smart. The people you want in the city are people who care about sending their kids to good schools. The problem is how to do this without creating a de facto segregated system.

My kids went to public school in New York City. I thought this was important, but I did figure out how to get my kids into the best possible schools for them. I did not want my kids in schools where no one cared about knowledge, or kids did not allow anyone to see that they were curious about the world.

The house I ran seemed to always have more white kids than the school at large. Still, they were a minority. I was always faced with the issues of tracking students. We had three cohorts and even if you did not believe in tracking the cohorts would still be tracked by the third year. They would track because one group would be taking things such as physics and math B and this would create a schedule that forced them to be together in English and social studies.

One of the things we did was to take kids that seemed to be working hard and showed curiosity and a desire to do well and move them into our honors track. We never looked at their reading or math levels. We made judgment calls about them based on who they were. What I think we were doing subconsciously is tracking kids by desire.

This was an interesting way to track because it gave you all of the good things about heterogeneous classes. The best thing I saw was good kids helping kids who were having trouble. This bred compassion and it also reinforced learning among the better students. Teaching someone else is the best way to learn.

It may be that if we change admissions standards for elite schools to account for desire than we may see these schools become more integrated. Minority kids have a real disadvantage on standardized tests. Their vocabulary is not even close to my own kids' vocabulary.

I am not sure how to test for this desire. Teacher recommendations are only good if you know the teacher. Teachers tend to recommend kids who gave them no trouble. What I think you need to find is kids who are curious. You want to find kids who have the resiliency to not know something and to work to figure it out. Give me a class full of those kids and I don't care what their color or grade level is I can do great things with them.

I have added a new link to a science teacher's blog who is at the beginning of being forced out of her school. I don't know her but the process is informative. It can happen to anyone. Asking any teacher, but particularly a science teacher to travel is such bad policy that I have no comment.