In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Linky linky

amandaw

’cause I’ve been collecting these stories for a couple days.

Fellow guestblogger Renee hits one out of the park: No More Penis Envy. I think I scared my cats laughing so freakin hard.

I am not sure if Nezua is guestblogging this summer but I am sure some of you remember him from last year. He wrote a piece this weekend on age, power, culture, authority and respect that takes a little longer to chew on, but the flavor is rich and the savor lingers long.

A bunch of parents in Fairfax County, Virginia, raised $125,000 to sue the school district for reworking the boundaries so as to integrate the local schools (on an economic basis). The kids were assigned to South Lakes High School, but the parents wanted them to go to the richer Oakton High. It will surprise precisely none of you, of course, that OHS is also whiter. (SLHS: 46% white, 20% black, 16% latin@ and 11 asian. OHS: 67% white, 11% black and latin@.) They argue on the basis of SAT scores for the schools overall, but here’s the thing: when you run the results for white kids in both schools, the SAT outputs are, respectively, 1730 and 1734. This is true on a general basis; in schools that are socioeconomically diverse, minority and poor kids do much better, and white kids do about the same. But, well, what do you really think those parents were suing over? Were they fighting for the right kind of education? Or were they fighting for the right kind of people?

Sir Charles taps into his righteous anger:

So much of the general public, including most of us in the blogosphere, are completely removed from the danger and physical difficulty of this kind of work.  That’s why you hear people talking about raising the Social Security retirement age to 70 — they have no idea what it’s like to hump it on a construction site for 30 or 40 years, no idea what it is like to pick up and lay down cinder block, one after the other for eight hours a day in 90 degree heat or 30 degree cold, no sense of what it takes to walk the iron or hoist re-bar or climb ladders and scaffolding when you’re 58 years old and your back is bad and your knees are screaming and your body is just broken down.  It’s easy for some asshole editorial writer or some glibertarian blogger to talk about working until you are 70 — but my feeling on this is that if the heaviest thing you lift every day is a cup of coffee or a bulky file — just shut the fuck up on this subject.

Preach it, brother.

And let’s wish Cara a happy belated birthday! She thought she was going to get away without mentioning it here, but ha-ha! I will catch up several days later and use my guest-blogging privileges to bring it to light! Take THAT, Cara! (Happy birthday, too. ;))

I have a post coming up that’s riffing off of the complaints in that post. In the meantime, let’s break out the little tooty toys and party hats, and I’ll go get the trick candles…

11 thoughts on Linky linky

  3. hah! as someone who grew up near Oakton High School and knows a bunch of kids who went there when we were all high schoolers… I am not surprised! It’s always been the rich school where the students are encouraged to go to good colleges and do well.. unlike some of the other schools in FCPS (though I was unaware that South Lakes was a ‘bad’ school.. it is in the middle of nowhere, though. Actually, looking at the statistics, it seems a lot LESS diverse than a lot of other nearby schools). To me, this whole thing seems to be about money-money-money. Hm, maybe I should be posting this comment at the blog that you linked to ;D

  5. Having gone to Oakton and known a lot of kids who went to South Lakes, I’m ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it’s good to see FCPS changing this district’s boundaries, not only for the more general goals of socio-economic or racial diversity, but also because it was widely believed that the previous boundaries for Oakton High were heavily gerrymandered to include Reston (the area in which South Lakes is located and where, I presume, the Oakton-to-South Lakes transplants are coming).

    On the other hand, there are a couple of things that make me uneasy with a “Oh, these disgusting rich people just don’t want their kids going to school with minorities” argument. Knowing what I know about the environments at both schools, I would have chosen Oakton other SLHS any day, and that’s in spite of my hatred for my former spoiled brat classmates. South Lakes’s facilities were not nearly as good, their security team had a reputation for draconian enforcement tactics, and there were more fights and sexual assaults (based on anecdotal accounts, at least). And while I think that the SAT argument is a total red herring, it’s equally misleading to argue from the other side that the educational opportunities are the same given the IB offerings at South Lakes. It’s pretty widely held that AP is the more challenging program.

    Obviously the respective demographics of the schools play a huge role in forming these differences, right down to one school offering IB and the other offering AP classes. And, of course, it’s an extraordinary privilege to be in a position to quibble about the differences between one wealthy suburban high school and another, slightly less wealthy suburban high school. If I were reading this story about any other school district, my politics would lead me to believe that the whole thing was, in fact, a thinly veiled aversion to integration . . . but I’m not so sure in this case, even though there was no shortage of racially insensitive, ignorant, or downright prejudiced kids at Oakton. I just really can’t say that I wouldn’t have been extremely upset if I were put in the same situation (although I probably would never resort to litigation).

    Lydia, you’re right about the comparison between South Lakes and other FCPS high schools. To me that’s actually another interesting things about this story — Oakton is by no means the snootiest of FCPS high schools (at the very least, Langley, Great Falls and Woodson beat us there), nor is South Lakes the poorest or least white.

  6. “but my feeling on this is that if the heaviest thing you lift every day is a cup of coffee or a bulky file — just shut the fuck up on this subject.”

    Deal. Sir Charles, please stop the socialist posturing about the plight of the working class, which you pretend to understand so well. Gotta love his bio:

    Sir Charles of DC is a lawyer in private practice with over twenty years of experience representing unions, union employee benefit plans, and individual workers. His undergraduate degree is in political science. ..he retains a touch of the frustrated DJ and looks forward to inflicting his tastes on others from time to time, no doubt with the inevitable “I remember when I saw the Clash in this small club back in 1979” commentary, the aging hipster’s equivalent of You kids get off of my lawn.

    Hm…he doesn’t have any self-interest in defending the plight of the working class at all.

  7. That story reminded me of a recent trend in some California school districts where White families are moving out because the increasingly large numbers of Asian/Asian-American families is perpetuating a perception that those schools are becoming “too competitive”, too academic, and deemphasized non-curricular activities such as football too much. Some of the White families also mentioned their children did not want to feel “stupid” for not being willing to put in the same effort towards their academics as their Asian/Asian-American peers.

    Disturbing considering the countless accounts I’ve heard from mostly socio-economically privileged college classmates, including those who graduated from some of the nation’s renowned private boarding schools who managed to go through 4 years of high school averaging straight As without having to open their texts more than a handful of times or otherwise putting in any meaningful effort.

    Not surprisingly, most of those classmates had a rude awakening their first year when they found the Profs were not only assigning them far more work than they were used to, but also had far greater expectations in the quality and rigor of said work. Some were shocked and even angry when they found many working-class scholarship students who attended “inferior public schools” seamlessly adjusted to college academic life which was reflected in their academic performance and the amount of respect they received from non-snobby classmates who did not make classist generalizations about public school graduates receiving inferior educations compared to their private school educated selves.

    It’s always been the rich school where the students are encouraged to go to good colleges and do well..

    I attended a public magnet urban high school that was very much like that….with the exception that it was mostly non-White and it had a mostly working/lower-middle class student population during my time there. If anything, the school culture was “Ivy-level college or bust” with the accompanying cutthroat grade/SAT competition where having less than a 90%/100, a schedule full of APs and even some college courses, and 650/800 on all sections meant you were considered irredeemably stupid in the eyes of fellow classmates and even many teachers.

  8. Oakton02- What I’ve learned the most from the article in question is that one really can’t trust quick little blog write-ups about complex situations.. It seems like only someone in the local area and at least aware of all the complications could really do a story like this justice.

    I went to Falls Church, so yeah, calling South Lakes a poor, too-diverse-for-the-white-pta-moms school sounded quite strange.

    Hey, any chance you went to Luther Jackson MS? that’s where all my Oakton friends come from 😀

  9. I lived in the district for Luther but I didn’t go there, I was in the magnet program in elementary and middle school and got bused away with all the other dorks :D. Then I switched back to regular high school because I didn’t have the teacher recommendations for TJ.

    And speaking of TJ . . . yeah, exholt, TJ is FCPS’s incredibly cutthroat magnet school (although I’m sure it’s substantially less diverse than where you went), which IMO throws another wrench in this whole story. Yes, Oakton is rich, and the parents expect their kids to go to good colleges, and therefore it’s competitive/high stress in a certain sense. The thing is, though, that most of the kids there are barely hovering around average in terms of intellectual ability, and it definitely showed in terms of grade inflation, the difficulty of even AP or honors classes, etc.

    Actually, I wonder what the average SAT numbers for different demographics at Oakton and South Lakes would be if kids who went to TJ but lived in the districts for these schools were factored back in? Or just how many kids from each school’s respective districts ended up at TJ, and of what ethnicities? It certainly wouldn’t tell you much about the quality of either high school, but I think it would be interesting.

    Anyway, yeah, education policy is thorny, and SO tied to local circumstances.

  10. TJ alum here. If I hadn’t been accepted, my options would have been West Potomac or Mount Vernon, which seem on a par with South Lakes from what you describe. In terms of the make-up of the school’s population, there was definitely a big contingent from the Langley area. A lot of my friends would have gone to Woodson–I’m not sure if that’s a rich school or not. Since I’ve left I’ve heard talk about parents complaining about attempts to ensure diversity in the student body, which is sad yet unsurprising.

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