How one BPS school went from desgregated to resegregated

And the Eliot is located in a part of Boston that is full of wealthly corporations that donate money to the school.

One way to improve BPS schools fast is to convince Boston businesses to donate money to Boston Public schools. A former classmate of my daughters transferred a few years ago from a Hyde Park Elementary school to the Eliot , I think because her mom is a teacher there, She got in. Good for them, and they happen to be folks of color. Kudos to the Eliot principal for her commitment making that school such a highly regarded school.

Meanwhile someone told me last week that Hyde Park families with kindergarden aged kids that don't get their kids into the 2 BPS schools currently ranked tier 1 in Hyde Park won't consider the other Hyde Park BPS schools and plan to pay for private school. If only more Boston families would invest time and money in BPS...if you gave most BPS schools an extra million dollars per year to spend on Arts , Music, Drama, world language and other non core curriculum areas , you would see a difference very quickly. BPS spends alot of each schools budget
Is servicing high need students , not leaving enough money to fund all the needed non core classes and it shows.

BPS HAS SO FEW SCHOOLS PERFORMING AT A HIGH LEVEL PLEASE DON'T LET THEM DOWNGRADE THE ONES THAT ARE WORKING WELL IN THE NAME OF EQUITY SO ALL BPS STUDENTS ARE STUCK WITH BAD OPTIONS!

There's clear arguments to make on both sides of this issue. But I find this headline just simply boils this issue down into a single-dimensional consideration. There's too much to say on this topic and this might be a bit ranty but...

Going to schools in the neighborhood is important. Building community identity around going to school with local kids and families is important. Not spending as much time on a school bus as adults spend commuting into the city is important... And creating attractive schools that draw money back into the city and help narrow the widening maw of the BPS deficit and massively declining enrollment is important. Does a school like Elliot present some challenging conundrums when it comes to creating a racially diverse school in a largely racially monolithic and historically white neighborhood? Absolutely. But it's also an absolute good to create a high quality public school that children who live nearby are able to attend. There are lots of magnet schools and charter schools in the city. It's cherry picking to look at a school like Elliot and hold them to some impossible degree of perfection of achieving racial diversity, deep parent engagement, existing in a highly affluent and white neighborhood, and more. Our expectations for schools like this seem to be that they simply accomplish everything perfectly, and that's not fair at all no matter which school it is. There needs to be at least some perspective challenging the idea that kids should spend hours a day riding a heavily polluting bus across the city is somehow the way that education is "supposed" to work, because there are clearly massive problems with the way that that approach has been implemented too, and blame to be shared for why this approach has contributed to the downward spiral of BPS.

African American/ Black 28.3
Hispanic/ 44.7
White 14.8
Asian 8.3
Native American 0.2
Pacific Isander 0.1
Mixed 3.6
.
If the State takes the system over maybe they can work on perfect racial parity, they better hurry though because if the BPS doesn't fix their problems soon we will have very few kids left of any race to educate, and the embarrassment of a school system we have will be gone forever, with most of our kids shipped to schools outside of the city and not run by Boston .

"Across all 119 Boston public schools, the Eliot has the second-highest percentage of white students, at 63%, and the lowest percentage of Black and Latino students, of 6% and 14%"

While any single minority pales by comparison to the white percentage, together they add up to 37% non-white. That's hardly "resegregated"; I daresay it's not even news worthy.

It's only "segregated" if the school is (marginally) mostly white.

The majority of BPS schools which have been overwhelmingly black and Hispanic for years didn't merit a story.

63% white, omg, let's raise Judge Garrity from the grave and bus 21.842% of those white kids to the Trotter, Lee and Greenwood! If those kids bail from the system and go to private schools or move to Winchester, keep busing the white kids until the Eliot is 87% black and Hispanic like the system overall.

Chapter 102 of Busing Was a Failure