one note on diversity in public schools
i’m a little interested, on a second glance, at how often people assume that private schools are more homogenous - or “less diverse” - than public schools. i’m not saying they’re not, necessarily, but it strikes me as a little weird - and more than a little inaccurate - to assume that because someone went to public school, they necessarily were in a more diverse environment than someone at private school.because public schools are determined by location, and often neighborhoods in a lot of places are still pretty segregated. so if you live in westchester (suburbs of NYC), which starts off middle class and gets richer the further north you go, chances are your kids’ public school will be pretty fuckin white! when i lived in bronxville (a town in westchester), there were zero black kids in my class of 20 or so, one asian one, and… i want to say i was the only hispanic one, i could be misremembering. all middle to upper middle class. my mother later told me that the father of one of my classmates actively tried to keep his jewish roots from other parents. you’d get a LOT more diversity if you sent your kid to either one of the private schools i attended - including socioeconomic diversity (not a ton, but, especially at the one i went from third to eighth grade - which let me go free for two years when my mom got sick and couldn’t work and my father refused to pay child support - we did have a number of kids on financial aid, yours truly included; and you can get financial aid on school but not on property taxes).
conversely, if you live in hunts point, your school will be (to estimate from the demographics of the neighborhood) about 75% non-white hispanic and 25% black. which is more diverse than bronxville, yeah, but not exactly super-diverse (i think i saw literally about 3 white kids in the entire K-5 school). there’s no socioeconomic diversity either, unless by “more diverse” you literally mean “fewer middle-to-upper-class” people which… is not what that word means. i’d also guess that it was pretty much uniformly christian - at least, when we had christmas decorating time and the kids got into “what did you get for christmas” conversations, i didn’t hear anyone say “we don’t celebrate christmas.” and if you live in crown heights (a neighborhood i wiki’d out of curiosity since i was interviewing there today), your neighborhood will be 90% black, and your school will probably be about 100% black since 9/10 of that last 10% is hasidic jews, who have their own schooling system. doesn’t sound especially diverse to me.
and if you live in west virginia, it doesn’t matter whether you go to public or private school since either way it’ll be almost entirely white and christian.
so. again, it depends on specific areas/schools. but public school does not necessarily equal more diverse, unless you’re using diverse as some kind of code word for, i don’t know, “less white” or “less rich” (and that might not even be the case then) or whatever.
You lived in Bronxville? lol I mean, great post! But, hey, my guy is from Mount Vernon and I lived in Fleetwood for a couple of years.
