US Politics Mega-thread - Page 6334

For more than a decade, Holland Public Schools has watched its enrollment fall, prompting the closure – and demolition – of multiple schools.

The decline is not the result of an aging community with fewer, school-age children. Rather, it’s largely a reflection of Michigan’s generous school choice policies. Choice has, consciously or not, left districts like Holland not only scrambling for students, but more racially segregated as its white students leave, often for districts that are less diverse.

“When school choice started, that decline started,” said Brian Davis, superintendent of the Holland district. In 2000, Holland had 15 school buildings; it now has eight. About one-in-three students living within the district are now being educated in another district or charter school. Because state education dollars follow students to their new district or charter, Davis said that Holland’s white flight has shaken the district’s finances.

In the two decades since Michigan adopted school choice, Holland’s white enrollment has plummeted 60 percent, with 2,100 fewer white students. Today, whites comprise 49 percent of school-age children living in the district, but only 38 percent the school population (Hispanics make up 47 percent of Holland schools).

From Holland to metro Detroit, Flint to Jackson, tens of thousands of parents across Michigan are using the state’s schools of choice program to move students out of their resident districts and into ones that are more segregated, a Bridge analysis of state enrollment data shows.
Last week, Bridge showed how “choice” has made several metro Detroit districts less diverse, with white students moving to whiter districts and African-American students increasingly gravitating to almost-entirely-black charter schools.
As white students left Holland’s schools, poor and Hispanic children increasingly became the face of the district. Today, 70 percent of Holland students are eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch, more than double the district’s poverty rate when choice began.
Many of those who left Holland’s schools didn’t go far. More than 400 students who live in the district now attend Black River Public School, a charter where 74 percent of students are white. Black River is just over a mile from Holland High School.

Another 255 Holland students drive east to the Zeeland Public Schools, which are 77 percent white.
Steve Grose, president of the Holland Public Schools board of education, has watched as thousands who live in his district take their kids elsewhere. One of his own has already graduated from Holland schools and two are currently in high school. Grose, who is white, said he is glad he stayed and embraced the diversity of the schools, which are also 7 percent African American.
“I’d say they’re getting a better education because of the rich diversity,” he said.

Yet across the state, thousands of parents are making a different decision, using choice to direct their children to less diverse traditional public or charter school districts.

The reasons given vary: Better resources, less racial friction, higher test scores, a safer environment. Advocates say parents are simply choosing schools that are better for the needs of their children, and deny that racial animus drives the majority of school choice decisions.

“Parents are making choice not on that issue (race),” said Dan Quisenberry, president of Michigan Association of Public School Academies, or MAPSA, the state’s largest charter school advocacy group. “They’re making choice based on, ‘How does this fit? Is it going to work’” for their child?

On November 29 2016 23:53 ticklishmusic wrote:
1/5 of the centrifuges doesn't seem too bad, though there's no way of knowing what kind of goal the US/israeli operation set. a probably-not-great argument is that someone would have done it eventually anyways. there's plenty of "innovations" if you want to call it in clandestine services, and not all of them are gonna be an exploding pen from a james bond movie.

sure you can make infinite copies of stuxnet, but it's not going to be particularly useful. i don't know too much about the program itself, but it doesn't seem to have had any crazy new elements or been a trove of proprietary l33t haxx0r knowledge.

On November 30 2016 01:45 Incognoto wrote:
It's normal and fine for people to send their children to the best possible establishments that they can.

There isn't a parent alive who says that they'd rather their child goes to a lesser quality school if it means they're going to adjust diversity statistics.

On November 30 2016 01:34 Acrofales wrote:

Huh? That's not the only information you have from a bomb. It didn't take the Soviets long to "reverse engineer" nuclear weapons from what they saw happen in Japan. Any new weapon used against a sufficiently resourceful enemy will give you the initial advantage, but will quickly be copied. The main difference is that everything is faster and infinitely more available in the digital playground. You don't need a giant arms research facility, you need a couple of laptops (you need clever techs in either case).

As for targets waiting to get hacked: they were there before stuxnet and plenty of people have published plenty of papers pointing out those vulnerabilities. All stuxnet really did was show that it wasn't just possible in theory, but also in practice, on a very high profile target. Even so, the US infrastructure is incredibly vulnerable. A lot of it is aging, centralized and easily accessible. I read an article a few years ago that a carefully constructed cyberattack on 2 or 3 electrical substations would knock out the entire electrical grid of the US for a few days, if not more. That would require physical access to the sites, but there were less terrible scenarios that could be done remotely, but would still cause considerable damage (knock out power to NYC for a few hours, as an example). And this focused on the electric grid. There's plenty of other systems that could cause havoc on a smaller scale (traffic control being the most obvious).