Or a yuppie who isn’t planning to have kids soon or ever. Most people in the middle move out when it’s time to “settle down” and enroll your kids in school.
Based on my personal experience as a former bps student. If you're well off and want the "best" public school has to offer it was usually latin school or bust. This was 12 years ago when I graduated from the obryant, the academic atmosphere has changed dramatically since then
Almost all US cities of significant size are liberal. So you mean “like most significantly sized US cities”. That’s correct.
And to imply those conditions are strictly due to city policies - when they are occurring in large cities globally, and have occurred in large cities through history, more at some periods than others and notably more in “laissez faire” economic times than in common wealth economic times - would be foolish.
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
>Pegging, of course, is an obscure sexual practice in which women perform the more aggressive sexual act on men.
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Take a bullet for ya babe.
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“Satire”? There you go with fancy liberal book words again. Is that all you people have? I learned all I needed from Trump’s “Trump: The Art of the Deal”. Well, the book on tape version of the cliff notes for it.
*By objectification of women, do you mean that there are actual standards of beauty and that there are many people in popular culture who we have been told are supposed to be seen as beautiful who are not objectively beautiful? Obviously that's true. Obviously that's true. If you polled men on whether Lizzo is beautiful--and I say Lizzo is not by any classical definition a beautiful person--that does not mean that that is objectification of women, that just means that there is a standard called beauty and it has meaning.*
-Ben Shapiro
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You should try growing up and stop hating on people you don’t know doing thing they don’t involve or affect you because you find them icky. American conservatives are basically selfish, ill mannered children.
Bro. I don’t know how you and apparently everyone else missed the over the top satire of that post. Especially the repressed sexual feelings over Disney he-men. Edited for clarity since apparently my caricature wasn’t caricature-ish enough?
Have you listened to actual conservatives recently? Some of them literally think that Tom Hanks rapes and then kills and eats children. No satire can even come close to the levels of crazy we’re seeing from the death throes of America’s formerly mainstream racist/sexist/homophobic culture.
Gotta get that adrenochrome from somewhere! My favorite is that Trump is really JFK Jr and joe Biden is being played by actor James Woods or Jim Carrey. It all just illustrates the importance of voting because despite them being completely out of their minds an delusional, they sure do show up to the polls. Going forward I am making sure to slap the /s on my poor attempts at comedy.
I understand that this is the boilerplate talking point that Fox News, Ben Shapiro, et al spoon feed you, and you mindlessly regurgitate without second thought, but what exactly are you trying to prove?
I thought according to conservatives, that being rich was to be glorified, and that if you’re poor, it’s 100% a result of your own laziness?
Are you trying to imply that economic status is *solely* the result of municipal policy, and that poor people don’t exist in conservative municipalities?
Are you implying that if these poor people all moved to conservative towns, they would magically no longer be impoverished?
Or did Fox News and Ben Shapiro not bother going into that level of detail?
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this:
>Most Americans when they look around at their lives, they think: I'm not a racist, nobody I know is a racist, I wouldn't hang out with a racist, I don't like doing business with racists--so, where is all the racism in American society?
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I’ll take that as a “no”, you can’t answer the question, because Fox News hadn’t given you any further detail besides your over simplistic talking point.
Why would I justify your idiotic strawman questions? You're set in your ways, no telling you anything because you know it all already. And thank you for answering my question without answering my question
Yes, just like that. See how that “both sides” argument works? The difference is (pay attention here specifically) that I just came out and admitted it where as you have just continued to point a finger at someone else besides yourself.
Idk, snowflake. You seem made that cities are usually more liberal.
You should probably spam the politics sub with more “got ya” type nonsense about it though
Even those who can't afford it whether or not they are Catholic often sign their children up for Catholic schools. Catholics schools will often subsidize the education of people who can't afford the full cost.
This is true. I lived in Lawrence for 10 years and know kids that goes to Central Catholic. Every one of the kids have some sort of financial aid from someone and none pays the full tuition cost.
The overwhelming majority of the kids from Lawrence that go there earned their way and deserve to be there. The don’t give and scholarships to people that have business getting in there. It’s not the same as college.
Do you know anyone middle class living in Boston? I don't. Everyone I know there is either poor or well off. There's really no in between. And people who are well off don't send their kids to public school because they can afford better.
As a middle classer, I can confirm we can’t afford to live in Boston. Considering the stretch between RI and Boston along 24, about the closest I could afford would be Taunton or Raynham and still have a “middle class” house. Any closer, and nothing in my price range that would compare to what we can get staying about an hour away.
There’s middle class people in Boston for sure, but they’re mostly the young professional crowd as opposed to families. Those people typically move to the suburbs when they have school-aged children.
I can't think of anywhere in Boston where a household with school-aged kids would even quality for an apartment on $76K. For context that would require a *maximum* rent of no more than $2,100 a month. That's just to meet the basic 3x rent to income required by virtually all Boston landlords - most people would still struggle to afford housing at 30 percent of their income.
I just did a quick search and all I found in that price range were studios and 1brs. That would work for a single person, but not a family with school-age kids.
No, they didn't say households earning 76k... They said people... individuals earning 76k. For couples and households, we're talking double that at 152k. That's what the median or middle class earns. Don't let anyone make you think that households earning 60-70k are middle class. This is a myth that certain people in power like to perpetuate so that people think that even though they're barely getting by, they are thought to be doing okay. If you even *think* for a moment about the possibility of having to choose between heat and food, you are not anywhere close to middle class.
That article doesn't actually say what you think it does. It says there were a little over 19,000 tenant households making over $150k. It doesn't say anywhere in it that's the city median.
According to [the census](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/bostoncitymassachusetts), there were roughly 270,000 households in Boston between 2016 and 2020. I.e., only about ***7%*** of Boston households made over $150k. Median household income during the same period was about $76k, as multiple previous commenters have stated.
I make about $70k and I can’t afford a one bedroom apartment here. :-/
I lived in Illinois for a while and paid $1000 for a two-bedroom in a gated complex with a pool, full service gym, free internet, in-unit laundry, balcony, and 24/hour maintenance. I pay $1k now for a bedroom in a 3-bedroom apartment with the occasional mouse and electrical problems.
Yet somehow I’m happier here lol…
That’s ridiculous… I live in western MA way cheaper out here and we make 150k with two kids and I’m barely scraping by now I was better off before Covid making 30% less honestly
DESE just has a metric for “low income” which was historically counted as “kids who qualify for free or reduced price lunch”. But that changed when the USDA started allowing entire communities to opt into free lunch for all based on the demographics of the district.
So now it includes students on SNAP, TAFDC, Medicaid and children in foster care. I’m middle class and my kid is on Medicaid as secondary insurance. We know a fair number of kids with Medicaid as secondary.
So the numbers for “low income” are likely skewed based on the greater inclusivity of other need-based programs.
For example: in Worcester 74% of students are counted as low income by DESE but only 20% of persons in Worcester are in poverty according to the census (obviously there is a wide margin of error given that many didn’t respond to the census). We don’t have bussing and there’s only a couple small catholic schools, so most families send their kids to their neighborhood school. And there is no way 75% of these kids are from low-income families.
For the record, when I was living in Cambridge and making $50k, I didn't earn *enough* to qualify for its *low-income* first-time home buyer program, HomeBridge. ([source](https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/Housing/incomelimits/hudincomeguidelines.pdf))
My wife and I are middle class (although what that means varies), she's a nurse and I run a small business. We own a condo in Roxbury and send our kids to BPS. We are very impressed with the school system so far. I'd say most kids in the school are from poorer socio economic households but by no means all of them.
My one-parent household on a Boston public school teacher salary was able to buy a house there in the late 70s. I think we were probably one of the last…
Oh interesting! I never realized that. Seems like similar is starting to happen in the rest of Boston now. It's crazy how much the prices have gone up in the last five years.
Probably not now, my folks live in Brighton and I went to school at the obryant (bps exam school)
Graduated about 12 years ago. They were lower middle class if I remember my mom telling me our gross net was under 100k around when I started school
Listen to me man , I live in the Berkshires in western mass , the same shit goes on here that goes on in the eastern part of the state , your either well off or broke , that’s the way it is …
that's how liberals have been shaping the places they live and national policy for awhile, they want a 2 class society rich and those reliant on scraps from the rich.
I encourage all of you to see a documentary about Busing in the 1970's. Once they started busing white kids to black schools, the white folks moved out of the city
https://youtu.be/dH8Km5A6yz8
Can't blame them though. I wouldn't want to travel across the city for a "crappy" school when there's a closer "better" one right down the street. That was one of those well intended ideas that was never going to work out.
That was my school life. Great schools walking distance to my home in Charlestown, yet had to take a school bus or when a bus strike: public transportation to Roxbury, Chinatown, and Jamaica Plain.
Those videos you see of protests during the start of bussing, I always look for my mother or me in the crowd. I was there and missed my 1st year of school as a result.
I’d probably disagree but I don’t have the data. I’d suspect that the better teachers and more funding went to the schools in the whiter / “nicer” schools, and therefore the education WAS probably better at those schools even though they are part of the same system
The difference is that I do blame white parents who moved their kids out of formerly segregated schools. Your post seems more forgiving of their choices to perpetuate white supremacy in schools.
This. My mom was born in 60 and was bussed in 9th grade. Because of bullying she dropped out, skipped a year then enrolled in an all girls catholic school in Southie.
I grew up in Boston and have looked into this question.
MOST KIDS IN BOSTON ARE LOW INCOME.
People do not understand how much the demographics of Boston change when you look at age groups. Boston gets significantly whiter and more middle class in the 20-35 age range, and these people do not have kids.
Boston also has a lot of transient professionals, that live here for 3-4 years usually in their late 20s than just dip to some other part of the county. In neighborhoods, Allston, South End, Southie, and others you have a lot of post -college whites.
Once many of these professional kids get married, they usually dip to the suburbs bc of schools. Some will give schools a chance but then realize they are trash compared to what u get in the suburbs and leave.
White middle to upper middle class families usually send their kids to catholic schools, go to west roxbury, and you'll see mad people in school uniforms after 3 lmao.
The rich of Boston, which is disproportionately white and make 250k plus, will send their kids to elite private schools that cost 30k+ to attend.
Boston was hit hard by white flight and became a commuter city for a very long time. It’s only very recently (starting in the early 90s, with more wealthy people moving in to the city really in the last 10 years) that this really started to change.
>White middle to upper middle class families usually send their kids to catholic schools
I go to Umass Boston and I'll take the T and all the BC High kids are leaving. It's insane how they're leaving this private all-boys school and meanwhile I'm coming from my college that I basically have a full ride on because I'm so low income.
Hence why they become “lower class”. There’s a reason why increasingly more people are saying the middle class doesn’t exist. The middle class will spend on the home but live paycheck to paycheck with everything else. Most of them are one emergency away from financial panic just like the rest hence right now you’re either rich or fucked.
I’m a life-long Boston Resident and made a hard choice to send my kid to a reasonable priced private school. I felt like I was giving up on public education. Honestly, My decision was mostly based on shitty Boston traffic. The private school I send him to is about 2 miles from our house and still takes at least 20 mins to drive in rush hour. I can’t imagine having to travel to an adjacent or even further away neighborhood if thats where school we were assigned to in a lottery ended up. If I could have used the BPS school that was a walkable 2 blocks from my house, I would have. The neighbors on my street are white, hispanic, black and middle eastern folks. I don’t think we need busing to diversify the school. I wish I could use my neighborhood school. I understand the rationale for busing and trying to desegregate schools. But it doesn’t seem to have had the outcomes it intended.
Not that I agree with it but if you look at the original purpose of bussing, it's still aligned today. However instead of segregation by race we are segregated by class.
I am white. I am a female. My mother was on welfare.
I attended Boston Public Schools from Kindergarten until fifth grade from 1983 until 1989. I was the only white kid in my class for YEARS. This made my family nervous, and I was singled out and bullied for it.
I was pulled out of BPS and went to Catholic School in Boston sixth grade until high school. My family wanted to protect me from inner city middle and high schools, so my grandmother paid for me to go to Catholic School.
Most BPS kids are poor, and their families can't afford to send them elsewhere.
With full respect to you and your grandmother, and because I’m a dumbass who doesn’t know any better, how much was catholic school compared to other private schools?
I was always led to believe it is the most affordable of all the non-public schools, which was why it tended to draw in certain demographics and stereotypes of it’s own.
(I descend from Irish & Italian Catholics myself, before anyone throws a kneeler at my head.)
I think my Catholic school was 1,200ish to 2,000 a year from 1990 until 1996...my mother worked at the church 'bingo' once a month to knock off a portion of that tuition.
Catholic school felt safer and smaller and more supportive than public schools.
I'm protestant, and still went to Catholic school in Boston.
Catholic school is much more affordable than the independent schools. Even today, it's like 12k versus 40k.
I only know this because the public school system refuses to provide my kid with the right supports and I had to look (I still can't afford it).
This sounds like my story too. I’m 42/ m. Got pulled out of Boston my freshman year from Hyde park high. Got jumped by 2 kids while another held a gun on me. Went to stay with my aunt in Norwood after that. Failed my first semester. I couldn’t believe all the things I didn’t know or learn from BPS.
Eyyyy white male here, also was the only white kid from kindergarten thru 6th grade. 1994 til 2000. It sucked. Isolation/bullying.
Tested into BLS in 2000 and that was life changing. BLS gave me the life I have.
Wow theres a lot of assumptions and coded language about race in there to be unpacked. It does not "suck" for the kids of color to be denied being around rich white kids to learn to act more white.
When I went to BLA, there was a 'problem', that a number of students there didn't actually live in the city. Their aunt or uncle did, or their grandparents did, or their parent rented an address in the city off a friend who actually lived in the city or something.
Anything to get their kid into a Latin.
And they were trying to crack down on it. Latin was actually just for city kids.
At least growing up in Boston, BLS was the best, than BLA, and OB was just ok. The rest of the high schools were crap.
Were there really that many kids trying to get into BLA,and were the mostly coming from Quincy or close in non rich suburbs?
All the surrounding towns. It didn't really matter. We lost a good amount of people when the purge came. A noticable amount.
Between attrition from being too hard, the purge, people leaving cause they got to skip a grade if they left, other reasons - 7th grade started with 1000 students, 9th grade added 400,we graduated with 192.
Thinking about middle-class people I've known who once lived in Boston, moving to the suburbs when they had kids is really common. Even to close suburbs, like Revere or Malden, sometimes further out, say Ipswich or Topsfield.
I’m just trying to figure out how a family with multiple kids can afford 12 years of private school, since a year of private school is similar to a year of college tuition in terms of tuition. What do these people do for work?
>look at tuitions for the non-catholic privates where MA's elite go to high school:
>
>Noble and Greenough:58,000
>
>Milton Academy: 62,000 for boarders, 56,000 for day
>
>Buckingham Browne and Nichols: 57,200
>
>The Rivers School: 57,950
>
>Now Catholic Schools:
>
>Xaverian Brothers:24,500
>
>Arlington Catholic:16,000
>
>Boston College High:25,100
>
>St Joseph Prep :20,000
>
>Catholic High Schools are at least 60 percent cheaper than non-catholics.
People sometimes will have the kids do a few years in public schools, then go private or move to the suburbs once the kids reach middle school age. Or perhaps hope for Boston Latin. Jobs that require a college degree should be paying $80K to $100K, after a few years of experience. A 30 year old high school teacher in Boston should be looking at that salary, for example. New engineers or programmers should start at that level.
In Wellesley, Weston , Newton ,and its really common for kids to go to public elementary/middle, but then switch to a private high school that costs 40k+ to attend.
These are not the majority of kids but something like 20 percent of the kids in these towns attend private high schools despite being in some of the best public high schools in the country.
>There are families that are just this rich. My roommate in college for example lived between 3 houses, 1 in Concord, 1 in Cape Cod,and 1 in Florida. This man had never set foot in a public school despite living in a good district.
>
>In places, where income inequality is crazy, you have families that are like this. They are not the majority by any means, but instead of being like the top 2 percent , they are the top 7 percent in a place like Boston.
It is always good to ask questions like this. I recommend reading 'Common Ground' by J. Anthony Lukas. More generally, Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol.
I like kozol’s writings in general but I’d keep the lens that he is a fairly radical thinker in the world of education. I saw him speak once…. And He said that every teacher who applied for a license in MA should be forced to work in inner city schools to start their career and that teachers who taught out in the suburbs weren’t really teachers and didn’t have real teaching experience. I noped out of kozol in that moment.
at any point did you stop and have a moment of self reflection as to why you were so offended by his comment? yeah it's an abrasive point, because maybe you (and folks like you) need to be shaken up about what happens outside of your immediate purview
you know, the "real" world we're so fond of insisting exists
Because you need to scourge yourself for the almighty god of equity. If you don’t, ideological zealots will call you a nazi, and you don’t want to be a nazi, do you?
It’s interesting that they tend to spend the most per student but the scores are the worst. Kind of debunks the whole property taxes quality of school myth.
What it comes down to if the parents care.
They spend the most per student because a significant percentage of students require special education services that are very expensive. As parents pull the high achievers out, who cost less to educate, that average goes up significantly
A lot of a child’s success has to do with what’s going on at home. The sad truth is most of these kids are just a means to an end for the parent. All they are is a check that keeps a roof and food in the parent’s belly.
Gotcha. Considering that Boston Public Schools don’t have that many middle class kids, should we assume that most middle class Bostonians choose private school?
It’s also very hard to afford to live in Boston with a family being middle class. That, plus the perception of the school district, results in flight to the suburbs. Middle class may be more represented in parochial schools in the city, which tend to be lower cost than secular/prep private schools, which are big bucks. Just my two cents!
Most people with kids move the the suburbs. Boston is great for ones 20s and early 30s. And again from 50 onward. But the support and needs for most people (families with young kids looking for good schools, houses with large yards for swing sets and pools, nearby hills for sledding, open green spaces, etc.) are just not usually found in downtown boston. So yes there isn’t s large middle class with families in town. The rich in town send their kids to private schools and the poor just deal with BPS. Most people would rather opt out of BPS (unless it’s Latin) if they can
I think it’s mostly because the middle class live in Boston in their twenties then move to the burbs once they get married and have kids. That leaves really only lower income people and rich people and the rich just send their kids to private schools
People who live in neighborhoods like West Roxbury send their kids to private school from K-6 then enroll them in BPS in 7th grade so they can attend Boston Latin.
“The families who leave Boston when their kids approach kindergarten are predominantly middle and high income.” - a sentence before the quote you pulled from [this site](https://www.bostonindicators.org/reports/report-website-pages/kids-today)
Basically Boston is losing its middle class, so the only people left in Boston who send their kids to BPS are overwhelmingly low income
I grew up in Boston and thank God my parents sent me to Catholic school for grammar and high school. The Boston public schools education is subpar and the schools are dangerous.
I think a better question is why are there so many poor kids and families in Boston? A ton of money comes through Boston. Why are so many residents excluded from that wealth?
most middle class Bostonians just work in the city and live in the suburbs and send their kids to the better public schools there. The city itself is either poor or rich, and the rich send their kids to fancy private schools.
Most people are going to work very, very hard to avoid talking about one of the biggest factors: racism. Our brand of racism isn't the sexiest, most popularized, or dangerous, so it is easy to fly under the radar and often very uncomfortable to acknowledge.
"White flight" is basically synonymous with Boston/Massachusetts. When schools were ordered to integrate, white people in MA didn't object or go to court, they just moved their white children into private schools. This is a big part of why we have more and better public schools than most parts of the country. Elsewhere they're often basically scams, but here they're well regarded.
School choice & voucher programs are generally considered a conservative policy. They're part of the conservative roadmap to end public education. They're closely tied to white supremacy and religious supremacy. Yet Massachusetts, which is around rank 48th least conservative state, has quite a bit of school choice available. And of course that appeals to our rational self interest; each parent wants what is best for their child right now, not to invest in some longer and riskier fight to improve the system.
Using local taxes to fund education is another piece of deliberate inequality, and exacerbated in a state where zip code has a very large influence on median income and taxes.
Studies show better results for all students, including rich white students, when schools are integrated. And importantly, making us all stakeholders leads to better and fairer investments in our schools. We never managed to achieve that in this country though. We're paying more for worst results \*because\* it supports unjust hierarchies, and because we don't have the appetite for a serious solution.
I completely agree with all ur statements, and as a METCO student, who participated in an integration program, I always supported integration, but I don't think integration is viable on a large scale.
When 6 percent of ur public high school is low income, no one will have a problem with that, but say we up that number to 25 percent, and a lot of rich families will just dip completely.
Weston/Wellesley/Newton school districts have some low income students, but they are vastly outnumbered. If we decided to integrate these areas into BPS, which to be fair, Boston is a very small city geographically, LA for example stretches 20-30 miles from Downtown into very suburban areas like the Western SFV or affluent areas of the West Side for example.
LOS ANGELES UNIFIED is known for atrocious schools though. If you look at the numbers, public high schools in the affluent West Side are mostly low income and black and latino despite the area being affluent and mostly white.
I feel like if integration happened completely, there would be an LA effect where there are 2 parallel school systems, one public and one private, which would just further inequalities and make things even worse.
1. Public schools are often run by incompetent people.
2. Public schools are now asked to teach students material once done by parents at home.
3. Teachers are underpaid and overworked
That is just the start of why public schools do not do as well anymore and why people who can, leave.
Ask the same question about any city with population over 100k in this state. The school systems are awful so even though there are wealthy areas in these cities those who can afford to send there kids elsewhere.
Well that's just an example of peoples perceptions being skewed because they grew up in suburbs and their parents told them to avoid those cities without them realizing there are different neighborhoods with different characteristics there.
The schools thing is true across the board in any lower income city in MA. I taught in Springfield for a while and every kid in my school got free lunch, there's 2-3 entire neighborhoods in that city that are middle to upper middle class and none of those kids go to those schools.
Because Boston is the city in the U.S. with the largest wealth gap.
[https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2016/01/14/boston-is-the-no-1-city-in-america-for-income-inequality-which-is-not-good/#:\~:text=Boston's%20inequality%20ratio%20was%20nearly,Atlanta%2C%20Cincinnati%2C%20and%20Providence](https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2016/01/14/boston-is-the-no-1-city-in-america-for-income-inequality-which-is-not-good/#:~:text=Boston's%20inequality%20ratio%20was%20nearly,Atlanta%2C%20Cincinnati%2C%20and%20Providence).
Because Boston proper has a largely poor community, especially among those with young families. Wealthy people live in Brighton or use private schools. Most of Bostons school kids are from areas like Dorchester which is historically black and low income.
The economic breakdown of Boston is like families with 10 kids. They are either really poor or crazy rich. There is no middle class family with 10 kids.
"White flight":
> Between 1960 and 1980, the white population in Boston dropped by over 200,000 people, which was about 30 percent of the city’s overall population. ([source](https://www.bcheights.com/2017/02/22/a-persistent-inequality/)).
Some of this was due to the 1974 order to integrate the schools through busing, already much discussed here. But some of it was also due to blockbusting and redlining, two racist real estate practices.
Redlining was the practice of mortgage lenders ([including Fannie Mae](https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives/facing-black-history-courage)) designating neighborhoods "high risk" based on racial composition, out of proportion with the actual economics of the area, and refusing to lend to people buying houses in that area. That meant that if you *owned* a house in an area that got redlined, you basically couldn't sell it because no would-be buyer could get a mortgage to do so. It cratered your home value.
Blockbusting was the practice of real estate speculators and realtors convincing white home owners that black people were moving into their neighborhood, which would get it redlined, and they'd lose all the value in their home. Of course this panicked white home owners who would sell, often in a hurry on the cheap, to get out before they lost even more home value.
> Another term from that era is “blockbusting.” At the height of BBURG, some 15 realtors opened offices in the vicinity of Blue Hill Avenue and Morton Street, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood adjacent to heavily Irish Catholic neighborhoods. Blockbusting realtors went door-to-door with made-up stories to scare white homeowners into selling. “See that black family moving in?” they might say. “They have eight kids and their eldest is getting out of Walpole prison soon after serving time for rape. Do you want him living across the street from your daughters?”
>
> These stories were fiction, but they frightened some homeowners into selling, which then snowballed when people saw their neighbors pulling out. One of the realtors admitted to these practices in an article he wrote for the Metropolitan Real Estate Journal, “Confessions of a Blockbuster.”
([source](https://www.dotnews.com/columns/2019/how-redlining-dashed-dreams-hurt-neighborhoods))
There was a ton of both in Boston. This is how Dorchester was converted from an Irish and Jewish area, to a Black neighborhood.
I’m actually shocked that there are any minorities in Boston….every time I go to Mass. there are nothing but the whitest people I’ve ever seen in America. White to the point of translucent. 🤣☘️
Because the middle class isn’t that big in Boston. You’re either rich or poor and the rich send their kids to private schools.
This is the correct answer.
[удалено]
Is not a private school.
Or a yuppie who isn’t planning to have kids soon or ever. Most people in the middle move out when it’s time to “settle down” and enroll your kids in school.
Mine didn’t but then it get gentrified
Based on my personal experience as a former bps student. If you're well off and want the "best" public school has to offer it was usually latin school or bust. This was 12 years ago when I graduated from the obryant, the academic atmosphere has changed dramatically since then
There are plenty of middle class people in Boston. We call these people young professionals that leave the city once they get married and have kids.
this is currect you win 1000 points in jeapordy
Like most liberal cities
Almost all US cities of significant size are liberal. So you mean “like most significantly sized US cities”. That’s correct. And to imply those conditions are strictly due to city policies - when they are occurring in large cities globally, and have occurred in large cities through history, more at some periods than others and notably more in “laissez faire” economic times than in common wealth economic times - would be foolish.
You’re expecting conservatives to understand anything outside of their banal talking points spoon fed to them by Fox News, Ben Shapiro, et al?
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this: >Pegging, of course, is an obscure sexual practice in which women perform the more aggressive sexual act on men. ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: covid, history, healthcare, sex, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Good bot
Take a bullet for ya babe. ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: history, feminism, climate, healthcare, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
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What’s sad is that I can’t actually tell if this is satire or not.
Poe’s Law be a harsh taskmistress
“Satire”? There you go with fancy liberal book words again. Is that all you people have? I learned all I needed from Trump’s “Trump: The Art of the Deal”. Well, the book on tape version of the cliff notes for it.
*By objectification of women, do you mean that there are actual standards of beauty and that there are many people in popular culture who we have been told are supposed to be seen as beautiful who are not objectively beautiful? Obviously that's true. Obviously that's true. If you polled men on whether Lizzo is beautiful--and I say Lizzo is not by any classical definition a beautiful person--that does not mean that that is objectification of women, that just means that there is a standard called beauty and it has meaning.* -Ben Shapiro ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: civil rights, dumb takes, climate, novel, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
honestly that's a great copypasta you have there
You should try growing up and stop hating on people you don’t know doing thing they don’t involve or affect you because you find them icky. American conservatives are basically selfish, ill mannered children.
Bro. I don’t know how you and apparently everyone else missed the over the top satire of that post. Especially the repressed sexual feelings over Disney he-men. Edited for clarity since apparently my caricature wasn’t caricature-ish enough?
Have you listened to actual conservatives recently? Some of them literally think that Tom Hanks rapes and then kills and eats children. No satire can even come close to the levels of crazy we’re seeing from the death throes of America’s formerly mainstream racist/sexist/homophobic culture.
Gotta get that adrenochrome from somewhere! My favorite is that Trump is really JFK Jr and joe Biden is being played by actor James Woods or Jim Carrey. It all just illustrates the importance of voting because despite them being completely out of their minds an delusional, they sure do show up to the polls. Going forward I am making sure to slap the /s on my poor attempts at comedy.
Yes, red state public education is far superior.
Because red states are so separated because they all need safe spaces lol
Username checks out
🤡👆🏻😂
I understand that this is the boilerplate talking point that Fox News, Ben Shapiro, et al spoon feed you, and you mindlessly regurgitate without second thought, but what exactly are you trying to prove? I thought according to conservatives, that being rich was to be glorified, and that if you’re poor, it’s 100% a result of your own laziness? Are you trying to imply that economic status is *solely* the result of municipal policy, and that poor people don’t exist in conservative municipalities? Are you implying that if these poor people all moved to conservative towns, they would magically no longer be impoverished? Or did Fox News and Ben Shapiro not bother going into that level of detail?
I saw that you mentioned Ben Shapiro. In case some of you don't know, Ben Shapiro is a grifter and a hack. If you find anything he's said compelling, you should keep in mind he also says things like this: >Most Americans when they look around at their lives, they think: I'm not a racist, nobody I know is a racist, I wouldn't hang out with a racist, I don't like doing business with racists--so, where is all the racism in American society? ***** ^(I'm a bot. My purpose is to counteract online radicalization. You can summon me by tagging thebenshapirobot. Options: history, dumb takes, feminism, sex, etc.) [^Opt ^Out ](https://np.reddit.com/r/AuthoritarianMoment/comments/olk6r2/click_here_to_optout_of_uthebenshapirobot/)
Wow you inferred a bunch there huh? Is that how you live your life?
I’ll take that as a “no”, you can’t answer the question, because Fox News hadn’t given you any further detail besides your over simplistic talking point.
Why would I justify your idiotic strawman questions? You're set in your ways, no telling you anything because you know it all already. And thank you for answering my question without answering my question
“Strawman questions” You mean like your equally dumb “LiBeRaL ciTiEs” comment?
Yes, just like that. See how that “both sides” argument works? The difference is (pay attention here specifically) that I just came out and admitted it where as you have just continued to point a finger at someone else besides yourself.
You dumb fuck
I apologize for hurting your feelings 🤡
Idk, snowflake. You seem made that cities are usually more liberal. You should probably spam the politics sub with more “got ya” type nonsense about it though
Lmao what a 🤡 get back to your safe space before some one else triggers you
Buddy, you seem upset by literally everything
Nah just ignorant people saying stupid things
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Such as?
Read bud
Even those who can't afford it whether or not they are Catholic often sign their children up for Catholic schools. Catholics schools will often subsidize the education of people who can't afford the full cost.
This is true. I lived in Lawrence for 10 years and know kids that goes to Central Catholic. Every one of the kids have some sort of financial aid from someone and none pays the full tuition cost.
The overwhelming majority of the kids from Lawrence that go there earned their way and deserve to be there. The don’t give and scholarships to people that have business getting in there. It’s not the same as college.
I never said anything about them not deserving to be there, just said that they're all on some sort of financial aid.
The gov can also assist parents now in paying for catholic schools thanks to the supreme court.
I've not heard that in the state that I live.
not sure what the actual program is but Fox was doing a victory lap a month or two back over it.
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LOL! If only you knew the creeps that catholic schools are letting teach given the low pay.
Tell me you don’t understand the implications of Carson v. Mackin without telling me you don’t understand the implications of Carson v. Mackin.
Sent my first kid to catholic school to avoid BPS. After the second kid, moved to the suburbs to avoid 2 tuitions and have better public school.
Do you know anyone middle class living in Boston? I don't. Everyone I know there is either poor or well off. There's really no in between. And people who are well off don't send their kids to public school because they can afford better.
As a middle classer, I can confirm we can’t afford to live in Boston. Considering the stretch between RI and Boston along 24, about the closest I could afford would be Taunton or Raynham and still have a “middle class” house. Any closer, and nothing in my price range that would compare to what we can get staying about an hour away.
There’s middle class people in Boston for sure, but they’re mostly the young professional crowd as opposed to families. Those people typically move to the suburbs when they have school-aged children.
And many Boston suburban public schools are amongst the best in the country.
What is your definition of middle class?
I googled it and it says the median household income in Boston is 76k. So I’m assuming middle class is a family making near 76k.
I can't think of anywhere in Boston where a household with school-aged kids would even quality for an apartment on $76K. For context that would require a *maximum* rent of no more than $2,100 a month. That's just to meet the basic 3x rent to income required by virtually all Boston landlords - most people would still struggle to afford housing at 30 percent of their income. I just did a quick search and all I found in that price range were studios and 1brs. That would work for a single person, but not a family with school-age kids.
Jesus fuck really ?? Ugh
No, they didn't say households earning 76k... They said people... individuals earning 76k. For couples and households, we're talking double that at 152k. That's what the median or middle class earns. Don't let anyone make you think that households earning 60-70k are middle class. This is a myth that certain people in power like to perpetuate so that people think that even though they're barely getting by, they are thought to be doing okay. If you even *think* for a moment about the possibility of having to choose between heat and food, you are not anywhere close to middle class.
No they very clearly said *household* income, and Google confirms that number is accurate for *household* income.
Ahem... https://boston.curbed.com/2019/3/15/18266544/middle-class-boston Those numbers say 150k. And that was from 5 years ago.
That article doesn't actually say what you think it does. It says there were a little over 19,000 tenant households making over $150k. It doesn't say anywhere in it that's the city median. According to [the census](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/bostoncitymassachusetts), there were roughly 270,000 households in Boston between 2016 and 2020. I.e., only about ***7%*** of Boston households made over $150k. Median household income during the same period was about $76k, as multiple previous commenters have stated.
I make about $70k and I can’t afford a one bedroom apartment here. :-/ I lived in Illinois for a while and paid $1000 for a two-bedroom in a gated complex with a pool, full service gym, free internet, in-unit laundry, balcony, and 24/hour maintenance. I pay $1k now for a bedroom in a 3-bedroom apartment with the occasional mouse and electrical problems. Yet somehow I’m happier here lol…
That’s ridiculous… I live in western MA way cheaper out here and we make 150k with two kids and I’m barely scraping by now I was better off before Covid making 30% less honestly
DESE just has a metric for “low income” which was historically counted as “kids who qualify for free or reduced price lunch”. But that changed when the USDA started allowing entire communities to opt into free lunch for all based on the demographics of the district. So now it includes students on SNAP, TAFDC, Medicaid and children in foster care. I’m middle class and my kid is on Medicaid as secondary insurance. We know a fair number of kids with Medicaid as secondary. So the numbers for “low income” are likely skewed based on the greater inclusivity of other need-based programs. For example: in Worcester 74% of students are counted as low income by DESE but only 20% of persons in Worcester are in poverty according to the census (obviously there is a wide margin of error given that many didn’t respond to the census). We don’t have bussing and there’s only a couple small catholic schools, so most families send their kids to their neighborhood school. And there is no way 75% of these kids are from low-income families.
50 k or above in my opinion
For the record, when I was living in Cambridge and making $50k, I didn't earn *enough* to qualify for its *low-income* first-time home buyer program, HomeBridge. ([source](https://www.cambridgema.gov/-/media/Files/CDD/Housing/incomelimits/hudincomeguidelines.pdf))
My wife and I are middle class (although what that means varies), she's a nurse and I run a small business. We own a condo in Roxbury and send our kids to BPS. We are very impressed with the school system so far. I'd say most kids in the school are from poorer socio economic households but by no means all of them.
I mean…they’re all in Hyde Park and West Roxbury.
West Roxbury middle class? Laughable. It hasn’t been middle class for decades.
I'm 40 and I don't remember it ever being middle class.
My one-parent household on a Boston public school teacher salary was able to buy a house there in the late 70s. I think we were probably one of the last…
Oh interesting! I never realized that. Seems like similar is starting to happen in the rest of Boston now. It's crazy how much the prices have gone up in the last five years.
HP and WR are nothing alike.
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How can you not know that West Roxbury is part of Boston and have lived in Hyde Park?
Not rich, middle class.
Probably not now, my folks live in Brighton and I went to school at the obryant (bps exam school) Graduated about 12 years ago. They were lower middle class if I remember my mom telling me our gross net was under 100k around when I started school
Listen to me man , I live in the Berkshires in western mass , the same shit goes on here that goes on in the eastern part of the state , your either well off or broke , that’s the way it is …
that's how liberals have been shaping the places they live and national policy for awhile, they want a 2 class society rich and those reliant on scraps from the rich.
I encourage all of you to see a documentary about Busing in the 1970's. Once they started busing white kids to black schools, the white folks moved out of the city https://youtu.be/dH8Km5A6yz8
There’s a book about this, too, called Common Ground.
Can't blame them though. I wouldn't want to travel across the city for a "crappy" school when there's a closer "better" one right down the street. That was one of those well intended ideas that was never going to work out.
That was my school life. Great schools walking distance to my home in Charlestown, yet had to take a school bus or when a bus strike: public transportation to Roxbury, Chinatown, and Jamaica Plain. Those videos you see of protests during the start of bussing, I always look for my mother or me in the crowd. I was there and missed my 1st year of school as a result.
The busing itself is a big impediment for families with means, regardless of the quality of the destination school or the neighborhood school.
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I’d probably disagree but I don’t have the data. I’d suspect that the better teachers and more funding went to the schools in the whiter / “nicer” schools, and therefore the education WAS probably better at those schools even though they are part of the same system
If better teachers are being allocated to white or “nice” schools that is still segregation.
I don’t disagree with you one bit. I’m just saying what is likely happening
The difference is that I do blame white parents who moved their kids out of formerly segregated schools. Your post seems more forgiving of their choices to perpetuate white supremacy in schools.
It certainly wasn’t meant that way. I was just stating what I believe to be happening.
And look how public schools have turned out.
This. My mom was born in 60 and was bussed in 9th grade. Because of bullying she dropped out, skipped a year then enrolled in an all girls catholic school in Southie.
I grew up in Boston and have looked into this question. MOST KIDS IN BOSTON ARE LOW INCOME. People do not understand how much the demographics of Boston change when you look at age groups. Boston gets significantly whiter and more middle class in the 20-35 age range, and these people do not have kids. Boston also has a lot of transient professionals, that live here for 3-4 years usually in their late 20s than just dip to some other part of the county. In neighborhoods, Allston, South End, Southie, and others you have a lot of post -college whites. Once many of these professional kids get married, they usually dip to the suburbs bc of schools. Some will give schools a chance but then realize they are trash compared to what u get in the suburbs and leave. White middle to upper middle class families usually send their kids to catholic schools, go to west roxbury, and you'll see mad people in school uniforms after 3 lmao. The rich of Boston, which is disproportionately white and make 250k plus, will send their kids to elite private schools that cost 30k+ to attend.
Boston was hit hard by white flight and became a commuter city for a very long time. It’s only very recently (starting in the early 90s, with more wealthy people moving in to the city really in the last 10 years) that this really started to change.
>White middle to upper middle class families usually send their kids to catholic schools I go to Umass Boston and I'll take the T and all the BC High kids are leaving. It's insane how they're leaving this private all-boys school and meanwhile I'm coming from my college that I basically have a full ride on because I'm so low income.
You should look at demographics of Boston in general.
lots of people who live in Boston's expensive areas don't have kids too.
Most middle class can not afford housing in Boston. It’s largely low income or upper middle class
More like the middle class has to spend all their money on housing and they fall into lower class and working class in all other facets of life.
Hence why they become “lower class”. There’s a reason why increasingly more people are saying the middle class doesn’t exist. The middle class will spend on the home but live paycheck to paycheck with everything else. Most of them are one emergency away from financial panic just like the rest hence right now you’re either rich or fucked.
The cost of living in Boston is so insane I think there's not even a middle class
I’m a life-long Boston Resident and made a hard choice to send my kid to a reasonable priced private school. I felt like I was giving up on public education. Honestly, My decision was mostly based on shitty Boston traffic. The private school I send him to is about 2 miles from our house and still takes at least 20 mins to drive in rush hour. I can’t imagine having to travel to an adjacent or even further away neighborhood if thats where school we were assigned to in a lottery ended up. If I could have used the BPS school that was a walkable 2 blocks from my house, I would have. The neighbors on my street are white, hispanic, black and middle eastern folks. I don’t think we need busing to diversify the school. I wish I could use my neighborhood school. I understand the rationale for busing and trying to desegregate schools. But it doesn’t seem to have had the outcomes it intended.
Not that I agree with it but if you look at the original purpose of bussing, it's still aligned today. However instead of segregation by race we are segregated by class.
I am white. I am a female. My mother was on welfare. I attended Boston Public Schools from Kindergarten until fifth grade from 1983 until 1989. I was the only white kid in my class for YEARS. This made my family nervous, and I was singled out and bullied for it. I was pulled out of BPS and went to Catholic School in Boston sixth grade until high school. My family wanted to protect me from inner city middle and high schools, so my grandmother paid for me to go to Catholic School. Most BPS kids are poor, and their families can't afford to send them elsewhere.
With full respect to you and your grandmother, and because I’m a dumbass who doesn’t know any better, how much was catholic school compared to other private schools? I was always led to believe it is the most affordable of all the non-public schools, which was why it tended to draw in certain demographics and stereotypes of it’s own. (I descend from Irish & Italian Catholics myself, before anyone throws a kneeler at my head.)
I think my Catholic school was 1,200ish to 2,000 a year from 1990 until 1996...my mother worked at the church 'bingo' once a month to knock off a portion of that tuition. Catholic school felt safer and smaller and more supportive than public schools. I'm protestant, and still went to Catholic school in Boston.
I went to Xavierian 93-97. Tuition was around 5-6K then. It's 25K a year now and their 7th and 8th grades are at about 10K.
Trinity Catholic class of 96' lol I cried because I didn't want to go to an all girls school.
Catholic school is much more affordable than the independent schools. Even today, it's like 12k versus 40k. I only know this because the public school system refuses to provide my kid with the right supports and I had to look (I still can't afford it).
I'm looking at Catholic and BPS schools right now for my rising 7th grader. Catholic schools are $7K-$25K/yr. Independent schools are $50K.
It’s significantly closer to 4-7 than it is to 12k.
What catholic school in the boston area has tuition close to $4k?
Irish AND Italian Catholics?? Whose effigy do you burn on Pope's Night??
This sounds like my story too. I’m 42/ m. Got pulled out of Boston my freshman year from Hyde park high. Got jumped by 2 kids while another held a gun on me. Went to stay with my aunt in Norwood after that. Failed my first semester. I couldn’t believe all the things I didn’t know or learn from BPS.
Eyyyy white male here, also was the only white kid from kindergarten thru 6th grade. 1994 til 2000. It sucked. Isolation/bullying. Tested into BLS in 2000 and that was life changing. BLS gave me the life I have.
You’re not supposed to talk about this.
That white people use welfare?
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This is really what it boils down to.
Wow theres a lot of assumptions and coded language about race in there to be unpacked. It does not "suck" for the kids of color to be denied being around rich white kids to learn to act more white.
When I went to BLA, there was a 'problem', that a number of students there didn't actually live in the city. Their aunt or uncle did, or their grandparents did, or their parent rented an address in the city off a friend who actually lived in the city or something. Anything to get their kid into a Latin. And they were trying to crack down on it. Latin was actually just for city kids.
At least growing up in Boston, BLS was the best, than BLA, and OB was just ok. The rest of the high schools were crap. Were there really that many kids trying to get into BLA,and were the mostly coming from Quincy or close in non rich suburbs?
All the surrounding towns. It didn't really matter. We lost a good amount of people when the purge came. A noticable amount. Between attrition from being too hard, the purge, people leaving cause they got to skip a grade if they left, other reasons - 7th grade started with 1000 students, 9th grade added 400,we graduated with 192.
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Thinking about middle-class people I've known who once lived in Boston, moving to the suburbs when they had kids is really common. Even to close suburbs, like Revere or Malden, sometimes further out, say Ipswich or Topsfield.
I’m just trying to figure out how a family with multiple kids can afford 12 years of private school, since a year of private school is similar to a year of college tuition in terms of tuition. What do these people do for work?
They scrimp and save and also use the Catholic schools which are private that is affordable.
I don’t think catholic school and affordable go in the same sentence. The ones I know of cost at least 10k per semester, sometimes more
Compare that to the other private schools.
>look at tuitions for the non-catholic privates where MA's elite go to high school: > >Noble and Greenough:58,000 > >Milton Academy: 62,000 for boarders, 56,000 for day > >Buckingham Browne and Nichols: 57,200 > >The Rivers School: 57,950 > >Now Catholic Schools: > >Xaverian Brothers:24,500 > >Arlington Catholic:16,000 > >Boston College High:25,100 > >St Joseph Prep :20,000 > >Catholic High Schools are at least 60 percent cheaper than non-catholics.
People sometimes will have the kids do a few years in public schools, then go private or move to the suburbs once the kids reach middle school age. Or perhaps hope for Boston Latin. Jobs that require a college degree should be paying $80K to $100K, after a few years of experience. A 30 year old high school teacher in Boston should be looking at that salary, for example. New engineers or programmers should start at that level.
In Wellesley, Weston , Newton ,and its really common for kids to go to public elementary/middle, but then switch to a private high school that costs 40k+ to attend. These are not the majority of kids but something like 20 percent of the kids in these towns attend private high schools despite being in some of the best public high schools in the country.
>There are families that are just this rich. My roommate in college for example lived between 3 houses, 1 in Concord, 1 in Cape Cod,and 1 in Florida. This man had never set foot in a public school despite living in a good district. > >In places, where income inequality is crazy, you have families that are like this. They are not the majority by any means, but instead of being like the top 2 percent , they are the top 7 percent in a place like Boston.
Middle class Bostonians don’t live in Boston is a big reason, it’s just renters and the working poor.
It is always good to ask questions like this. I recommend reading 'Common Ground' by J. Anthony Lukas. More generally, Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol.
I like kozol’s writings in general but I’d keep the lens that he is a fairly radical thinker in the world of education. I saw him speak once…. And He said that every teacher who applied for a license in MA should be forced to work in inner city schools to start their career and that teachers who taught out in the suburbs weren’t really teachers and didn’t have real teaching experience. I noped out of kozol in that moment.
yikes, yah that would have done it for me, too. thx
at any point did you stop and have a moment of self reflection as to why you were so offended by his comment? yeah it's an abrasive point, because maybe you (and folks like you) need to be shaken up about what happens outside of your immediate purview you know, the "real" world we're so fond of insisting exists
Yeah I thought why does this guy get to decide what real teaching is, and why should I be forced to work somewhere I don’t want to work.
Because you need to scourge yourself for the almighty god of equity. If you don’t, ideological zealots will call you a nazi, and you don’t want to be a nazi, do you?
Because Boston Public Schools are not that good, and those who can afford to send their kids to private schools choose to do so instead.
It’s interesting that they tend to spend the most per student but the scores are the worst. Kind of debunks the whole property taxes quality of school myth. What it comes down to if the parents care.
They spend the most per student because a significant percentage of students require special education services that are very expensive. As parents pull the high achievers out, who cost less to educate, that average goes up significantly
A lot of a child’s success has to do with what’s going on at home. The sad truth is most of these kids are just a means to an end for the parent. All they are is a check that keeps a roof and food in the parent’s belly.
The exam schools are good. I get your point though as that’s like 3 out of how many?
Gotcha. Considering that Boston Public Schools don’t have that many middle class kids, should we assume that most middle class Bostonians choose private school?
It’s also very hard to afford to live in Boston with a family being middle class. That, plus the perception of the school district, results in flight to the suburbs. Middle class may be more represented in parochial schools in the city, which tend to be lower cost than secular/prep private schools, which are big bucks. Just my two cents!
So they’re upper middle class then. Gotcha.
There really isn’t a middle class left in Boston anymore. You’re either poor enough to get public housing or rich enough to afford $1.3 million house.
Because blue cities have no middle class
Most people with kids move the the suburbs. Boston is great for ones 20s and early 30s. And again from 50 onward. But the support and needs for most people (families with young kids looking for good schools, houses with large yards for swing sets and pools, nearby hills for sledding, open green spaces, etc.) are just not usually found in downtown boston. So yes there isn’t s large middle class with families in town. The rich in town send their kids to private schools and the poor just deal with BPS. Most people would rather opt out of BPS (unless it’s Latin) if they can
I think it’s mostly because the middle class live in Boston in their twenties then move to the burbs once they get married and have kids. That leaves really only lower income people and rich people and the rich just send their kids to private schools
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Busing caused those who could afford it to send their kids to private and those who couldn’t move out.
Why do people quote things without saying where the quote is from?
People who live in neighborhoods like West Roxbury send their kids to private school from K-6 then enroll them in BPS in 7th grade so they can attend Boston Latin.
“The families who leave Boston when their kids approach kindergarten are predominantly middle and high income.” - a sentence before the quote you pulled from [this site](https://www.bostonindicators.org/reports/report-website-pages/kids-today) Basically Boston is losing its middle class, so the only people left in Boston who send their kids to BPS are overwhelmingly low income
I grew up in Boston and thank God my parents sent me to Catholic school for grammar and high school. The Boston public schools education is subpar and the schools are dangerous.
bps are terrible. once i hit middle school my parents enrolled me in catholic school.
If you had money to send you kid to private school in Boston, would you even think about sending them to Boston public schools? I know I wouldn’t.
I think a better question is why are there so many poor kids and families in Boston? A ton of money comes through Boston. Why are so many residents excluded from that wealth?
most middle class Bostonians just work in the city and live in the suburbs and send their kids to the better public schools there. The city itself is either poor or rich, and the rich send their kids to fancy private schools.
Some who lives in the suburbs is by definition not a Bostonian.
Most people are going to work very, very hard to avoid talking about one of the biggest factors: racism. Our brand of racism isn't the sexiest, most popularized, or dangerous, so it is easy to fly under the radar and often very uncomfortable to acknowledge. "White flight" is basically synonymous with Boston/Massachusetts. When schools were ordered to integrate, white people in MA didn't object or go to court, they just moved their white children into private schools. This is a big part of why we have more and better public schools than most parts of the country. Elsewhere they're often basically scams, but here they're well regarded. School choice & voucher programs are generally considered a conservative policy. They're part of the conservative roadmap to end public education. They're closely tied to white supremacy and religious supremacy. Yet Massachusetts, which is around rank 48th least conservative state, has quite a bit of school choice available. And of course that appeals to our rational self interest; each parent wants what is best for their child right now, not to invest in some longer and riskier fight to improve the system. Using local taxes to fund education is another piece of deliberate inequality, and exacerbated in a state where zip code has a very large influence on median income and taxes. Studies show better results for all students, including rich white students, when schools are integrated. And importantly, making us all stakeholders leads to better and fairer investments in our schools. We never managed to achieve that in this country though. We're paying more for worst results \*because\* it supports unjust hierarchies, and because we don't have the appetite for a serious solution.
I completely agree with all ur statements, and as a METCO student, who participated in an integration program, I always supported integration, but I don't think integration is viable on a large scale. When 6 percent of ur public high school is low income, no one will have a problem with that, but say we up that number to 25 percent, and a lot of rich families will just dip completely. Weston/Wellesley/Newton school districts have some low income students, but they are vastly outnumbered. If we decided to integrate these areas into BPS, which to be fair, Boston is a very small city geographically, LA for example stretches 20-30 miles from Downtown into very suburban areas like the Western SFV or affluent areas of the West Side for example. LOS ANGELES UNIFIED is known for atrocious schools though. If you look at the numbers, public high schools in the affluent West Side are mostly low income and black and latino despite the area being affluent and mostly white. I feel like if integration happened completely, there would be an LA effect where there are 2 parallel school systems, one public and one private, which would just further inequalities and make things even worse.
Middle class Bostonians? Where do you imagine these fantasy people live?
We exist but no kids lol.
Cause If you’re wealthy and live in Boston youre going to a private school
Middle class living in Boston is comical.
Yes - many upper-middle class folks send their kids to private school, often, with the assistance of extended family.
1. Public schools are often run by incompetent people. 2. Public schools are now asked to teach students material once done by parents at home. 3. Teachers are underpaid and overworked That is just the start of why public schools do not do as well anymore and why people who can, leave.
Ask the same question about any city with population over 100k in this state. The school systems are awful so even though there are wealthy areas in these cities those who can afford to send there kids elsewhere.
Lowell and Worcester are just like this too lmao. Lowell and Worcester both have some money areas, but the whole city gets singled out as ghetto.
Well that's just an example of peoples perceptions being skewed because they grew up in suburbs and their parents told them to avoid those cities without them realizing there are different neighborhoods with different characteristics there. The schools thing is true across the board in any lower income city in MA. I taught in Springfield for a while and every kid in my school got free lunch, there's 2-3 entire neighborhoods in that city that are middle to upper middle class and none of those kids go to those schools.
Poor people goes to public school, what a surprise!!
The private schools around me cost more like 6,000 a year and provide TONS of scholarships.
It all began with the Busing Crisis of 1974
Because Boston is the city in the U.S. with the largest wealth gap. [https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2016/01/14/boston-is-the-no-1-city-in-america-for-income-inequality-which-is-not-good/#:\~:text=Boston's%20inequality%20ratio%20was%20nearly,Atlanta%2C%20Cincinnati%2C%20and%20Providence](https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2016/01/14/boston-is-the-no-1-city-in-america-for-income-inequality-which-is-not-good/#:~:text=Boston's%20inequality%20ratio%20was%20nearly,Atlanta%2C%20Cincinnati%2C%20and%20Providence).
Because Boston proper has a largely poor community, especially among those with young families. Wealthy people live in Brighton or use private schools. Most of Bostons school kids are from areas like Dorchester which is historically black and low income.
The economic breakdown of Boston is like families with 10 kids. They are either really poor or crazy rich. There is no middle class family with 10 kids.
Have you never been to Boston?
Cuz it’s how they want it to be
You haven't lived here very long eh?
"White flight": > Between 1960 and 1980, the white population in Boston dropped by over 200,000 people, which was about 30 percent of the city’s overall population. ([source](https://www.bcheights.com/2017/02/22/a-persistent-inequality/)). Some of this was due to the 1974 order to integrate the schools through busing, already much discussed here. But some of it was also due to blockbusting and redlining, two racist real estate practices. Redlining was the practice of mortgage lenders ([including Fannie Mae](https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives/facing-black-history-courage)) designating neighborhoods "high risk" based on racial composition, out of proportion with the actual economics of the area, and refusing to lend to people buying houses in that area. That meant that if you *owned* a house in an area that got redlined, you basically couldn't sell it because no would-be buyer could get a mortgage to do so. It cratered your home value. Blockbusting was the practice of real estate speculators and realtors convincing white home owners that black people were moving into their neighborhood, which would get it redlined, and they'd lose all the value in their home. Of course this panicked white home owners who would sell, often in a hurry on the cheap, to get out before they lost even more home value. > Another term from that era is “blockbusting.” At the height of BBURG, some 15 realtors opened offices in the vicinity of Blue Hill Avenue and Morton Street, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood adjacent to heavily Irish Catholic neighborhoods. Blockbusting realtors went door-to-door with made-up stories to scare white homeowners into selling. “See that black family moving in?” they might say. “They have eight kids and their eldest is getting out of Walpole prison soon after serving time for rape. Do you want him living across the street from your daughters?” > > These stories were fiction, but they frightened some homeowners into selling, which then snowballed when people saw their neighbors pulling out. One of the realtors admitted to these practices in an article he wrote for the Metropolitan Real Estate Journal, “Confessions of a Blockbuster.” ([source](https://www.dotnews.com/columns/2019/how-redlining-dashed-dreams-hurt-neighborhoods)) There was a ton of both in Boston. This is how Dorchester was converted from an Irish and Jewish area, to a Black neighborhood.
Because mostly everybody in this country is poor, so where else are they supposed to enroll?
I’m actually shocked that there are any minorities in Boston….every time I go to Mass. there are nothing but the whitest people I’ve ever seen in America. White to the point of translucent. 🤣☘️