Rarely do I get cranky when writing a post for Clean Slate MoCo. Folks, there is a limit to how emotionally invested you can get about zoning and the liquor monopoly.
Reading White Oak School First to Pilot Brilliant Futures Savings Program for Kindergartners, though, made me extremely upset. The article describes the inauguration of Greater Washington Community Foundation’s Brilliant Futures program. As part of this program, children attending Jackson Road Elementary School accrue $1,000/year for each year of their MCPS studies. Post K-12, the graduates can apply the $13,000 maximum to an approved venture.
Jackson Road is in the White Oak district, and serves students in areas that the county’s Planning Department believes are moderately, slightly, or neutrally disadvantaged.
Here is what the school ranking service Niche has to say about Jackson Road.
This school is great on diversity, but when it comes to academics it’s struggling. It ranks 365 in all of Maryland.
Let’s see what Niche has to say about Bethesda Elementary School.
This school is also good on diversity, and also great in academics and teachers. It ranks a stellar 36 in all of Maryland. The children attending this school are privileged—as all children should be.
According to standardized scores, the comparison is even more glaring.
| Metric | Jackson Road ES | Bethesda ES |
| Percent Proficient – Reading | 35% | 73% |
| Percent Proficient – Math | 19% | 62% |
Recall that MCPS is the authoritarian body that decides which students attend which schools. The students living around New Hampshire Avenue and Jackson Road must attend Jackson Road ES—a school that looks awfully close to failing. If a student manages to graduate from Jackson Road, and goes on to survive White Oak Middle and Springbrook High, that student gets a $13,000 voucher.
That voucher isn’t an award. That voucher is guilt money for forcing students to attend a failing school.
I really don’t follow the demands for slavery reparations that simmers throughout the national discourse. The whites and blacks alive today were neither the perpetrators nor the victims of America’s congenital scourge. (Others may think differently, and that’s OK.) In contrast, I really do see why the GWCF would want to pay reparations for being complicit in forcing students to attend failing schools. A cruel MCPS bureaucracy forces students into these failing schools, and a cruel county government funds the advantaged schools (and the streets, water, and other infrastructure ancillary to those schools). This is exactly what colonialism looks like, and it does warrant contemporaneous reparations.
Instead of retroactive reparations, though, GWCF could be doing the right thing in the first place. Its board should be granting $1,000 (or a $5,000) annual vouchers so students can attend a school of their choice. Go ahead, take a survey of the parents at Jackson Road ES and see which they prefe
