Posted On: Monday - May 13th 2019 8:41AM MST
In Topics: Race/Genetics Educational Stupidity
There is a big intersection a couple of miles from our house that has a certain big billboard, always advertising for one particular expensive K-12th private school.
(Note: This is a file photo - not the school in question.)
Now, I imagine the school and the advertising company that owns the billboard have a nice working arrangement, as the billboard stays covered, literally (see kids, that's when you use "literally"), and the school can keep their nice spot - it should be a good deal for both. The school changes up the image up there once a year or so, I suppose, but it's the latest iteration that has me writing this post.*
The newest ad up on the billboard reads "It's time to start thinking about middle school." That's pretty simple, straightforward, and innocuous, right? There's nothing wrong with it, but I really think Steve Sailer's writing, along with my knowledge of the neighborhood(s), has given me an understanding of the real thoughts behind this simple advertisement.
Firstly, here are some details: One of the nicest neighborhoods in town is about 1 mile from the billboard. In fact, it's too nice a neighborhood to HAVE a billboard of any kind too close by (understandably, Not In My Backyard! - unless you've REALLY got a good deal...) Besides being, by my guess, one of the top 10 busiest intersections in downtown, it's about where you'd want to put it to attract the eyeballs (as those ad people say) of people from that nice neighborhood.
This well-to-do neighborhood has a couple of good elementary schools, though one is slightly better than the other. What do we mean by good? What do most people mean by good? The students are mostly white with a few Oriental kids, and not many black and Hispanic kids (not too many of the latter around this particular area, on the census-tract level). That's just the truth of the matter, and even diligent black parents would have to admit that, if none of their friends were listening. Keep in mind, I'm writing about ELEMENTARY schools here first. Middle school starts from 6th grade. Even if your Kindergarten - 5th grader is NOT at a good school, especially toward the beginning thereof, it's not like the disruption and violence are much to speak of. Sure, your kid may pick up bad habits and ways of talking, and he may have a few more stories than if he were at the good elementary school. He may get picked on, even, but the kids are still little enough to where it usually doesn't amount to much but tears. The disruptions from the bad kids are smaller and less worrisome.
The kids at the middle school are bigger, as it goes through 8th grade. Trouble can be more serious. In the neighborhood in question, there is one middle school, formerly known to be one of the best around. It's changing, as the bad neighborhood, pretty close to a ghetto is not even 3/4 mile away from the heart of the good neighborhood. As I drive by often, during the recess times, I notice that there are loads of black kids. Sometimes, the kids are mixed up, sometimes there are 50 white kids grouped up, and sometimes 50 or more black kids. Any white or Oriental parent driving by there with kids in the district is going to get just a little, uhhh, concerned, if I may. The Moms will just get a bad feeling, while the Dads may start counting and calculating.
Nowadays, of course, the information is all out there, on websites like Great Schools and School Digger. The parents will get these numbers and start musing about how life may be for their kids once they get to middle school, maybe next year. That's where the billboard comes in.
The school in question was built long ago, within a couple of years after school integration, along with a whole bunch of others that still play each other in football, basketball, and baseball. They no longer have any de-facto discrimination against certain crowds that their schools were built to get the kids away from. However, the high tuition does the job pretty nicely. The chances that the few high-tuition-paying black parents have real thugs as children is still fairly small. Since they do have a few Non-Asian-Minorities (the ones they don't want) here and there, until this latest billboard, which is more words than photo, every other billboard up there would have one token black kid to show "hey, see, we're a great school, and it has NOTHING, NOTHING, I TELLS YA, to do with what kids go here... NO, NO, NOTHING AT ALL!" (Of course, they can't fit that on the billboards, hence the smiling kids' faces.)
To put this all together, the ad seems focused toward parents in the nice, richer neighborhood that may have kids for whom middle school is coming up, this year, maybe next. Yeah, the two elementary schools are pretty good, though even your bad ones can be tolerable, but hey, have you looked at the middle school they are slated to attend? You may want to think long and hard, look us up, and get some money together, some real money. "Start thinking about middle school." With my new Sailer-induced thinking, it also has that "dog whistle" at a frequency that good parents can hear: "You'd better WISE UP, JANET WEISS!"**
* This is something right up our favorite unz.com blogger Steve Sailer's alley, involving race, schools, and even marketing (his former profession, though he was not an "ad guy" at all).
** Sorry, obscure Rocky Horror Picture Show reference there. Janet Weiss was actually a reasonably-hot Susan Sarandon, going back, well,yeah, QUITE a ways.
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