M St. at Sundown by Jim Malone.
Good morning Georgetown, here’s the latest:
- Next Q & A Cafe on December 9 will have the two owners of Georgetown Cupcake.
- More on the hubbub over Hardy: the Post reports, reader/parent responds.
- Merriment in Georgetown coming back! Let’s hope it’s not the absolute coldest day of the year like it was last year.
The Georgetown Metropolitan 
The Post article about Hardy was really irresponsible. That out-of-boundary parents have invested decades into a school abandoned by local parents only to slowly lose access to it now that in-boundary parents are reinvesting in Hardy is an unfortunate tale of historical structural inequities in our city. However, this Post article clumsily stumbles into these complex issues with mere race-baiting.
An African-American Hardy parent is understandably suspicious when told what he thought was a quote from Rhee to a CAG meeting that “it’s [Hardy] not going to turn overnight”. The duped parent was no doubt unaware that the quote was lifted from a Northwest Current article as the Post didn’t attend the meeting, and that Rhee’s comment was not racially coded language at all but followed a comment that Deal Middle School has been “turned” into a first-class school by any standard. The article then attributes to Rhee the belief, unsupported by quotes, that Hardy’s principal “has not always been welcoming to neighborhood families”, only to totally retract the claim in a stunning correction the next day (see top of Post article).
The complex reality is that the structural inequities whose effects will place some out-of-boundary Hardy parents in this unfair situation is the same structure that has conned parents for too long into believing that a school where “nearly three-quarters of its students are proficient in reading” is “a small gem in the District’s public education system”. Addressing structural inequities means addressing a structure, not just a single school, and doing so will unfairly displace some in the short-term. But there is no other path to a long term system in which educational opportunity isn’t determined by race or class.
I am really looking forward to this year’s “Merriment”. I tried to attend with some neighbors last year, but it was so horribly, freezing cold and windy that we just could not hack it and ended up spending the afternoon trying to stave off our frostbite in Martin’s.