Two Rivers elementary families -- what is your MS plan
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Anonymous
The truth is that very few charters at the elementary level are actually better academically than the average DCPS. If you adjust test scores by socioeconomic level, many charters are actually worse academically. We are a former TR family now at a DCPS (and not one of the 3 on the Hill that gets talked about on here as "good") and I am not soured in charters completely. We will almost certainly try for charters for MS and HS. But I think at the elementary level charters that do not offer a significant differentiator from DCPS (like Montessori or immersion) should be held to very high standards academically. Our DCPS experience has been really good and even though I don't regret going to TR for ECE I now realize that we would have better than okay at our IB DCPS for those years with the benefit of a short commute. We were overly swayed by people telling us it was a bad school. |
Anonymous
Bolded is an oft repeated statement of nonsense repeated by so many of you "deep thinkers". I don't send my kid to a school to an ES to get their test scores up. I send them to a school where there are enough kids with high test scores that my kid won't be bored or warehoused. By this dumb logic, you should send your kid to any school with a 1% proficiency rate since your kid will be fine. It is ES. You people and your fortune cookie logic amuse me. |
Anonymous
There is a real debate to be had over which is better though: A neighborhood DCPS with a high number of at risk kids resulting in overall poor test scores but a small cohort of high achieving kids (say 5-15 kids per grade who may be distributed across classes). OR A charter with a much smaller percent of at risk kids and overall higher test scores but where kids rarely if ever work above grade level and may receive a disjointed education with weak curriculum (so: Two Rivers). Obviously neither are ideal. If you value having your kid in an ES with a large cohort of high achievers then neither of these are going to meet your expectations. The DCPS may have some high achievers but they will be very limited and your kid will definitely spend a lot of time doing solo work or having to sit through lessons that are review for them. However I will say that my experience with DCPS is that the high caliber of teachers at the ES level mean that high achieving kids absolutely ARE given above grade level work that challenges them and the schools often find ways to group advanced students so they can work forward. But yes there will be some boredom and just the general issue of your kid being at a school where most of the focus is going to be on trying to bring at risk students up to grade level. On the other hand at the charter your kid isn't really in a group of high achievers either. At Two Rivers actual high achievers leave because there is nothing for them there. Kids who are right on grade level do fine and then the school is not very good at moving kids who are below grade level up. The main advantage you will get at a school like this is social -- plenty of kids with a similar background and thus plenty of parents with a similar background so it may be overall a more pleasant experience. But it's unlikely your child will be challenged and they certainly are not getting the benefit of a high achieving cohort. Those are the options being discussed in this thread. If you are looking for a school with a large cohort of high achievers you will need to look elsewhere altogether. The problem of course is that if your IB is say JO Wilson and the best alternative you can get into is TR you may not have other options unless you move or keep playing the lottery and hope you get a hit. |
Anonymous
No the reality is that at many title 1 DCPS schools there are not enough high achievers and above grade level kids to group anything. In fact, they will spread out the few, if any above grade level kids between classrooms. And no, the above grade level kids are on computers a lot or asked to be the teachers helper to help so many of the kids below grade level. Or best just given worksheets to do on their own. There is no active teaching of above grade level material. If your title 1 school is different, then you are the outlier. |
Anonymous
And what is the average experience of an above grade level kid at Two Rivers? That's the real question. Are they given above grade level material or just put in the corner with worksheets on their own? Or just forced to sit through the material they already know? Two Rivers test scores do not indicate that kids are getting a bunch of instruction above grade level. In fact when you compare TR to Payne (a DCPS with very similar demographics to TR) you see the DCPS doing significantly better with more than twice as many kids scoring above grade level in math and signficantly more scoring at or above grade level in ELA. Everyone agrees they want their kids in a cohort with plenty of kids at and above grade level. That's the whole point -- TR does not offer this and their curriculum is pretty awful and poorly implemented. So regardless of why you might reject your IB Title 1 DCPS the question is why you would *choose* TR as an alternative when it appers to be an inferior school. |
Anonymous
I said nothing about TR and don’t have any kids at TR. I refuted your general statement that title 1 schools group above grade level kids and teach them above grade level content. This is not true and anonymous people like you making false statements across the board should be called out. |
Anonymous
DP. Do you have kids in a T1 middle school? |
Anonymous
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We’re back with another edition of “bash schools my kids never went to.”
look, I believe TR is falling apart and wouldn’t send my kid there, but all the hand wringing and theorizing is pointless. If you live in W5-6-7-8, you don’t live in the homogeneous suburbs, and the schools will NEVER look like that. Best to accept and see what’s actually in front of you (in our case a T1 MS that is working out quite well) or just go where you feel your “advanced kid” needs to be. |
Anonymous
You don’t think high achievers leave in DCPS schools too esp if there is a huge achievement gap and the overwhelming majority of kids are working below grade level?? They sure do by the masses because the school has nothing to offer them. Just look at the composition of the kids in ECE compared to 2nd or 3rd. The difference between schools above and some charters is that some charters have much better scores and significantly more kids at or above grade level so they can actually teach grade level content. |
Anonymous
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We have sent our kids to both TR and to a Title 1 DCPS and they got more challenging work especially above grade level at the DCPS. I have no idea if this is representative of other Title 1 schools -- I imagine it varies. But a quick compare and contrast:
1) Two Rivers has a more nurturing and friendly environment with more neighborhood families and it's more social and seemed to have more invested and involved families -- more as in a greater number of them. Not that people at TR were more invested. However past K the curriculum is really unchallenging especially in math and we felt we had to supplement aggressively at home. Our oldest is a naturally ver good reader so I am not sure if the curriculum was better there or our kid just needed less instruction. We also felt there was overeliance on screens and app-based learning especially after K -- just entire chunks of the day with the kids all sitting separate on ipads with headphones. I feel like they put a lot of effort into making ECE a good experience and then punt on middle and upper elementary. The teachers also seemed less committed in upper grades and on the inexperienced side. 2) DCPS definitely had a less nurturing and friendly vibe. Parents are in and out and the PTO struggles to get participation. There is a core group of devoted parents though and I'd actually say they are more involved and committed than most parents at TR. But there are fewer of them. There are lots of single parent or dual working families where they are clearly devoted parents but just do not have the time or bandwidth for school involvement. There are also (by definition) a lot of kids from not-great family situations. There are more low level behavioral issues -- talking back and being late to school. Anecdotally I think there are a lot of at risk kids who get SN diagnoses in 2nd or 3rd grade and until that happens they can be harder to control in the classroom but once they get treatment it gets better. I thinnk it's likely just harder to get them the attention they need to get diagnosed and treated. BUT academically the DCPS is better. Even when you factor in the large at risk population and the classroom issues that correspond with it. The curriculum is better and more straight forward with very clear progression through material that is easy for us to follow and track via report cards and PT conferences. And the teachers are frankly amazing. I have concluded that teachers willing to work in these schools tend to just really love teaching because we haven't had a dud (whereas at TR I'd say about half were mediocre). And they absolutely do a great job of differentiating and providing challenging coursework to advanced kids. Both of our kids were testing below grade level on i-Ready assessments in math when we came to this school and both are now in the the upper end of on grade level now. One of our kids jumped 3 grade levels in reading during 1st grade (no joke -- the focus on phonics and the way they encouraged fluency was fantastic and so much more organized than how TR approached). TR has very weak academics. It's possible that our DCPS has unusually good academics for a Title 1. I don't know. But I have ZERO regrets about leaving TR and actually wish we'd left earlier. I would not recommend it to anyone except potentially as an ECE (and only ECE) option if you know for sure you will be able to move to a school you are happier with for 1st and actually I'd leave at Kindergarten because I in my experience even the early academics in K are sub-standard at TR. This thread does have a lot of people opining about schools their kids don't attend but I have noticed one thing: I don't think I've seen a single currrent TR family defending the school's academics past PK. I've seen some people criticizing other schools and saying they aren't as good as TR in terms of things like sending kids outside. But I'd love to hear a single TR parent say "The school's academics are great and no overhaul of the curriculum is needed." But I don't and that's unusual on threads like this. You usually have at least a couple boosters. |
Anonymous
I found this to be true at our Title 1 DCPS also, and was a huge proponent in early elementary. I agree that the way DCPS teaches reading is particularly strong. However -- the wheels came off the bus later on. Principal hired inexperienced teachers who let the more advanced kids finish their work in like 5 minutes and then just do whatever they wanted (read or play video games) for the rest of the time. Fights broke out in the classroom all the time. Many kids are WAY below grade level and take up all the attention of the teacher. I'm not sure an elementary charter is the answer, but DCPS schools do differ. I decided to put my older kid in a charter middle that is much more challenging than the DCPS option (I talked to teachers at both schools to determine this) and to move our younger kid to a better run non-T1 DCPS. |
Anonymous
No direct experience at TR; but I definitely agree about the quality of DCPS teachers by and large. Not uniformly perfect, but very good at what they do, especially wrt literacy in the younger grades. It fell off for us a bit in late elementary, but back on track in MS. People don’t choose to become teachers/admins in MS just because they need a job! |
Anonymous
As somebody who used to teach in a (non TR) charter, I think the benefits of teaching in DCPS attract and retain teachers for longer periods of time. I have seen the revolving door of teachers at charter schools, sometimes leaving the profession or sometimes going to DCPS where pay and benefits are better. Does that mean all of the dcps teachers started out better? Not necessarily, but in general, if you stay in a profession for longer you learn skills and learn how to differentiate and improvise and think on your toes, all skills that make really strong teachers in urban districts like DCPS. Our kids have been in Title 1 Cap Hill schools since 2015, with the older in middle, and we have found Dad teacher experience really matters, and we have lucked out with schools with very experienced teachers. They are required teach the same curriculum to everybody, but they found ways to push kids who needed to be pushed and support kids who needed extra help. I agree with one of the previous posters, I have not heard a ton of specific examples about academic content at TR after the Early childhood and younger years. For the sake of having good options in the neighborhood, I hope they can figure things out! |
Anonymous
They don't because this is DCUM. The anti-charter folks live in a fantasy world where (1) high achieving kids in DCPS don't flee to BASIS, Latin, privates or the burbs, (2) where DCPS Central is a perfectly functioning bureaucracy that wastes no money and provides all necessary support, (3) tenured teachers in DCPS are never dead weight and abusive to kids and admins - they are all staffed from Dead Poet's Society, (4) Principals and admins in DCPS are wonderfully nurturing and don't get and keep their jobs largely playing DCPS Central's games and kissing the butts of the Chancellor and the trolls in Central. |
Anonymous
| I think not all T1s are alike and declaring T1s “better” than TR across the board is dumb. That said, if you have a T1 with an actually diverse population/reasonable UMC representation (Payne or VN, on the Hill, for instance), I’d choose that 10/10 over TR. L-T was T1 until the pandemic, Watkins flipped back in recently… those schools absolutely have enough high achievers to have an above grade level group. There are quite a few T1s that would lose that designation (which, honestly, can be challenging) if just a handful of families each year stayed instead of heading to charters. On the other hand, there are T1s without a single UMC kid in most classes 2nd grade & up; that’s a very different experience no matter how good the teachers are. T1 is way too over broad a category to talk about as a monolith, especially when most DCUM families are thinking of schools more like Payne than not. |