Failing Schools Almost Impossible to "Turnaround"

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:to 10:01 -- read back in this thread and you will see people suggesting concentrating poor people (not middle class homeowners) in the suburbs where they supposedly will be better off.

Hmmm... The only thing I came across was this:

More poverty in the suburbs means deconcentration of poverty. DC's housing agency should be counseling applicants on how to use their Section 8 vouchers in MD and VA. You can get more house for your money, there are better job opportunities, and the schools are better. It's nuts that DC spends so much trying to keep poor folks trapped in the city.

...which seems to make the exact opposite point. When DC has 80% of the region's poor, and the vast surrounding suburbs 20%, something's wrong. If you're going to reverse the concentration of poverty, you're going to have to increase the poverty share in the suburbs and decrease it in the city.

Funny how we hear every day on this board how the schools are awful in DCPS, and that sending your kid to a DCPS middle- or high-school is tantamount to child-abuse. But when it comes to educational options for poor folks, giving them that option will only "supposedly" make them better off.

[Anonymous]

I live in Arlington and participated in the Redistricting thread and so clicked on this thread out of curiousity.

The point is valid. If we evaluate schools as successful based on test scores, then all you need is to flood the school with higher-performing kids (likely with a higher SES) thereby diluting the scores of the low-performers. Is the school performing better? Of course not.

Simplistically, you could evaluate a school system's success year by year based on overall percentage of students' test scores. What percentage of kids are failing these tests across the board, and then how do you reach those kids regardless of what school they attend. More evenly balancing demographics across the schools simply hides the problem.

[Anonymous]

If we evaluate schools as successful based on test scores, then all you need is to flood the school with higher-performing kids (likely with a higher SES) thereby diluting the scores of the low-performers. Is the school performing better? Of course not.

There's actually a lot of evidence that shows having poor and poorly performing kids in wealthier school districts leads to better educational outcomes. You say "Of course not", but it actually makes sense: If 5% of the students in a school need a lot of attention, they'll likely get it. If 85% of the students in a school need a lot of attention, you've got DCPS.

That's not even addressing the fact that concentrated poverty tends to overwhelm social services outside of the school.

Take a kid out of Barry Farm, and put his family up in a townhouse in Loudon County in a neighborhood where everyone is middle-class, and the school has 2% FARMS students, and that kid is going to do better. Obviously.

[Anonymous]

Take a kid out of Barry Farm, and put his family up in a townhouse in Loudon County in a neighborhood where everyone is middle-class, and the school has 2% FARMS students, and that kid is going to do better. Obviously.

This method was initially tried 36 years ago, and is the initial data regarding relieving intergenerational poverty through deconcentration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautreaux_Project

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Take a kid out of Barry Farm, and put his family up in a townhouse in Loudon County in a neighborhood where everyone is middle-class, and the school has 2% FARMS students, and that kid is going to do better. Obviously.

This method was initially tried 36 years ago, and is the initial data regarding relieving intergenerational poverty through deconcentration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gautreaux_Project

Thanks for the link. This is one of the rare instances where the results of academic research produce a completely intuitive result.

If the public housing had been depopulated in a controlled manner, and residents directed to suburbs so that no new concentrations of poverty were created in the suburbs, the positive results of the Gautreaux project might have held.

Housing choice vouchers, along with housing counseling which could be provided from DCDOH, would be the perfect vehicle to avoid the kind of rapid migration that swamps suburban school districts.


It also casts suspicion on those who still so desperately want to keep poor kids (and their parents) locked up in the urban core.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

If we evaluate schools as successful based on test scores, then all you need is to flood the school with higher-performing kids (likely with a higher SES) thereby diluting the scores of the low-performers. Is the school performing better? Of course not.

There's actually a lot of evidence that shows having poor and poorly performing kids in wealthier school districts leads to better educational outcomes. You say "Of course not", but it actually makes sense: If 5% of the students in a school need a lot of attention, they'll likely get it. If 85% of the students in a school need a lot of attention, you've got DCPS.

That's not even addressing the fact that concentrated poverty tends to overwhelm social services outside of the school.

Take a kid out of Barry Farm, and put his family up in a townhouse in Loudon County in a neighborhood where everyone is middle-class, and the school has 2% FARMS students, and that kid is going to do better. Obviously.

I'm not trying to be combative, just trying to understand. It's not that the school (meaning the administration, teachers and support staff) is performing better, it's that the student body is comprised of a higher percentage of high-performing kids than it had been previously. Right? As a PP said, these tests don't really evaluate the quality of the education being offered, they are evaluating the quantity of information absorbed by the students. Poor quality education likely will lead to poor scores. Excellent instruction doesn't necessarily equate to excellent scores. I think.

[Anonymous]

regarding deconcentration --seems like some of those poor kids could just be bussed to good DC schools instead of moving to the suburbs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That's nonsense. 80% of DC is not in deep poverty. And even so, poverty does not have to automatically correlate with poor school performance - take for example latinos and immigrants who arrive as refugees from horrible conditions and deep poverty - typically they close the performance and income gap within a single generation.

As for affordable housing, what is forcing poor families to stay in DC? It's obviously not for work. And if we are supposed to consider that it's for family or community, consider that family and community is the biggest part of what is contributing to poor performance and continued poverty.

If you don't get it you don't get it. As the previous poster noted, poverty "in general" is closely related to a number of factors. Lack of education, absent parents, lack of resources, hunger, lack of healthcare (illness and poor nutrition cause frequent absences and lack of healthcare in elementary grades often lead to undiagnosed health/SpEd issues). Children of immigrants cannot be compared to low SES children because many immigrants are not low SES, they maybe in their new adopted country but at the school where my child goes many of them had middle-class jobs in their country. There are many African children whose parents are driving cabs that were teachers and professors in their country, they also came here so their children could have the opportunity for a better education. There are huge differences in educational success between the children of refugees that come from countries of high literacy and those that don't, overall the children from El Salvador that had intermittent education are not doing well. Many of their parents are illiterate, we even have children who are not highly literate in Spanish. Many Americans lump all immigrant, refugees and ELLs together but statistics show that family literacy and poverty play a huge role. Additionally, many families in NW who are low income live with multiple generations and relatives to afford the rents or have moved to Maryland. There are many domestics in my school, do you really think they can afford the astronomical rents in DC? If the parents are absent, often traveling as far as Baltimore to clean - who do you think is looking after the children and making sure they do their homework. If they themselves don't speak English, how can they help? Of course, they want a better life for their children and support their child's education but poverty plays a huge role in many ways as it does for all low-SES children native or otherwise.

You forgot another important factor: the immigrant pool is pre-selected and therefore hugely skewed in favor of the very motivated. Poverty or literacy rates notwithstanding, an average immigrant will be distinguished by the increased motivation to change their life for the better.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:regarding deconcentration --seems like some of those poor kids could just be bussed to good DC schools instead of moving to the suburbs.

Sounds an awful lot like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:regarding deconcentration --seems like some of those poor kids could just be bussed to good DC schools instead of moving to the suburbs.

Problem is we're already doing that. Many, many poor kids are using the OOB process to go to schools that are better than their neighborhood school. But because we've made it our policy to concentrate poor kids in DC, they make up such a large proportion of the DC school age population that there aren't enough "good DC schools" to bus them to. (30% of all kids in DC are below the poverty line) The handful of "good" DCPS schools in DC are all 40 or 50% FARMS students. The vast majority are in the 70 and 80% range.

If we simply did mandatory busing in DC, we'd just end up destroying the handful of good schools and end up with uniformly poor schools. Then instead of few decent DCPS options for poor kids we'd have none.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

If we evaluate schools as successful based on test scores, then all you need is to flood the school with higher-performing kids (likely with a higher SES) thereby diluting the scores of the low-performers. Is the school performing better? Of course not.

There's actually a lot of evidence that shows having poor and poorly performing kids in wealthier school districts leads to better educational outcomes. You say "Of course not", but it actually makes sense: If 5% of the students in a school need a lot of attention, they'll likely get it. If 85% of the students in a school need a lot of attention, you've got DCPS.

That's not even addressing the fact that concentrated poverty tends to overwhelm social services outside of the school.

Take a kid out of Barry Farm, and put his family up in a townhouse in Loudon County in a neighborhood where everyone is middle-class, and the school has 2% FARMS students, and that kid is going to do better. Obviously.

I'm not trying to be combative, just trying to understand. It's not that the school (meaning the administration, teachers and support staff) is performing better, it's that the student body is comprised of a higher percentage of high-performing kids than it had been previously. Right? As a PP said, these tests don't really evaluate the quality of the education being offered, they are evaluating the quantity of information absorbed by the students. Poor quality education likely will lead to poor scores. Excellent instruction doesn't necessarily equate to excellent scores. I think.

No, if you look at the Gautreaux study, you find that the individual poor kid does better, not that the school numbers look better. Poor (and poorly perfoming) kids who are placed in schools where student achievement is the norm do better than they would otherwise have. The subject of test scores is beside the point here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:regarding deconcentration --seems like some of those poor kids could just be bussed to good DC schools instead of moving to the suburbs.

Sounds an awful lot like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to me.

Sounds a lot like giving poor kids a chance to get educated around more functional kids (as per the study mentioned above) without requiring a family move.

Of course, this strategy would also prevent gentrifiers from moving into the deposed poor people's homes

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:regarding deconcentration --seems like some of those poor kids could just be bussed to good DC schools instead of moving to the suburbs.

Sounds an awful lot like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to me.

Sounds a lot like giving poor kids a chance to get educated around more functional kids (as per the study mentioned above) without requiring a family move.

Of course, this strategy would also prevent gentrifiers from moving into the deposed poor people's homes

Try to think with your brain instead of your heart for just a second. Where exactly are you going to bus these kids? I'm serious, I'd really like to know. Should we just send every child in the city to Deal and Wilson? Think.

The optimal situation would be to have regional busing, where kids from the poorest neighborhoods are bused to good schools, and vice versa. But, conveniently, MD and VA school districts happen to be segregated from the districts where the poor people live. So, like countless middle-class parents before them, we're going to have to enable a larger proportion of poor folks to get their kids a decent education in the suburbs.

[Anonymous]

Sounds a lot like giving poor kids a chance to get educated around more functional kids (as per the study mentioned above) without requiring a family move.

Oh, and btw, sometimes you have to make sacrifices to give your kid a shot at a better future. That's what being a parent means.

[Anonymous]

These poor people would have to move very far away to use these vouchers. Tony DC suburbs with good schools are more or as expensive as DC.

Anonymous wrote:It's suburban America's worst nightmare.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/housing-vouchers-a-golden-ticket-to-pricey-suburbs/2011/06/23/AGDNc7kH_story.html