Stats about white students in DCPS being in top nationwide?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DC performs better not just by a few points, pretty significant gap between DC and MA (18 points).

Again, there are poor white kids in MA. There are no poor white kids in DC. DC is unique in that way.

How can you fairly compare a few thousand kids in DC to a whole state of kids? The only white kids in DC are very rich. Of course the majority of them are going to do very well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Meh, I like the Hill because there are a ton of kids and it is very close to my job, not much more than that. The cultural opportunities are very exaggerated. Kids would benefit just as much from big yards and the ability to run around freely as they would from a trip to the Smithsonian museums once a week. (And what kid wants to go to a museum that often anyway?)

Not sure what "big yards" is supposed to do for them. And kids in the burbs don't "run around freely", at least none of my relatives' or in-laws' kids do. Hell, my nephew has to be driven to school by his mother. They leave early and sit in a line of cars waiting for the school staff to shepherd them into the building. If they don't arrive extra early, then they're at the end of the line, and have to wait longer. So they make sure they get to the school 40 minutes early and sit there idling. In line. It sounds like Hell on Earth.

Let me tell you what a "big yard" does for my family. Last night we spent about 1 1/2 hours in our big yard after dinner. My 1 year old wandered around, playing with stones and pebbles and a shovel and bucket, watering the plants, riding his little tricycle, blowing bubbles, watching birds, etc. My 3 year old helped her dad plant a new grape plant, checked to see if her blueberries were still green, played with her brother with the stones, watched a colony of ants carry items to their home...yep nothing particularly valuable about that! Guess we should have taken them to the museum instead. We live pretty far out and can walk to all grade levels of school, so there won't be any idling in a car here.

Look, I've lived in both environments and have enjoyed both. These "_______ is better" arguments are so silly.

That sounds idyllic!! I grew up in the suburbs and it was nothing like what your kids are experiencing. We had nothing to walk to at all. The yard was nice, but no friends to play with. You have a great option! I would love that, but how long is your commute? I have an anxiety disorder and can't take a long commute, so I live downtown. We are happy here, but I can totally see why others would prefer a "big yard" etc. lifestyle. Good for you!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have a friend who bailed on the Hill a couple years ago over schools issues. Her child has moved onto an AAP center in Fairfax, while ours, who is the same age, is at Brent. I'm not convinced that her child learns more than mine a given week. She's far from the Smithsonians now, while we walk down most weekends. Our child takes seriously good music and art classes a 5-minute walk from our house, and visit the the local library across the street almost every day. She has to drive her kid everywhere, or put him on a school bus. My kids' classmates have parents who are World Bank economists, design Mars rovers for NASA, serve as senior diplomats and military officers, and drive legislative battles in the Senate.

I'm not buying that Fairfax offers young families more overall, at least at the elementary school level.

Is the topic the actual stuff that is taught in school, or the opportunities to learn outside of school?

NP here, people with the diverse careers listed in that post live in Fairfax as well, have you even met anyone from there? The schools there are also very likely more diverse in both racial and SES terms than your school.

Please stop making the claim that everyone on the hill is more interesting than everywhere else. It makes you sound like an uninformed snob. The issues or driving vs. walking are valid, but nothing else in your post makes very much sense.

I live in Dc and my kids go to DCUM HRCS and i love it & make fun of my sister who lives in columbia MD. I babysat her kids for a week and was blown away by how ethnically diverse it was- kids from senegal to Kuala Lampur all playing together. DC is very WASP w/ a smattering of Catholics, AA and very few of anything else who actually attend public schools. I am not saying that all of the other things you are saying aren't true but don't knock fairfax- a lot of immigrants didn't come here so they can live in cramped condos w/ parquet floors and dirty streets and walk to open air markets. They moved to the US to drive SUVs to giant gleaming malls. I grew up in potomac, MD and our entire school was full of diplomats & people who worked at the world Bank. My cousins who lived close by and my best friends parents all living in bethesda/potomac were WB employees. There are also tons of physicians in that area who are mostly foreigners b/c theres a shortage of US trained doctors living in close in MD/VA suburbs as well.

DC has a smattering of African Americans?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Meh, I like the Hill because there are a ton of kids and it is very close to my job, not much more than that. The cultural opportunities are very exaggerated. Kids would benefit just as much from big yards and the ability to run around freely as they would from a trip to the Smithsonian museums once a week. (And what kid wants to go to a museum that often anyway?)

Not sure what "big yards" is supposed to do for them. And kids in the burbs don't "run around freely", at least none of my relatives' or in-laws' kids do. Hell, my nephew has to be driven to school by his mother. They leave early and sit in a line of cars waiting for the school staff to shepherd them into the building. If they don't arrive extra early, then they're at the end of the line, and have to wait longer. So they make sure they get to the school 40 minutes early and sit there idling. In line. It sounds like Hell on Earth.

Let me tell you what a "big yard" does for my family. Last night we spent about 1 1/2 hours in our big yard after dinner. My 1 year old wandered around, playing with stones and pebbles and a shovel and bucket, watering the plants, riding his little tricycle, blowing bubbles, watching birds, etc. My 3 year old helped her dad plant a new grape plant, checked to see if her blueberries were still green, played with her brother with the stones, watched a colony of ants carry items to their home...yep nothing particularly valuable about that! Guess we should have taken them to the museum instead. We live pretty far out and can walk to all grade levels of school, so there won't be any idling in a car here.

Look, I've lived in both environments and have enjoyed both. These "_______ is better" arguments are so silly.

That sounds idyllic!! I grew up in the suburbs and it was nothing like what your kids are experiencing. We had nothing to walk to at all. The yard was nice, but no friends to play with. You have a great option! I would love that, but how long is your commute? I have an anxiety disorder and can't take a long commute, so I live downtown. We are happy here, but I can totally see why others would prefer a "big yard" etc. lifestyle. Good for you!

Yes, the commute. Definitely a con of our lifestyle. Mine is about 40 minutes-I start work at 7am and end at 3 so miss the worst of rush hour. I work in SE DC, my husband at NIH, so we picked a place (kind of) in the middle.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We have a friend who bailed on the Hill a couple years ago over schools issues. Her child has moved onto an AAP center in Fairfax, while ours, who is the same age, is at Brent. I'm not convinced that her child learns more than mine a given week. She's far from the Smithsonians now, while we walk down most weekends. Our child takes seriously good music and art classes a 5-minute walk from our house, and visit the the local library across the street almost every day. She has to drive her kid everywhere, or put him on a school bus. My kids' classmates have parents who are World Bank economists, design Mars rovers for NASA, serve as senior diplomats and military officers, and drive legislative battles in the Senate.

I'm not buying that Fairfax offers young families more overall, at least at the elementary school level.

Is the topic the actual stuff that is taught in school, or the opportunities to learn outside of school?

NP here, people with the diverse careers listed in that post live in Fairfax as well, have you even met anyone from there? The schools there are also very likely more diverse in both racial and SES terms than your school.

Please stop making the claim that everyone on the hill is more interesting than everywhere else. It makes you sound like an uninformed snob. The issues or driving vs. walking are valid, but nothing else in your post makes very much sense.

I live in Dc and my kids go to DCUM HRCS and i love it & make fun of my sister who lives in columbia MD. I babysat her kids for a week and was blown away by how ethnically diverse it was- kids from senegal to Kuala Lampur all playing together. DC is very WASP w/ a smattering of Catholics, AA and very few of anything else who actually attend public schools. I am not saying that all of the other things you are saying aren't true but don't knock fairfax- a lot of immigrants didn't come here so they can live in cramped condos w/ parquet floors and dirty streets and walk to open air markets. They moved to the US to drive SUVs to giant gleaming malls. I grew up in potomac, MD and our entire school was full of diplomats & people who worked at the world Bank. My cousins who lived close by and my best friends parents all living in bethesda/potomac were WB employees. There are also tons of physicians in that area who are mostly foreigners b/c theres a shortage of US trained doctors living in close in MD/VA suburbs as well.

DC has a smattering of African Americans?

LOL you beat me to it, verbatim!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There you go:

85% of District resident are English-speaking. 14% and change are speakers of other languages. Of that number, half are Spanish-speaking. https://apps.mla.org/cgi-shl/docstudio/docs.pl?map_data_results

Let's take Fairfax county now. 64% are English-speaking. A whopping 35% are speakers of other languages. Spanish speakers account for only 13% of that number. The rest are a little bit of everything (that's the actual definition of diversity). https://apps.mla.org/cgi-shl/docstudio/docs.pl?map_data_results

I think I'm the PP you're referencing. The reason I said "it depends" is because sure, VA and MD are more diverse than DC in the aggregate (not surprising since we're comparing whole states to a single city), but when you drill down, there are plenty of places that are more or less diverse, so the aggregate may not reflect people's day to day experiences with diversity.

I lived in a fairly homogenous neighborhood in MoCo (very white, lots of locals who grew up in the area and are now raising families here; a "W" district). However, my kid's daycare nearby had a lot of diversity--families from Germany, Spain, Brazil, Nigeria, etc. Of course there are very homogenous (mostly AA) neighborhoods in DC as well, but there are also some that are extremely diverse. My current DC neighborhood has people from all over, lots of 1st gen Americans, many Americans who've done stints abroad, lots of bilingual and trilingual kids, and so on. My old neighborhood had a different type of diversity--more European, Asian, and Latin American countries--and my DC neighborhood has some of that, but also a lot of families from the Caribbean, East and West Africa, etc.

My overall point is that the aggregate statistics arguably don't mean much. Diverse neighborhoods can be had in both DC and the burbs, since as other PPs have said, the region is very diverse overall.

[Anonymous]

I live in Dc and my kids go to DCUM HRCS and i love it & make fun of my sister who lives in columbia MD. I babysat her kids for a week and was blown away by how ethnically diverse it was- kids from senegal to Kuala Lampur all playing together. DC is very WASP w/ a smattering of Catholics, AA and very few of anything else who actually attend public schools. I am not saying that all of the other things you are saying aren't true but don't knock fairfax- a lot of immigrants didn't come here so they can live in cramped condos w/ parquet floors and dirty streets and walk to open air markets. They moved to the US to drive SUVs to giant gleaming malls. I grew up in potomac, MD and our entire school was full of diplomats & people who worked at the world Bank. My cousins who lived close by and my best friends parents all living in bethesda/potomac were WB employees. There are also tons of physicians in that area who are mostly foreigners b/c theres a shortage of US trained doctors living in close in MD/VA suburbs as well.



I'm wondering where you live in DC because my DCPS experience is very different from what you describe, and my kids are in Ward 3 DCPS. My children's friends are from all over the world, all over the district, and all over the SES and racial map. This whole area is full of the same kinds of diversity. You seem to be confusing DCPS/PCS with private religious schools.

[Anonymous]

Even though it may be diversity in terms of ethnic background/birthplace, I'm not sure schools full of diplomats' and WB executives' kids is really more meaningfully "diverse" than many DC DCPS/HRCS especially at the ES level. That is, I think socioeconomic diversity sometimes matters a whole lot more...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I found this NYT article interesting. It breaks things down by school district:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/29/upshot/money-race-and-success-how-your-school-district-compares.html?_r=0

Thanks for sharing! Confirms what we all knew but sad nevertheless.

And you can bet that DCPS admin has known this kind of thing for years, but has supressed it, because it doesn't fit with their ideology that it's all about the teachers

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is there a recruitment for the white students, since they are smarter and wealthier? When will Trump PCS open up their campus on Pennsylvania Avenue?

Gentrification is all about getting more white families in DC, to raise real estate values and raise test scores, so Kaya Henderson and crew can take credit for test scores going up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Even though it may be diversity in terms of ethnic background/birthplace, I'm not sure schools full of diplomats' and WB executives' kids is really more meaningfully "diverse" than many DC DCPS/HRCS especially at the ES level. That is, I think socioeconomic diversity sometimes matters a whole lot more...

Completely agree. World Bank culture is surprisingly homogenous. Many different languages, skin colors, birth places, but all middle/upper middle class childhoods with 2+ degrees from good universities. And many studied at the same universities in the US, UK and EU. SES diversity is much more noticeable than ethnic diversity after you've known someone for more than a day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even though it may be diversity in terms of ethnic background/birthplace, I'm not sure schools full of diplomats' and WB executives' kids is really more meaningfully "diverse" than many DC DCPS/HRCS especially at the ES level. That is, I think socioeconomic diversity sometimes matters a whole lot more...

Completely agree. World Bank culture is surprisingly homogenous. Many different languages, skin colors, birth places, but all middle/upper middle class childhoods with 2+ degrees from good universities. And many studied at the same universities in the US, UK and EU. SES diversity is much more noticeable than ethnic diversity after you've known someone for more than a day.

I get the impression that you have never known many folks from different countries/ languages/ cultures/ religions/ histories for more than a day.

God bless you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even though it may be diversity in terms of ethnic background/birthplace, I'm not sure schools full of diplomats' and WB executives' kids is really more meaningfully "diverse" than many DC DCPS/HRCS especially at the ES level. That is, I think socioeconomic diversity sometimes matters a whole lot more...

Completely agree. World Bank culture is surprisingly homogenous. Many different languages, skin colors, birth places, but all middle/upper middle class childhoods with 2+ degrees from good universities. And many studied at the same universities in the US, UK and EU. SES diversity is much more noticeable than ethnic diversity after you've known someone for more than a day.

You need to have a degree in higher education to work at the world bank, IADB, IMF, etc.

And as someone who actually works at one of these places, I can tell you it's quite diverse.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even though it may be diversity in terms of ethnic background/birthplace, I'm not sure schools full of diplomats' and WB executives' kids is really more meaningfully "diverse" than many DC DCPS/HRCS especially at the ES level. That is, I think socioeconomic diversity sometimes matters a whole lot more...

Completely agree. World Bank culture is surprisingly homogenous. Many different languages, skin colors, birth places, but all middle/upper middle class childhoods with 2+ degrees from good universities. And many studied at the same universities in the US, UK and EU. SES diversity is much more noticeable than ethnic diversity after you've known someone for more than a day.

You need to have a degree in higher education to work at the world bank, IADB, IMF, etc.

And as someone who actually works at one of these places, I can tell you it's quite diverse.

It's 100% fair to say it's a different kind of diversity though. I'm a U.S. career FSO and would never deny that foreign diplomats posted to DC long term (as most countries do, especially poorer ones) are actually more "like me" than many of my NE neighbors. Theirs kids are even more like my kids, Since many of them have been 100% raised here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Even though it may be diversity in terms of ethnic background/birthplace, I'm not sure schools full of diplomats' and WB executives' kids is really more meaningfully "diverse" than many DC DCPS/HRCS especially at the ES level. That is, I think socioeconomic diversity sometimes matters a whole lot more...

Completely agree. World Bank culture is surprisingly homogenous. Many different languages, skin colors, birth places, but all middle/upper middle class childhoods with 2+ degrees from good universities. And many studied at the same universities in the US, UK and EU. SES diversity is much more noticeable than ethnic diversity after you've known someone for more than a day.

You need to have a degree in higher education to work at the world bank, IADB, IMF, etc.

And as someone who actually works at one of these places, I can tell you it's quite diverse.

It's 100% fair to say it's a different kind of diversity though. I'm a U.S. career FSO and would never deny that foreign diplomats posted to DC long term (as most countries do, especially poorer ones) are actually more "like me" than many of my NE neighbors. Theirs kids are even more like my kids, Since many of them have been 100% raised here.

Yes, I am the WB poster and this is what I meant. I was a WB staff member for years BTW. At the WB I saw more diversity between the GA-GD salary grades (admin staff) and the GF+ grades (professionals) than I did among the GF+ grades, of which I was a member. Those were the most recent scales; they may have changed again. And as I suggested in my post it felt less diverse to me than, say, a room half full of rich people and half of poor people.