Jefferson Academy Kool-Aid

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really hate that we're talking about "shitty" schools. I really don't know that the test scores reflect how good or bad a school is in DC. Rather it reflects the social and economic capital of the families that send their children there. Median Growth Percentile has been suggested to do a much better job at reflecting the performance of a school. Jefferson's scores there are a little better than Brent's, although by this metric, all our kids should go to DC Prep Edgewood's middle school.

I wish people would stop talking about not sending their kids to bad schools when what they should be saying is they don't want to send their kids to schools with a lot of poor kids who aren't performing at grade level. Which is fair enough.

But they are shitty schools. It's not just the kids, but the fact that being poor means you have fewer access to resources, and hence shitty schools (no matter who enrolls there.) Bad teachers, bad administration, bad facilities. It's not true that your kid will do fine there just by dint of being high SES - that's your white privilege speaking. Your kid will have to go to a crappy school, because poor people get crappy things (the definition of being poor) and may suffer, just like the poor kids. Not as badly (because again, privilege) but to pretend like their mere presence is what changes a bad school into a good school is pretty offensive. It's a product of income inequality plus gentrification that makes this self-evident. In the same way that moving into a run-down house doesn't make it a nice house just because you're rich, sending your rich kid to a shitty, poor school doesn't turn it into a good school.

How do you reach that conclusion about the teachers and administrators? Because they haven't solved poverty? For as much as DC gripes about facilities deficiencies there's little evidence that modernized facilities improve learning. The teachers and administrators can only serve the families that enroll. If that happens to be predominantly at risk and/FARM students then your common core standards for quality assessment are largely irrelevant.

You're the one speaking from a position of profound entitlement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why not set up a comprehensive middle school on Capitol Hill spread out on two campuses? 6th grade at Stuart-Hobson and 7th and 8th grade at Elliott-Hine. Feeders would be JO Wilson, LT, Watkins, Brent, Maury, Tyler, SWS, Payne, Miner, Van Ness, and Amidon-Bowen. There could be a Spanish immersion track to support students from Tyler Bilingual as well as Hill families from LAMB and Mundo Verde looking for a neighborhood school for the MS years. Turn Jefferson into a test-in STEM MS.

Great question for Henderson, Grosso and Allen.

This idea has been presented to city leaders and considered in various forms many many times. The leaders expressed a desire to standardize the entire system. Move fifth grade from Hobson into Watkins; dismantle the parts of the Cluster with SWS and Montessori being set up as stand alone; eliminate education campuses and set up regular ES/MS schools, etc.

With regard to Jefferson being a test in program, DCPS has a test in STEM program, and it is underutilized and not that strong. Also, what would you do with the kids from Southwest attending Jefferson in this new scenario? Have them drive another mile past Hobson to Eliot Hine (2 miles away versus half a mile for Jefferson) in order to cater to Hill families that are unwilling to enroll their kids in DCPS middle schools?

As Charles Allen says, we need everyone to pull in the same direction. The only way that happens is for (most of) Ward 6 to have one middle school - bonding everyone together and creating mutually shared goals plus economies of scale and critical mass of advanced students. How exactly to get there is the task at hand.

Charles Allen should spend less time talking and more time proposing actual solutions. Then again his mentor was Tommy Wells.

During Wells's campaign for mayor he took some pretty bold stances with regard to schools. I get the frustration with Wells, but I saw him come around on the issue.

Politicians should lead, but there is no one who can sort out the MS mess on Capitol Hill. Fenty lost office because he was too far in front of the issues, and the lesson Allen and others learned is that you must bend the curve and not break it. Plus asking for huge disruptive changes will satisfy a potential group of voters only if it works really quick. incremental changes, like additions to Hobson, satisfy current votes today.

Further, Wells and Allen do not have enough authority to actually make changes. They are cheerleaders and organizers. The only ones with power is the Mayor and Chancellor - and voters. Right now Ward Six voters pull in a every directions and they are negative on the whole situation. Where is the upside for a politician in that scenario?

You're right, the Ward 6 guys haven't had nearly enough authority to effect pervasive change in Hill schools. This means that locally generated political will to sort the by-right Hill MS mess out, or lack thereof, is neither here nor there. I'm not convinced that Ward Six voters still pull in every direction though, at least not pull hard. It's the powerful across-the-river group embedded in Cluster structures that pulls, and gets results with "their" mayors. Almost everybody I talk to here, from the Miner District to the Brent District, would be fine with a strong sole Ward 6 MS emerging, one offering a rich menu of remedial, grade-level, and above grade level classes serving all DCPS elementary schools. Yet I see no hope of this coming to pass before the next boundary review, maybe in 10 years, or 20, or even 30. None. We're saving our pennies for privates.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really hate that we're talking about "shitty" schools. I really don't know that the test scores reflect how good or bad a school is in DC. Rather it reflects the social and economic capital of the families that send their children there. Median Growth Percentile has been suggested to do a much better job at reflecting the performance of a school. Jefferson's scores there are a little better than Brent's, although by this metric, all our kids should go to DC Prep Edgewood's middle school.

I wish people would stop talking about not sending their kids to bad schools when what they should be saying is they don't want to send their kids to schools with a lot of poor kids who aren't performing at grade level. Which is fair enough.

But they are shitty schools. It's not just the kids, but the fact that being poor means you have fewer access to resources, and hence shitty schools (no matter who enrolls there.) Bad teachers, bad administration, bad facilities. It's not true that your kid will do fine there just by dint of being high SES - that's your white privilege speaking. Your kid will have to go to a crappy school, because poor people get crappy things (the definition of being poor) and may suffer, just like the poor kids. Not as badly (because again, privilege) but to pretend like their mere presence is what changes a bad school into a good school is pretty offensive. It's a product of income inequality plus gentrification that makes this self-evident. In the same way that moving into a run-down house doesn't make it a nice house just because you're rich, sending your rich kid to a shitty, poor school doesn't turn it into a good school.

How do you reach that conclusion about the teachers and administrators? Because they haven't solved poverty? For as much as DC gripes about facilities deficiencies there's little evidence that modernized facilities improve learning. The teachers and administrators can only serve the families that enroll. If that happens to be predominantly at risk and/FARM students then your common core standards for quality assessment are largely irrelevant.

You're the one speaking from a position of profound entitlement.

I'm not the shitty schools poster, but more power to her. Profound entitlement? Knock off the holier-than-thou shaming already. A school in which 12% of 6th graders test proficient is shitty by any measure of course, and not necessarily because teachers and admins there aren't doing a good job.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, in the interests of fairness, I don't think anyone last night said Jefferson was the next Deal or that any of this would be easy. But they did let people know that the enrollment situation at Jefferson is improving, albeit it doesn't have nearly the demand as Basis or Latin. But demand is there which it isn't for Eliot-Hine or many other DCPS middle schools.

So you have done your due diligence in adding skepticism to the discussion. That is duly noted. Now how can we make a better middle school pathway for advanced/proficient students at Brent? I'm with the optimists who are working to improve Jefferson rather than throwing their hands up and getting a realtor or paying for private.

I would add that, yes, Hardy and Stuart-Hobson's test scores may improve faster than Jefferson's. But they are in demand now. So if Brent families would consider those schools now and the Hardy/SH aren't an option in the future, why not consider Jefferson if it gets to or could get to quickly the point Hardy is at now? It is my understanding that the proficient/advanced students at SH generally feel pretty good about their experience.

The fact that a school which has an enrollment of about 50 percent of its capacity has engineered a "waitlist" in order to create the perception that it is now "in demand" is too clever by half.

There's a lot of misconception about why schools offer OOB spots. Schools only offer OOB spaces with total confidence that the spaces will be filled and generate at least some waitlist. In the budgeting process the schools project enrollment and request budget accordingly. There's a strong disincentive to overestimating student enrollment because if the numbers don't materialize the schools lose the resources late in the process. Conversely, the principals are better served projecting realistically and almost conservatively because they can gain additional resources if the numbers demand it. They'd rather add if necessary late instead of completing their annual planning and subtracting resources at the beginning of the school year.

Unless something has drastically changed, that is not true at all. Historically DCPS principals have had a strong incentive to over-estimate their incoming classes. They could claim it was for students who might move into the school during the year, and no-one ever asked them to return any funds when those students never materialized.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, in the interests of fairness, I don't think anyone last night said Jefferson was the next Deal or that any of this would be easy. But they did let people know that the enrollment situation at Jefferson is improving, albeit it doesn't have nearly the demand as Basis or Latin. But demand is there which it isn't for Eliot-Hine or many other DCPS middle schools.

So you have done your due diligence in adding skepticism to the discussion. That is duly noted. Now how can we make a better middle school pathway for advanced/proficient students at Brent? I'm with the optimists who are working to improve Jefferson rather than throwing their hands up and getting a realtor or paying for private.

I would add that, yes, Hardy and Stuart-Hobson's test scores may improve faster than Jefferson's. But they are in demand now. So if Brent families would consider those schools now and the Hardy/SH aren't an option in the future, why not consider Jefferson if it gets to or could get to quickly the point Hardy is at now? It is my understanding that the proficient/advanced students at SH generally feel pretty good about their experience.

The fact that a school which has an enrollment of about 50 percent of its capacity has engineered a "waitlist" in order to create the perception that it is now "in demand" is too clever by half.

There's a lot of misconception about why schools offer OOB spots. Schools only offer OOB spaces with total confidence that the spaces will be filled and generate at least some waitlist. In the budgeting process the schools project enrollment and request budget accordingly. There's a strong disincentive to overestimating student enrollment because if the numbers don't materialize the schools lose the resources late in the process. Conversely, the principals are better served projecting realistically and almost conservatively because they can gain additional resources if the numbers demand it. They'd rather add if necessary late instead of completing their annual planning and subtracting resources at the beginning of the school year.

Unless something has drastically changed, that is not true at all. Historically DCPS principals have had a strong incentive to over-estimate their incoming classes. They could claim it was for students who might move into the school during the year, and no-one ever asked them to return any funds when those students never materialized.

You are incorrect. If enrollment targets are not met in June (before school starts), July and the start of school, positions are either frozen or even eliminated. Principals have to be conservative with enrollment forecasts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, in the interests of fairness, I don't think anyone last night said Jefferson was the next Deal or that any of this would be easy. But they did let people know that the enrollment situation at Jefferson is improving, albeit it doesn't have nearly the demand as Basis or Latin. But demand is there which it isn't for Eliot-Hine or many other DCPS middle schools.

So you have done your due diligence in adding skepticism to the discussion. That is duly noted. Now how can we make a better middle school pathway for advanced/proficient students at Brent? I'm with the optimists who are working to improve Jefferson rather than throwing their hands up and getting a realtor or paying for private.

I would add that, yes, Hardy and Stuart-Hobson's test scores may improve faster than Jefferson's. But they are in demand now. So if Brent families would consider those schools now and the Hardy/SH aren't an option in the future, why not consider Jefferson if it gets to or could get to quickly the point Hardy is at now? It is my understanding that the proficient/advanced students at SH generally feel pretty good about their experience.

The fact that a school which has an enrollment of about 50 percent of its capacity has engineered a "waitlist" in order to create the perception that it is now "in demand" is too clever by half.

There's a lot of misconception about why schools offer OOB spots. Schools only offer OOB spaces with total confidence that the spaces will be filled and generate at least some waitlist. In the budgeting process the schools project enrollment and request budget accordingly. There's a strong disincentive to overestimating student enrollment because if the numbers don't materialize the schools lose the resources late in the process. Conversely, the principals are better served projecting realistically and almost conservatively because they can gain additional resources if the numbers demand it. They'd rather add if necessary late instead of completing their annual planning and subtracting resources at the beginning of the school year.

Unless something has drastically changed, that is not true at all. Historically DCPS principals have had a strong incentive to over-estimate their incoming classes. They could claim it was for students who might move into the school during the year, and no-one ever asked them to return any funds when those students never materialized.

You are incorrect. If enrollment targets are not met in June (before school starts), July and the start of school, positions are either frozen or even eliminated. Principals have to be conservative with enrollment forecasts.

When a classroom is projected to have 32 students, and ends up with 28, the teacher's position doesn't get eliminated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really hate that we're talking about "shitty" schools. I really don't know that the test scores reflect how good or bad a school is in DC. Rather it reflects the social and economic capital of the families that send their children there. Median Growth Percentile has been suggested to do a much better job at reflecting the performance of a school. Jefferson's scores there are a little better than Brent's, although by this metric, all our kids should go to DC Prep Edgewood's middle school.

I wish people would stop talking about not sending their kids to bad schools when what they should be saying is they don't want to send their kids to schools with a lot of poor kids who aren't performing at grade level. Which is fair enough.

Ah yes, the beloved you must hate the poor kids card. That coupled with the nonsense about MGP being evidence that Jefferson is somehow doing a better job than Brent, and the defense of Councilman Wells, who fought tooth-and-nail to keep Eastern in Ward 6, but fecklessly ran from the debates around the Ward 6 Middle School Plan, is too much of the Tropical Punch flavor of the day. There are plenty of poor kids capable of performing in grade level. Attack the issue at the elementary school level with novel approaches, or even those more tried and true ones at Kipp and DC Prep. But don't insult us by pretending everything's okie-dokie at Jefferson just because a few parents are saying they might send their kids there a couple of years from now. I've heard the same thing now for the past seven years. DCPS and dilettantes like Grosso and Allen are counting on parents to gentrify schools so that they can ignore the bigger issues. Hell, Grosso can't remember whether modernizing Jefferson is a priority or not.

Hmmm... This is quite an unsubstantiated rant. I don't at all think it's a great thing that kids aren't performing at grade level. But I just don't think the school is necessarily to blame. What metric would you suggest we use to compare schools that factors in where they're starting from coming in? If your issue is you don't want your kid(s) among kids who aren't performing at grade level, say so. But stop pinning it on the school without providing evidence. Brent sure hasn't solved the performance gap issue either.

As you seem to be familiar with the acievement gap at Brent you must have heard that the gap correlates with students admitted to Brent at First Grade and above. Brent can't remediate its way out of a situation where students admitted to fill seats via the lottery find themselves unprepared by the schools they left.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really hate that we're talking about "shitty" schools. I really don't know that the test scores reflect how good or bad a school is in DC. Rather it reflects the social and economic capital of the families that send their children there. Median Growth Percentile has been suggested to do a much better job at reflecting the performance of a school. Jefferson's scores there are a little better than Brent's, although by this metric, all our kids should go to DC Prep Edgewood's middle school.

I wish people would stop talking about not sending their kids to bad schools when what they should be saying is they don't want to send their kids to schools with a lot of poor kids who aren't performing at grade level. Which is fair enough.

Ah yes, the beloved you must hate the poor kids card. That coupled with the nonsense about MGP being evidence that Jefferson is somehow doing a better job than Brent, and the defense of Councilman Wells, who fought tooth-and-nail to keep Eastern in Ward 6, but fecklessly ran from the debates around the Ward 6 Middle School Plan, is too much of the Tropical Punch flavor of the day. There are plenty of poor kids capable of performing in grade level. Attack the issue at the elementary school level with novel approaches, or even those more tried and true ones at Kipp and DC Prep. But don't insult us by pretending everything's okie-dokie at Jefferson just because a few parents are saying they might send their kids there a couple of years from now. I've heard the same thing now for the past seven years. DCPS and dilettantes like Grosso and Allen are counting on parents to gentrify schools so that they can ignore the bigger issues. Hell, Grosso can't remember whether modernizing Jefferson is a priority or not.

Hmmm... This is quite an unsubstantiated rant. I don't at all think it's a great thing that kids aren't performing at grade level. But I just don't think the school is necessarily to blame. What metric would you suggest we use to compare schools that factors in where they're starting from coming in? If your issue is you don't want your kid(s) among kids who aren't performing at grade level, say so. But stop pinning it on the school without providing evidence. Brent sure hasn't solved the performance gap issue either.

As you seem to be familiar with the acievement gap at Brent you must have heard that the gap correlates with students admitted to Brent at First Grade and above. Brent can't remediate its way out of a situation where students admitted to fill seats via the lottery find themselves unprepared by the schools they left.

While I generally agree with your caveat, you pick the exact wrong example. A school can absolutely be expected to "add value" to a student's trajectory between 1st and 5th grade; between 4th and 5th not so much.

But good point you just raised about middle schools. Those have at best 3 years to make up for sub-optimal instruction, support, or other factors, to the extent a student's instruction is indeed what drives his/her performance. As we all know there is a lot more to that, much of it cannot be "remediated" by schools. Nonsense, schools aren't "shitty" for that fact. And that's precisely why kids who come in with all the right foundations do very well. I would go as far as saying - and have heard notable principals say as much - that schools with bigger challenges are much better equipped to also serve the highest achievers than schools who can coast and comfortably serve all of the laureates without ever going out of their way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really hate that we're talking about "shitty" schools. I really don't know that the test scores reflect how good or bad a school is in DC. Rather it reflects the social and economic capital of the families that send their children there. Median Growth Percentile has been suggested to do a much better job at reflecting the performance of a school. Jefferson's scores there are a little better than Brent's, although by this metric, all our kids should go to DC Prep Edgewood's middle school.

I wish people would stop talking about not sending their kids to bad schools when what they should be saying is they don't want to send their kids to schools with a lot of poor kids who aren't performing at grade level. Which is fair enough.

Ah yes, the beloved you must hate the poor kids card. That coupled with the nonsense about MGP being evidence that Jefferson is somehow doing a better job than Brent, and the defense of Councilman Wells, who fought tooth-and-nail to keep Eastern in Ward 6, but fecklessly ran from the debates around the Ward 6 Middle School Plan, is too much of the Tropical Punch flavor of the day. There are plenty of poor kids capable of performing in grade level. Attack the issue at the elementary school level with novel approaches, or even those more tried and true ones at Kipp and DC Prep. But don't insult us by pretending everything's okie-dokie at Jefferson just because a few parents are saying they might send their kids there a couple of years from now. I've heard the same thing now for the past seven years. DCPS and dilettantes like Grosso and Allen are counting on parents to gentrify schools so that they can ignore the bigger issues. Hell, Grosso can't remember whether modernizing Jefferson is a priority or not.

Please cite examples. And then consider the DC context where we scrape for every resource

Hmmm... This is quite an unsubstantiated rant. I don't at all think it's a great thing that kids aren't performing at grade level. But I just don't think the school is necessarily to blame. What metric would you suggest we use to compare schools that factors in where they're starting from coming in? If your issue is you don't want your kid(s) among kids who aren't performing at grade level, say so. But stop pinning it on the school without providing evidence. Brent sure hasn't solved the performance gap issue either.

As you seem to be familiar with the acievement gap at Brent you must have heard that the gap correlates with students admitted to Brent at First Grade and above. Brent can't remediate its way out of a situation where students admitted to fill seats via the lottery find themselves unprepared by the schools they left.

While I generally agree with your caveat, you pick the exact wrong example. A school can absolutely be expected to "add value" to a student's trajectory between 1st and 5th grade; between 4th and 5th not so much.

But good point you just raised about middle schools. Those have at best 3 years to make up for sub-optimal instruction, support, or other factors, to the extent a student's instruction is indeed what drives his/her performance. As we all know there is a lot more to that, much of it cannot be "remediated" by schools. Nonsense, schools aren't "shitty" for that fact. And that's precisely why kids who come in with all the right foundations do very well. I would go as far as saying - and have heard notable principals say as much - that schools with bigger challenges are much better equipped to also serve the highest achievers than schools who can coast and comfortably serve all of the laureates without ever going out of their way.

[Anonymous]

I don't get it. How could a school like Jefferson focused on serving below-grade-level students also serve high achievers well? Unless the high achievers were being taught in all their own classes, which sounds very unlikely, how could advanced students find appropriate challenge sitting in class alongside peers lacking basic skills? How could school like Jefferson, which is more than half empty, offer, for example, upper level language classes in several languages, as Deal does? And how could such a school attract teachers with experience teaching cohorts of gifted kids? Even if two dozen or more Brent 5th grade graduates were to enroll, how could it possibly work?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't get it. How could a school like Jefferson focused on serving below-grade-level students also serve high achievers well? Unless the high achievers were being taught in all their own classes, which sounds very unlikely, how could advanced students find appropriate challenge sitting in class alongside peers lacking basic skills? How could school like Jefferson, which is more than half empty, offer, for example, upper level language classes in several languages, as Deal does? And how could such a school attract teachers with experience teaching cohorts of gifted kids? Even if two dozen or more Brent 5th grade graduates were to enroll, how could it possibly work?

Jefferson used to do it. The high-achieving test in kids were separated from the rest of the students...non-test in students were literally placed in the basement of the building.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't get it. How could a school like Jefferson focused on serving below-grade-level students also serve high achievers well? Unless the high achievers were being taught in all their own classes, which sounds very unlikely, how could advanced students find appropriate challenge sitting in class alongside peers lacking basic skills? How could school like Jefferson, which is more than half empty, offer, for example, upper level language classes in several languages, as Deal does? And how could such a school attract teachers with experience teaching cohorts of gifted kids? Even if two dozen or more Brent 5th grade graduates were to enroll, how could it possibly work?

Jefferson used to do it. The high-achieving test in kids were separated from the rest of the students...non-test in students were literally placed in the basement of the building.

And DC used to segregate and track students by race. It's ridiculous to suggest that Jefferson was doing a fantastic job with differentiated teaching two decades ago based on anecdotal information such as this.

[Anonymous]

As you seem to be familiar with the acievement gap at Brent you must have heard that the gap correlates with students admitted to Brent at First Grade and above. Brent can't remediate its way out of a situation where students admitted to fill seats via the lottery find themselves unprepared by the schools they left.

I'll fix this for you. Unprepared by ...

... by the prenatal care they didn't get
... by the poverty-driven cortisol that crossed the placenta when they were in utero
... by the relative lack of high-nutrient foods (DHA, EPA) they didn't get ages 0-3 as their brains developed critical neuro pathways
... by the 30 million words they didn't hear by age 3, a result that will follow them at Watkins, SH and for the rest of their entire lives [ http://literacy.rice.edu/thirty-million-word-gap ]
... by the comparatively ad hoc, likely low-quality and unstable child care they received prior to school
... by the books they weren't read, the art classes they didn't have as 2 year olds, the Please Touch Museum they didn't visit at age 4
.... by the slapping around they received throughout early childhood for getting on mama's last nerve

It's really time to reframe "the gap" and stop making "shitty teachers" and "shitty administrators" and "David Grosso" the absolute and only scapegoats.

-- not a teacher or a Grosso staffer

[Anonymous]

No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really hate that we're talking about "shitty" schools. I really don't know that the test scores reflect how good or bad a school is in DC. Rather it reflects the social and economic capital of the families that send their children there. Median Growth Percentile has been suggested to do a much better job at reflecting the performance of a school. Jefferson's scores there are a little better than Brent's, although by this metric, all our kids should go to DC Prep Edgewood's middle school.

I wish people would stop talking about not sending their kids to bad schools when what they should be saying is they don't want to send their kids to schools with a lot of poor kids who aren't performing at grade level. Which is fair enough.

But they are shitty schools. It's not just the kids, but the fact that being poor means you have fewer access to resources, and hence shitty schools (no matter who enrolls there.) Bad teachers, bad administration, bad facilities. It's not true that your kid will do fine there just by dint of being high SES - that's your white privilege speaking. Your kid will have to go to a crappy school, because poor people get crappy things (the definition of being poor) and may suffer, just like the poor kids. Not as badly (because again, privilege) but to pretend like their mere presence is what changes a bad school into a good school is pretty offensive. It's a product of income inequality plus gentrification that makes this self-evident. In the same way that moving into a run-down house doesn't make it a nice house just because you're rich, sending your rich kid to a shitty, poor school doesn't turn it into a good school.

How do you reach that conclusion about the teachers and administrators? Because they haven't solved poverty? For as much as DC gripes about facilities deficiencies there's little evidence that modernized facilities improve learning. The teachers and administrators can only serve the families that enroll. If that happens to be predominantly at risk and/FARM students then your common core standards for quality assessment are largely irrelevant.

You're the one speaking from a position of profound entitlement.

I'm not the shitty schools poster, but more power to her. Profound entitlement? Knock off the holier-than-thou shaming already. A school in which 12% of 6th graders test proficient is shitty by any measure of course, and not necessarily because teachers and admins there aren't doing a good job.

a school as affluent and low at risk at Brent only has 12% advanced. That doesn't impress me all that much