Anonymous wrote:I think if one of my child’s teachers wrote on a thread “sure our test scores suck but that’s okay” I would have a stroke. But I guess that’s why we didn’t chose Stuart Hobson.
This is a bizarre summary of the Stuart-Hobson teacher’s thoughtful, nuanced response to the OP.
Anonymous wrote:Current SH teacher who enjoys his job. OP: go to open houses, meet teachers, meet families, meet students, and make your decision from there. Many posters on this thread are basing their opinions on test scores alone, which is flawed. Test scores may be one factor when evaluating a school for your child but should by no means be the only factor. Arguing over which school is "the best" is like arguing over which color or pie flavor is the best. There's no "best," but there probably is a "best for your child." Most of my students and their families seem very happy at SH. SH has students transfer in from charters (including BASIS) and are very glad that they did. Sometimes we have students transfer out to charters, and I assume that they're glad they did too. Experience as much as you can and make your decision from there.
As far as your original question, we have lots of students who choose to go on to selective high schools and have success there. The fact that we don't "track" our Science and Social Studies classes does not mean that we aren't able to challenge all of our students. I don't think many of our students would say that SH is easy. I think many of them would say that most teachers teach well and offer lots of opportunities for enrichment and support. That's all that can be asked of us, really.
Also, re: your kid not being "independently driven" - welcome to middle school. Good teachers (which we have many of at SH) can identify and leverage that pretty quickly. It's not uncommon for us to hear from families that they're surprised at how much their child is enjoying and engaging in school. While of course it helps, being self-motivated is not a requirement for success in a decent teacher's class.
Obviously I'm biased. That said, different schools have different approaches and different communities, and what's best for one person isn't always what's best for the other. Try to find what's "best for you" instead of finding "the best."
Breaking news...
SH teacher says that SH teachers are great, parents should ignore SH's abysmal test scores, and ranking the "best" school is like choosing apple pie over cherry pie or liking blue over red.
Anonymous wrote:“Eastern is not a dystopian hellscape. Let’s all sign our kids up!”
I mean - I’ve recently reconnected with a bunch of friends from HS. Some extremely accomplished but with lasting emotional scars from being pushed by their parents. But we all have the same memory of how unstressful and fun high school was despite anything personal we had going on. It’s really been something on my mind lately - at the risk of sounding arrogant I know my kid is very smart and will make is way in the knowledge economy. I’m more concerned with the values he learns, how he makes friends, handles different kinds of people, and all of that. Am I saying we will choose Eastern? Definitely not with any kind of assurance. But I can think of way worse outcomes than a “less rigorous” HS experience.
The problem is that the "less rigorous" schools in DCPS are actually not adequate to prepare a kid for college. I think fewer than 20 percent of students who graduate from DCPS end up graduating from college. These schools are just so far from the Palo Alto/Fairfax County suburban pressure cookers.
I sent my kids to Title 1 elementary schools and was happy as a clam for years, but when we hit middle school, i somehow woke up. There is a narrow path to success in DC, and if you want your kid to be even remotely competitive with their peers around the country, you do need to send them to the best middle and high schools in the city that you can find (NONE of which are at all comparable to the best high schools in suburban districts, but a handful of which are good enough.)
There are so many moving parts and variables in this thread. Some of the things being said about suburban schools might be accurate but there are also other very specific and different reasons for test scores, graduation rates etc that that are not directly linked to the instruction in high school. Not saying that they aren't significant and shouldn't be addressed but it is very much an issue of correlation vs. causation.
And to the most recent poster, this doesn't need to turn into an EH or SH bashing thread. There are families at these schools who chose the school and are happy there and doing well. Totally other elephant in the room is the achievement gaps between various subgroups. A prior poster already mentioned how unhelpful it is to judge an entire school on a few data points. I agree with this for multiple reasons - one being that there is more to measure at a school that can't be captured by data, but separately the data gets really skewed and not as useful.
The "few data points" are math and ELA scores that demonstrate nearly the entire school is significantly below grade level. I'm not sure why you don't consider those to be "useful" data points. Maybe the word you're looking for is "inconvenient?"
There is now at both EH and SH approximately 30 students in each grade who get 4s and 5s on the CAPE math test. That is a cohort. Is Latin better? Most would say yes and especially yes if you care about having a decent high school locked in. But it is also now a very difficult lottery spot to land. Is Hardy better? Most would say yes but it is also a pretty lengthy daily commute from the eastern side of the city even with a lottery spot. Basis is pretty controversial - and the 5th grade waitlist movement and 7th-9th grade attrition there both speak to that. I think its increasingly common to not get into Latin, turn down Basis, and try a Hill area dcps middle school.
Anonymous wrote:There is now at both EH and SH approximately 30 students in each grade who get 4s and 5s on the CAPE math test. That is a cohort. Is Latin better? Most would say yes and especially yes if you care about having a decent high school locked in. But it is also now a very difficult lottery spot to land. Is Hardy better? Most would say yes but it is also a pretty lengthy daily commute from the eastern side of the city even with a lottery spot. Basis is pretty controversial - and the 5th grade waitlist movement and 7th-9th grade attrition there both speak to that. I think its increasingly common to not get into Latin, turn down Basis, and try a Hill area dcps middle school.
No. That is only a cohort if the students are tracked, which DCPS absolutely refuses to do. The reality is, in a classroom at EH, more than 80% of students are going to be below grade level.
Anonymous wrote:There is now at both EH and SH approximately 30 students in each grade who get 4s and 5s on the CAPE math test. That is a cohort. Is Latin better? Most would say yes and especially yes if you care about having a decent high school locked in. But it is also now a very difficult lottery spot to land. Is Hardy better? Most would say yes but it is also a pretty lengthy daily commute from the eastern side of the city even with a lottery spot. Basis is pretty controversial - and the 5th grade waitlist movement and 7th-9th grade attrition there both speak to that. I think its increasingly common to not get into Latin, turn down Basis, and try a Hill area dcps middle school.
This is a flagrant lie for EH. Less than 20% of the school is proficient in math. And there are only 90 kids per grade.
Anonymous wrote:There is no really great middle school option in this area. Read some of the posts about Basis. It has a for-profit parent company, high teacher turnover rate, and a not so great facility. It also self-selects for a smart and motivated peer group which makes it the overall best option for some students but being self-motivated and willing to do a large volume of homework is important and a lot of kids are not developmentally going to be ready for or happy at that type of middle school program.
Never fails that a BASIS hater comes out of the blue. You probably don't even have a kid at BASIS/
OP- BASIS is fine, great even. Convenient location, likeminded peers, sports, a Spring musical. Yes, the building sucks, but it goes through 12th grade, so you don't need to deal with the HS application process. If your child is smart and likes to learn, I don't see why you wouldn't at least apply.
Why not apply? No outdoor space, uninspired leadership, high teacher turnover, essentially no performing arts, weak sports/no playing fields, essentially no recognition of kids' talents outside a narrowly academic sphere, no languages taught before 8th grade (then just for beginners). Need I go on? The truth is that SH offers most of what BASIS is lacking outside serious academics. If only there was a way to meld BASIS academics and SH enrichment with a stable faculty and a good Head in this obnoxious DC political climate. I'd sign up for that in-boundary middle school fast.
Ridiculous.
You are comparing a school where most of the students are below grade level to Basis, the top public school in the city?
No, BASIS isn't the top public school in the city. Walls, JR top tier and possible Banneker are. Look at their college admissions successes for their upper echelon. They beat BASIS. Weak high school ECs, cramming four years of HS academics into three and too much math acceleration for average students hurt most BASIS students.
A good many SH students end up at Walls and Banneker. I know of 10 kids from my boy's cohort at a DCPS ES who applied to Walls, 3 from SH, 3 from BASIS, 4 from Latin. All 3 from SH were admitted along with 1 from Latin. That's it. Sure, this evidence of preferential treatment in Walls admissions from SH is anecdotal but it's still interesting.
Where does one find this data?
and I meant top middle school in the city, as this thread is about SH.
I can't find the data on admissions to selective DCPS high schools by middle school and I've looked hard and called DCPS and OSSE (leaving messages).
If anybody knows where to find it, please let us know.
Lots of n<10, which makes it harder to get a good sense, but you can get a rough sense based on the variety of selective high schools students are admitted to and the consistency of admission over multiple school years.
Deal, Hardy, Oyster and DCI are the only ones with exact numbers (10 or over), everyone else is less than 10. includes SH, EH, Basis, Latin, Francis, ITS, etc. Many middle schools on the list.
Keep in mind the overall class size at each of these schools. It would be unrealistic for Deal (400+ 8th graders) and ITDS (40+ 8th graders) to send an equivalent number of students. It helps here to look over multiple years. Which schools are consistently sending students to Walls?
There are TON of schools that send between 1 and 9 kids to Walls every year. Like, 20 different schools.
So look at it the other way. Since this thread is about Stuart-Hobson, Stuart-Hobson 8th graders to Walls in
SY19-20: n<10
SY20-21: 11
SY21-22: n<10
SY22-23: n<10
Stuart-Hobson 8th graders to Banneker in
SY19-20: n<10
SY20-21: n<10
SY21-22: 10
SY22-23: n<10
Stuart-Hobson 8th graders to McKinley in
SY19-20: n<10
SY20-21: 14
SY21-22: 12
SY22-23: 23
Stuart-Hobson 8th graders to Duke Ellington in
SY19-20: 14
SY20-21: 11
SY21-22: 10
SY22-23: 14
This is useful information, and it's pretty impressive. No stake in SH (not in bounds and have a kid already in a different middle school.) If I was at a feeder and my kid really wanted to go, I would have a hard time saying no.
No not really. SH is similar size to Deal and Deal sends significantly more kids to Walls.
The other elephant in the room is just because you got into Walls doesn’t mean you will be prepared and competitive with many of the other kids from much higher performing schools who took more rigorous and more advance class offerings
The elephant in the room is that Deal sends a lot more kids to Walls because there are a lot more kids at Deal who are prepared to keep up at Walls, because there are more kids at Deal from well-resourced families who can provide the support and home environment needed to allow kids to excel academically.
The kids from SH getting into Deal are prepared to attend Deal. They aren't charity cases. But the proportion of SH's population who both wants to attend Walls AND has the academic ability to do well there is smaller than it is at Deal. However it is growing and is already twice what it was 5 or 6 years ago. The number of UMC families deciding to stick with SH goes up every year. If you live in the neighborhood you can see how it's nearing the critical mass needed to start to make SH a first choice (right now it still tends to be a 2nd or 3rd choice for many parents -- though even that is a huge improvement over a decade ago when it was the 4th or 5th choice or simply not on the table for a lot of Hill families).
As SH gentrifies you will likely see it sending more and more kids to Walls, Banneker, McKinley, especially since it appears that the gentrification of Eastern will lag behind the gentrification of its feeders.
The truth is that there is nothing inherently special about Deal or inherently inferior about SH. Academic outcomes for the average student are different because academic outcomes are strongly correlated to socioeconomic status. If you are a UMC family with two college-educated parents there is not reason to think Deal would prepare your child for a school like Walls any better than SH would.
There is absolutely something superior about Deal and inferior about SH: the high school feeder. We are a family that looked over SH because we didn’t want to have the high school problem in three years.
This is true. I’m not happy about not having a HS locked in.
If academic outcomes are strongly correlated to socioeconomic status, then why are Hill parents afraid to send their kids to Eastern?
There’s a tiny bit of momentum there, but I think it’s a bridge too far to go to a HS with little/no infrastructure to support college admissions and advanced classes. But we’re still going to the open house. it’s a chicken-egg problem and if every kid at SH and EH attended it would be fine.
Not surprised with the direction this thread took, but I will chime in for a second to say that I appreciate this prior poster is actually going to attend an open house at Eastern. I have been to one, and have spent time talking to families who are there. That's the way to actually learn about a school. Not saying they have the same programs as every other school, but they do have advanced classes, and in the last data point they shared, 88% of their students went onto a 4 year college. My impression of the school is there are some really strong rigorous options/tracks, and internships and university partnerships, for kids that take advantage of them. Question/goal is how many kids take advantage of them and how to increase numbers, but the foundation seems to be there, and leadership and teacher experience seems strong. And there is more buy in every year. So who knows, schools in DC are a crystal ball.
I hate this sort of post patronizing post. Oh, so the real problem is...lack of info about how great SH and Eastern are on the part of CH parents who reject these programs. Some of us have not only attended open houses, we've gone to talk to admins, dug deep into data, even volunteered at school events. The inconvenient truth is that Eastern's IB Diploma program remains weak as compared to suburban options in the DMV. The lack of an acceptable by-right high school after SH continues to make things tough for the middle school feed. With only a dozen SH students making the cut for Walls each year, the middle school remains a risky choice. When you point to more buy-in at Eastern every year, you're talking about 14 years since the renovation and reboot to attract, what, two dozen white kids in a catchment area that's become at least two-thirds white due to gentrification? At this rate, most of us won't touch Eastern not only for our children, but our grandchildren.
Sure, a lot of people will not consider it as an option, but looking at the bigger picture of enrollment and school trends in our neighborhood and DC as a whole is not as simple as looking at a fact that the renovation was done 14 years ago. Enrollment in all of the feeders (and other areas of the city as well) has changed drastically during that time. The fastest growing population of students is middle and high school age. The application schools are more of a crap shoot now because there is such an increased number of people trying to get a spot.
It is really not about trying to convince anybody and I am not sure if our family will even go there, but not too long ago a lot of people were saying the same thing about EH and are now there and happy. Things do change.
Stop posting the same lie about EH in every thread. EH is overwhelmingly low income, OOB and underperforming. Nearly a fifth of the student body has been disciplined for incidents of violence at this school according to the most recent DC stats. 42% of students was chronically absent last year. The math proficiency is an abysmal 18%. It is a school of last resort for people who struck out in the lottery or who are so delusional about their own child that they think peer group doesn't matter.
hi we are happy there! The reason there are few behavioral disruptions is that the kids get discipline.
Anonymous wrote:“Eastern is not a dystopian hellscape. Let’s all sign our kids up!”
I mean - I’ve recently reconnected with a bunch of friends from HS. Some extremely accomplished but with lasting emotional scars from being pushed by their parents. But we all have the same memory of how unstressful and fun high school was despite anything personal we had going on. It’s really been something on my mind lately - at the risk of sounding arrogant I know my kid is very smart and will make is way in the knowledge economy. I’m more concerned with the values he learns, how he makes friends, handles different kinds of people, and all of that. Am I saying we will choose Eastern? Definitely not with any kind of assurance. But I can think of way worse outcomes than a “less rigorous” HS experience.
The problem is that the "less rigorous" schools in DCPS are actually not adequate to prepare a kid for college. I think fewer than 20 percent of students who graduate from DCPS end up graduating from college. These schools are just so far from the Palo Alto/Fairfax County suburban pressure cookers.
I sent my kids to Title 1 elementary schools and was happy as a clam for years, but when we hit middle school, i somehow woke up. There is a narrow path to success in DC, and if you want your kid to be even remotely competitive with their peers around the country, you do need to send them to the best middle and high schools in the city that you can find (NONE of which are at all comparable to the best high schools in suburban districts, but a handful of which are good enough.)
There’s no stopping point to this. Eventually not even Whitman is good enough because the best prepared kids are at TJ …
Anonymous wrote:“Eastern is not a dystopian hellscape. Let’s all sign our kids up!”
I mean - I’ve recently reconnected with a bunch of friends from HS. Some extremely accomplished but with lasting emotional scars from being pushed by their parents. But we all have the same memory of how unstressful and fun high school was despite anything personal we had going on. It’s really been something on my mind lately - at the risk of sounding arrogant I know my kid is very smart and will make is way in the knowledge economy. I’m more concerned with the values he learns, how he makes friends, handles different kinds of people, and all of that. Am I saying we will choose Eastern? Definitely not with any kind of assurance. But I can think of way worse outcomes than a “less rigorous” HS experience.
The problem is that the "less rigorous" schools in DCPS are actually not adequate to prepare a kid for college. I think fewer than 20 percent of students who graduate from DCPS end up graduating from college. These schools are just so far from the Palo Alto/Fairfax County suburban pressure cookers.
I sent my kids to Title 1 elementary schools and was happy as a clam for years, but when we hit middle school, i somehow woke up. There is a narrow path to success in DC, and if you want your kid to be even remotely competitive with their peers around the country, you do need to send them to the best middle and high schools in the city that you can find (NONE of which are at all comparable to the best high schools in suburban districts, but a handful of which are good enough.)
There are so many moving parts and variables in this thread. Some of the things being said about suburban schools might be accurate but there are also other very specific and different reasons for test scores, graduation rates etc that that are not directly linked to the instruction in high school. Not saying that they aren't significant and shouldn't be addressed but it is very much an issue of correlation vs. causation.
And to the most recent poster, this doesn't need to turn into an EH or SH bashing thread. There are families at these schools who chose the school and are happy there and doing well. Totally other elephant in the room is the achievement gaps between various subgroups. A prior poster already mentioned how unhelpful it is to judge an entire school on a few data points. I agree with this for multiple reasons - one being that there is more to measure at a school that can't be captured by data, but separately the data gets really skewed and not as useful.
The "few data points" are math and ELA scores that demonstrate nearly the entire school is significantly below grade level. I'm not sure why you don't consider those to be "useful" data points. Maybe the word you're looking for is "inconvenient?"
This again?
if you break down test scores you’ll see that the high SES cohort at EH and SH does as well/better than Deal.
Anonymous wrote:There is now at both EH and SH approximately 30 students in each grade who get 4s and 5s on the CAPE math test. That is a cohort. Is Latin better? Most would say yes and especially yes if you care about having a decent high school locked in. But it is also now a very difficult lottery spot to land. Is Hardy better? Most would say yes but it is also a pretty lengthy daily commute from the eastern side of the city even with a lottery spot. Basis is pretty controversial - and the 5th grade waitlist movement and 7th-9th grade attrition there both speak to that. I think its increasingly common to not get into Latin, turn down Basis, and try a Hill area dcps middle school.
This is a flagrant lie for EH. Less than 20% of the school is proficient in math. And there are only 90 kids per grade.
Anonymous wrote:There is now at both EH and SH approximately 30 students in each grade who get 4s and 5s on the CAPE math test. That is a cohort. Is Latin better? Most would say yes and especially yes if you care about having a decent high school locked in. But it is also now a very difficult lottery spot to land. Is Hardy better? Most would say yes but it is also a pretty lengthy daily commute from the eastern side of the city even with a lottery spot. Basis is pretty controversial - and the 5th grade waitlist movement and 7th-9th grade attrition there both speak to that. I think its increasingly common to not get into Latin, turn down Basis, and try a Hill area dcps middle school.
No. That is only a cohort if the students are tracked, which DCPS absolutely refuses to do. The reality is, in a classroom at EH, more than 80% of students are going to be below grade level.
is this the point when I say my kid is smart and advantaged enough that I don’t think being around less privileged kids as a 12 yr old will threaten his future?
Go pull the CAPE scores for last spring. It is not a lie. There are lots of schools in DC where the number of students scoring 4s and 5s in math is close to zero. It is now 25+ at both SH and EH. The schools also do some math tracking.
Anonymous wrote:There is now at both EH and SH approximately 30 students in each grade who get 4s and 5s on the CAPE math test. That is a cohort. Is Latin better? Most would say yes and especially yes if you care about having a decent high school locked in. But it is also now a very difficult lottery spot to land. Is Hardy better? Most would say yes but it is also a pretty lengthy daily commute from the eastern side of the city even with a lottery spot. Basis is pretty controversial - and the 5th grade waitlist movement and 7th-9th grade attrition there both speak to that. I think its increasingly common to not get into Latin, turn down Basis, and try a Hill area dcps middle school.
No. That is only a cohort if the students are tracked, which DCPS absolutely refuses to do. The reality is, in a classroom at EH, more than 80% of students are going to be below grade level.
is this the point when I say my kid is smart and advantaged enough that I don’t think being around less privileged kids as a 12 yr old will threaten his future?
It's not about "being around less privileged" kids. It's that when you are in a class where the kids are so below grade level at the middle school level, the teacher actually has to change the standards of the class to meet the bottom -- no homework and very low expectations. Because DCPS teachers are not really allowed to fail kids. So the kids are the top are not held to high expectations either, even though they could all handle it.
BASIS works because they actually do fail kids out and so they can keep high standards. Latin and Deal and Hardy work because they have a critical mass of proficient kids, so they can raise the standards for everyone.
This is not as much of an issue in elementary school, when teachers can create "small groups" within the class. It becomes a huge issue in middle school.
Anonymous wrote:There is now at both EH and SH approximately 30 students in each grade who get 4s and 5s on the CAPE math test. That is a cohort. Is Latin better? Most would say yes and especially yes if you care about having a decent high school locked in. But it is also now a very difficult lottery spot to land. Is Hardy better? Most would say yes but it is also a pretty lengthy daily commute from the eastern side of the city even with a lottery spot. Basis is pretty controversial - and the 5th grade waitlist movement and 7th-9th grade attrition there both speak to that. I think its increasingly common to not get into Latin, turn down Basis, and try a Hill area dcps middle school.
No. That is only a cohort if the students are tracked, which DCPS absolutely refuses to do. The reality is, in a classroom at EH, more than 80% of students are going to be below grade level.
is this the point when I say my kid is smart and advantaged enough that I don’t think being around less privileged kids as a 12 yr old will threaten his future?
It's not about "being around less privileged" kids. It's that when you are in a class where the kids are so below grade level at the middle school level, the teacher actually has to change the standards of the class to meet the bottom -- no homework and very low expectations. Because DCPS teachers are not really allowed to fail kids. So the kids are the top are not held to high expectations either, even though they could all handle it.
BASIS works because they actually do fail kids out and so they can keep high standards. Latin and Deal and Hardy work because they have a critical mass of proficient kids, so they can raise the standards for everyone.
This is not as much of an issue in elementary school, when teachers can create "small groups" within the class. It becomes a huge issue in middle school.
Add to that is that if SH and EH (and John Francis) really want buy in from neighborhood parents, they need to have tracking in all the subjects.
Anonymous wrote:There is now at both EH and SH approximately 30 students in each grade who get 4s and 5s on the CAPE math test. That is a cohort. Is Latin better? Most would say yes and especially yes if you care about having a decent high school locked in. But it is also now a very difficult lottery spot to land. Is Hardy better? Most would say yes but it is also a pretty lengthy daily commute from the eastern side of the city even with a lottery spot. Basis is pretty controversial - and the 5th grade waitlist movement and 7th-9th grade attrition there both speak to that. I think its increasingly common to not get into Latin, turn down Basis, and try a Hill area dcps middle school.
No. That is only a cohort if the students are tracked, which DCPS absolutely refuses to do. The reality is, in a classroom at EH, more than 80% of students are going to be below grade level.
is this the point when I say my kid is smart and advantaged enough that I don’t think being around less privileged kids as a 12 yr old will threaten his future?
It's not about "being around less privileged" kids. It's that when you are in a class where the kids are so below grade level at the middle school level, the teacher actually has to change the standards of the class to meet the bottom -- no homework and very low expectations. Because DCPS teachers are not really allowed to fail kids. So the kids are the top are not held to high expectations either, even though they could all handle it.
BASIS works because they actually do fail kids out and so they can keep high standards. Latin and Deal and Hardy work because they have a critical mass of proficient kids, so they can raise the standards for everyone.
This is not as much of an issue in elementary school, when teachers can create "small groups" within the class. It becomes a huge issue in middle school.
my kid is learning and not getting stupider, and also very happy, and the EH teachers are responsive, and he’s having fun, doing clubs, making friends … where’s the “huge issue”?
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