New TA here: please don’t send your kids to high poverty schools if you can avoid it

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My dcs are in a hs like this. They went to a high performing charter until 8th grade so they have a good academic base. But this is our district and they wanted to play sports. It's been very eye-opening and I think will be good for them in the long run. I don't want my kids to be bubble-dwellers. We have a ton of money and they are already set for life no matter what they do. Oldest has gotten into a great college. I am ok with it.

There is a huge difference between attending a higher poverty high school when you already have a solid base and attending a high poverty elementary school. High school classes are differentiated, which means that students taking more advanced courses tend to be with the best behaved students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My dcs are in a hs like this. They went to a high performing charter until 8th grade so they have a good academic base. But this is our district and they wanted to play sports. It's been very eye-opening and I think will be good for them in the long run. I don't want my kids to be bubble-dwellers. We have a ton of money and they are already set for life no matter what they do. Oldest has gotten into a great college. I am ok with it.

Yeah -- it can work over the long run. But most of these kids are being destroyed.

I probably wouldn't do it if I felt they had more to lose. But they will be ok. I realize this is privilege.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My dcs are in a hs like this. They went to a high performing charter until 8th grade so they have a good academic base. But this is our district and they wanted to play sports. It's been very eye-opening and I think will be good for them in the long run. I don't want my kids to be bubble-dwellers. We have a ton of money and they are already set for life no matter what they do. Oldest has gotten into a great college. I am ok with it.

There is a huge difference between attending a higher poverty high school when you already have a solid base and attending a high poverty elementary school. High school classes are differentiated, which means that students taking more advanced courses tend to be with the best behaved students.

Which is why I qualified it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went a school district with approximately 80% FARMs (one of the poorest and lowest-performing school districts in my state) and it took me a long time to grapple with this and come to terms with it.

Why do you think there are kids there who seem out of place? Middle class, on grade level or higher, well behaved? What are their parents thinking?!

My parents had (have) a belief in urban public schools. My father went to Catholic school and didn't even go to college, and was perturbed by his experiences there. My parents were adamant that we live in the city they grew up in and attend school there rather than flee it and deprive it of its tax base like so many other people did.

I think I turned out more than fine. I had plenty of friends who had zero behavioral issues, I did sports, there was little violence where I lived (not a major city) and I graduated at the top of my class with good SAT scores. Didn't struggle in college and am happy in my profession (accounting). BUT, many, many kids' lives did not turn out that way. And I can't ignore that.

My schools always had much more tracking than DC area high schools have currently. Think 4-5 levels of Math classes from 9th-12th grade, and 3-4 levels of history, science, and english.

When was this? I went to a school with quite a bit of FARMS in the 80s-90s. The difference is that kids were not nearly as disruptive as they are today. And teachers/staff cannot discipline them as before. My kids went to my elementary school and I pulled them out because the behavior was so incredibly disruptive and they were not learning. Just like the OP said.

PP here. I graduated HS 13 years ago. As I said, A LOT of kids fell through the cracks. I am not disagreeing with OP. It was not ideal for k-8. For high school it would be weak but not nearly as much. Lots of tracking in every grade, even to this day at that high school. I knew one dual lawyer family whose five children went to the high school only (they all went to private for k-8). I was classmates with 2 of them. Three kids in the family have gone on to be doctors, one is in IB and the other is a management consultant. But that family was very out of the ordinary; the parents spoke at school board meetings often.


I have more good anecdotes but they were all, with little exception, either children of relatively well-off (for our area) parents, who worked as school principals, dentists, admin, lawyers or physical therapists.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have recently started working as a TA at an 85% low income and ESL school. This is not in the DMV area but I think there are very similar schools in FCPS for example. I can never say this to parents in my district because I am bound by all the privacy stuff but I want to say it here: please please don’t send your child to a school like that, even for K.
I don’t know why the kids from middle class families are there. Many of them seem at least 3rd Gen American so it’s not like their parents have no clue about the school system. Heck, many first Gen parents have a good idea! But apparently not them?
Each class has a group of very disruptive kids who ideally need their own aide, either as a group or even individually. They don’t seem to be getting much education simply because they are so distracted they can’t possibly learn much.
The rest of the kids are very very different from each other in terms of their levels. Ideally each class should have at least 3 level groups (not counting the separate one for distractable kids).
But since they only have one teacher… most of the time most of the kids are left to their own devices. The teacher works with one group at a time, doing an awesome job juggling them. The rest are doing activities mostly on their chromebooks. If your child is highly driven, disciplined, is able to ask for help, and has a good attention span - this kid will be fine. But even in that case… there won’t be much fun or enthusiasm in learning. Most of the energy is spent keeping discipline, and helping those who clearly struggle.
Your child’s presence doesn’t seem to benefit anyone either. I mean, maybe it benefits another child like that who now has a friend who is “good, smart” kid. But it definitely doesn’t have any influence on the overall class dynamic, I mean, yeah, it’s better than the class being 100% disruptive but maybe in the latter case help would arrive a little faster?
At the same time, it’s hurting the kids who are capable of learning and being excited to learn, but who instead spend their days almost forgotten (unless they get in trouble) and on their chromebooks.
Anyway, sorry if I am being too direct, but I really wanted to help the kids who can do so much better than this.

How about we knock it off with being judgemental toward parents, please.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went a school district with approximately 80% FARMs (one of the poorest and lowest-performing school districts in my state) and it took me a long time to grapple with this and come to terms with it.

Why do you think there are kids there who seem out of place? Middle class, on grade level or higher, well behaved? What are their parents thinking?!

They are thinking that they cannot afford a better school cluster. Have you seen the housing costs?

I am a single mom who rents a 1bd near a slightly better school and then I was able to put my kid in charter. It can be done!

[Anonymous]

OP here: kids will most likely be ok if they have educated caring parents but their school experience is sorely lacking, not even so much academically but rather emotionally and socially

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have recently started working as a TA at an 85% low income and ESL school. This is not in the DMV area but I think there are very similar schools in FCPS for example. I can never say this to parents in my district because I am bound by all the privacy stuff but I want to say it here: please please don’t send your child to a school like that, even for K.
I don’t know why the kids from middle class families are there. Many of them seem at least 3rd Gen American so it’s not like their parents have no clue about the school system. Heck, many first Gen parents have a good idea! But apparently not them?
Each class has a group of very disruptive kids who ideally need their own aide, either as a group or even individually. They don’t seem to be getting much education simply because they are so distracted they can’t possibly learn much.
The rest of the kids are very very different from each other in terms of their levels. Ideally each class should have at least 3 level groups (not counting the separate one for distractable kids).
But since they only have one teacher… most of the time most of the kids are left to their own devices. The teacher works with one group at a time, doing an awesome job juggling them. The rest are doing activities mostly on their chromebooks. If your child is highly driven, disciplined, is able to ask for help, and has a good attention span - this kid will be fine. But even in that case… there won’t be much fun or enthusiasm in learning. Most of the energy is spent keeping discipline, and helping those who clearly struggle.
Your child’s presence doesn’t seem to benefit anyone either. I mean, maybe it benefits another child like that who now has a friend who is “good, smart” kid. But it definitely doesn’t have any influence on the overall class dynamic, I mean, yeah, it’s better than the class being 100% disruptive but maybe in the latter case help would arrive a little faster?
At the same time, it’s hurting the kids who are capable of learning and being excited to learn, but who instead spend their days almost forgotten (unless they get in trouble) and on their chromebooks.
Anyway, sorry if I am being too direct, but I really wanted to help the kids who can do so much better than this.

How about we knock it off with being judgemental toward parents, please.

Yeah, that’ll fix the problem.

[Anonymous]

It depends on the enrichment programs the district can offer and when. My kids went to private k-elementary. Then to an >80% FARMS middle school. However, the enrichment, starting in middle school is excellent. My kids go to a local university for core classes- paid for my the district. For the highly advanced, it is even better than academics private can offer. If my kids were middle of the road academically, I would have stayed private

[Anonymous]

I agree w you op as someone who went to high poverty public schools from elementary-high school despite being from a UMC family w parents who could’ve easily afforded to move us to a better public school district or send us to private schools. They wanted to support urban public education (much like another PP stated about her parents) and they also had the mindset that my siblings and I would do well in life no matter where we went to school because they knew we were smart and that they could provide us w lots of enrichment outside of school. They also thought it was important for us to go to school w kids who were from different SES/(and also racial) backgrounds than we were so we wouldn’t grow up in a bubble.

While I think my parents had good intentions and now as an adult I do share a lot of their beliefs (we live in a city and our kids attend urban, diverse public schools too), my own school experience was frankly awful. There were so many problems w day to day operation of the school that I didn’t get a good education—academically or socio-emotionally either. School was a depressing, sometimes scary/dangerous (fights all the time in and around the school, events like school dances and pep rallies were always getting cancelled due to student fighting) place to be. I hated school and never felt supported there by teachers, who were mostly too busy dealing w all the challenges of working in a high poverty school to teach well at all and certainly stretched too thin to provide much support to the “good, smart” kids. If you were a quiet, well behaved kid like I was the teachers didn’t pay any attention to you and just let you slide by even if you weren’t that great of a student academically. If my parents had known how bad it was they wouldn’t have made the same choice. But I think at the time they were so wrapped up in the ideology of doing something they believed in that they couldn’t see how it was damaging and not a good environment for us kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have recently started working as a TA at an 85% low income and ESL school. This is not in the DMV area but I think there are very similar schools in FCPS for example. I can never say this to parents in my district because I am bound by all the privacy stuff but I want to say it here: please please don’t send your child to a school like that, even for K.
I don’t know why the kids from middle class families are there. Many of them seem at least 3rd Gen American so it’s not like their parents have no clue about the school system. Heck, many first Gen parents have a good idea! But apparently not them?
Each class has a group of very disruptive kids who ideally need their own aide, either as a group or even individually. They don’t seem to be getting much education simply because they are so distracted they can’t possibly learn much.
The rest of the kids are very very different from each other in terms of their levels. Ideally each class should have at least 3 level groups (not counting the separate one for distractable kids).
But since they only have one teacher… most of the time most of the kids are left to their own devices. The teacher works with one group at a time, doing an awesome job juggling them. The rest are doing activities mostly on their chromebooks. If your child is highly driven, disciplined, is able to ask for help, and has a good attention span - this kid will be fine. But even in that case… there won’t be much fun or enthusiasm in learning. Most of the energy is spent keeping discipline, and helping those who clearly struggle.
Your child’s presence doesn’t seem to benefit anyone either. I mean, maybe it benefits another child like that who now has a friend who is “good, smart” kid. But it definitely doesn’t have any influence on the overall class dynamic, I mean, yeah, it’s better than the class being 100% disruptive but maybe in the latter case help would arrive a little faster?
At the same time, it’s hurting the kids who are capable of learning and being excited to learn, but who instead spend their days almost forgotten (unless they get in trouble) and on their chromebooks.
Anyway, sorry if I am being too direct, but I really wanted to help the kids who can do so much better than this.

How about we knock it off with being judgemental toward parents, please.

Yeah, that’ll fix the problem.

Don’t be judgemental.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went a school district with approximately 80% FARMs (one of the poorest and lowest-performing school districts in my state) and it took me a long time to grapple with this and come to terms with it.

Why do you think there are kids there who seem out of place? Middle class, on grade level or higher, well behaved? What are their parents thinking?!

They are thinking that they cannot afford a better school cluster. Have you seen the housing costs?

I am a single mom who rents a 1bd near a slightly better school and then I was able to put my kid in charter. It can be done!

I am also a single mom (and a public school teacher) and I rent a basement apartment in Potomac. The rent is reduced (because I couldn't afford more than about $1500/month) since I dog/house sit for the family who lives upstairs. They go out of town a lot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went a school district with approximately 80% FARMs (one of the poorest and lowest-performing school districts in my state) and it took me a long time to grapple with this and come to terms with it.

Why do you think there are kids there who seem out of place? Middle class, on grade level or higher, well behaved? What are their parents thinking?!

They are thinking that they cannot afford a better school cluster. Have you seen the housing costs?

I am a single mom who rents a 1bd near a slightly better school and then I was able to put my kid in charter. It can be done!

I am also a single mom (and a public school teacher) and I rent a basement apartment in Potomac. The rent is reduced (because I couldn't afford more than about $1500/month) since I dog/house sit for the family who lives upstairs. They go out of town a lot.

I don't know how you guys do it! God bless!

[Anonymous]

The issue is we need better teachers and school staff. We go where there is affordable housing that is not a stretch...

[Anonymous]

Sometimes people don’t have a choice. My BIL grew up in the South and went to a school like this. He was one of a few people who went to a four year college. He’s done just fine for himself. He said they separated out into basically haves and have nots.