Washington Informer article: "School Lottery Season Starts Amid Questions about Enrollment and Equity"

[Anonymous]

UDC's early college program at Anacostia HS is an associates in engineering, not haircare. I'm happy to give you a tour of their hydroponics lab and show you the electric car the students built with mentorship of UDC grad students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:But the KIPP kids all fail once they have to fledge.

The data all show when they aren't surrounded by the KIPP environment, they all regress back to the mean.

So it's the same as the tutors for the athletes in college. If somebody is in your face prompting you to think about every goddam step on the way to every Fing answer, you can get through the work, side by side.

Then without the side by side support, everything falls away.

You are factually incorrect: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/09/12/kipp-college-graduation-study/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UDC's early college program at Anacostia HS is an associates in engineering, not haircare. I'm happy to give you a tour of their hydroponics lab and show you the electric car the students built with mentorship of UDC grad students.

Thank you for responding to the prior super inaccurate post. The intentional or unintentional ignorance of the rest of the city by the posters on this site is exhausting. For any readers on here who are interested, here are just a few of the collaborative programs and partnerships in a few high schools.

Bard Early College https://bhsec.bard.edu/dc/
Phelps Architecture/Construction and Engineering https://www.phelpshsdc.org/
UDC Community to Career Partnership in Anacostia https://www.udc.edu/ccpa/

[Anonymous]

How can kids get an associates in engineering if they can’t get a 2 on the PARCC? What does that degree possibly mean?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How can kids get an associates in engineering if they can’t get a 2 on the PARCC? What does that degree possibly mean?

Sounds like a trash degree.

[Anonymous]

The UDC engineering associate's degree includes calculus, linear algebra, and differential equations. Completion rates for the associate degree programs are very low. The answer to how students who are getting 2s on PARCC are also getting engineering degrees is that they aren't.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:UDC's early college program at Anacostia HS is an associates in engineering, not haircare. I'm happy to give you a tour of their hydroponics lab and show you the electric car the students built with mentorship of UDC grad students.

Can I seriously take you up on that with elementary school kids who’d love to see this? Is there an open house soon?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No I’m saying that charters are well meaning and poor kids are uneducable. Any time anyone tries to explain why the children of poor people consistently fail at education, they say it’s impossible to fix, that the kids need to be surrounded by massive support in order to mitigate a lifetime of trauma. I agree. The resources? Not coming. They just aren’t. The charters aren’t offering massive trauma reduction. They are just another set of schools.

So what do you get? Uneducated kids and a second system to do it that ALSO doesn’t solve their education problems. And then schools with too few kids to get any money. Hence they close.

The tragedy im getting at is that NO ONE has found the way to teach the traumatized intergenerational poor to become good standardized test takers, which is what this board cares about, right? Those PARCC 5s?

So why try with two school systems instead of one?

And if you want to say BASIS or KIPP, tell me what you think would happen if we took the Sousa or Anacostia HS student body and just sent them there. They wouldn’t turn out much better. This sucks! Why do we have charters if the outcomes are the same? We’re just offering a pressure valve that lets parent anger flow around the problem that these kids are growing up to be dummies. Another generation that can’t get into the mainstream economy and make first world incomes.

Is there anybody that can prepare the traumatized poor for college, real college not UDC for janitorial or haircare, without basically stealing them from their families and turning them individually into brainwashed suburbanites? I haven’t seen it. And it really sucks.

I somewhat agree. But there have been educational studies that show when you mix poor children with higher SES kids the outcomes improve (and it improves for all but larger gains for low income students).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How can kids get an associates in engineering if they can’t get a 2 on the PARCC? What does that degree possibly mean?

Sounds like a trash degree.

You sound lovely. 🙄 This is what a modern G&T program looks like lady.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No I’m saying that charters are well meaning and poor kids are uneducable. Any time anyone tries to explain why the children of poor people consistently fail at education, they say it’s impossible to fix, that the kids need to be surrounded by massive support in order to mitigate a lifetime of trauma. I agree. The resources? Not coming. They just aren’t. The charters aren’t offering massive trauma reduction. They are just another set of schools.

So what do you get? Uneducated kids and a second system to do it that ALSO doesn’t solve their education problems. And then schools with too few kids to get any money. Hence they close.

The tragedy im getting at is that NO ONE has found the way to teach the traumatized intergenerational poor to become good standardized test takers, which is what this board cares about, right? Those PARCC 5s?

So why try with two school systems instead of one?

And if you want to say BASIS or KIPP, tell me what you think would happen if we took the Sousa or Anacostia HS student body and just sent them there. They wouldn’t turn out much better. This sucks! Why do we have charters if the outcomes are the same? We’re just offering a pressure valve that lets parent anger flow around the problem that these kids are growing up to be dummies. Another generation that can’t get into the mainstream economy and make first world incomes.

Is there anybody that can prepare the traumatized poor for college, real college not UDC for janitorial or haircare, without basically stealing them from their families and turning them individually into brainwashed suburbanites? I haven’t seen it. And it really sucks.

Wrong. There are charters that help kids do better like KIPP with the same SES students that are at Sousa and Anacostia. The data is out there.

These charters are not crimpled by the damn inefficient bureaucracy that is DCPS. They also place more demands on students than the low expectations of DCPS. They also don’t tolerate the behavior crap that happens in DCPS and have consequences for such misbehavior.

There were no charters back in the day 25-30 years ago and DCPS was the lowest and worst performing school district in the country. Charters offers some families who care options and a way out. Charters have absolutely improved the overall educational landscape in this city and have kept more families here who otherwise would move.

I suggest you talk to the old timers who were here before charters became a thing.

You are acting like SES is the only relevant factor to compare KIPP to Sousa etc. Even if SES is the same the student bodies are not. To get into KIPP you need a family to know enough and care enough to get into the lottery. The bar isn’t high but is there. Then you need to conform to KIPP’s behavior rules or be expelled/counseled out. Sousa needs to welcome new students the whole year if they recently enter the district, get pushed out of their previous school etc. This can be very disruptive. After the year starts KIPP is not required to accept anyone else to minimize disruption. This can help a charter seem like they actually do a better job of educating when they simply are getting a slightly easier population to educate. This then leaves an even harder population to educate at the by right DCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How can kids get an associates in engineering if they can’t get a 2 on the PARCC? What does that degree possibly mean?

Sounds like a trash degree.

You sound lovely. 🙄 This is what a modern G&T program looks like lady.

How many of the high school students have completed that degree? Have any? That's more math than the most advanced students at BASIS are doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What I think people need to really realize here is that the death of schools East of the Anacostia is about the charter sector eating DCPS' lunch over there. My take is that parents aren't seeing their children succeed in DCPS and want an alternative, which means the charter sector over there.

The unkind reality is that children of poor people who can't give extra to their kids, don't read to them, experience trauma, have little education themselves, etc., are going to have poor educational outcomes. I don't fault people for wanting better for their kids even if - because education is JUST NOT a game-changer for poorly-performing students - they are not likely to do better just because of these schools.

At some point, I really hope there are game-changing educational possibilities for poor and disadvantaged children, actually, I want it generations ago, but it appears we can only change the future. However, if there was truly such a thing, DCPS would do it too! DCPS totally would! Even a bureaucracy in America would eventually do what works.

But instead because no one can fix kids' outcomes, they say "well, let's go to a different service provider who promises better things!" And then the different outcomes are not one-to-one matched to the same kids. The mirage of different outcomes we perceive is really about sorting those who are more likely to succeed away from those who are less likely to. And it sucks. And it leads to crap like this - normal schools with minimal budgets able to do little to support kids who need A LOT because they can't get enough butts in seats.

Our effort to "offer alternatives" that don't do better has led predictably to the starvation of normal DCPS, from Sousa to Anacostia.

Why are you assuming that everyone in Wards 7 and 8 are full of trauma/have parents who can’t give them extras, etc.?

To me, the article seems to indicate that there are many families in those Wards who are just the same as W3 families— if their kids were in Janney, they’d be scoring 5s just like your kid. The problem is that the DCPS schools around them aren’t offering the programs/support/instruction Janney does, and that’s the result of historic disinvestment, not because of the families. So naturally, these families have to travel long distances to get the schooling your kid gets to walk to in 5 min.

How can DCPS address this problem??

[Anonymous]

Why can’t DME figure out how to provide all Wards with the same quality of schools that exist in W3? What are they doing all day?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I think people need to really realize here is that the death of schools East of the Anacostia is about the charter sector eating DCPS' lunch over there. My take is that parents aren't seeing their children succeed in DCPS and want an alternative, which means the charter sector over there.

The unkind reality is that children of poor people who can't give extra to their kids, don't read to them, experience trauma, have little education themselves, etc., are going to have poor educational outcomes. I don't fault people for wanting better for their kids even if - because education is JUST NOT a game-changer for poorly-performing students - they are not likely to do better just because of these schools.

At some point, I really hope there are game-changing educational possibilities for poor and disadvantaged children, actually, I want it generations ago, but it appears we can only change the future. However, if there was truly such a thing, DCPS would do it too! DCPS totally would! Even a bureaucracy in America would eventually do what works.

But instead because no one can fix kids' outcomes, they say "well, let's go to a different service provider who promises better things!" And then the different outcomes are not one-to-one matched to the same kids. The mirage of different outcomes we perceive is really about sorting those who are more likely to succeed away from those who are less likely to. And it sucks. And it leads to crap like this - normal schools with minimal budgets able to do little to support kids who need A LOT because they can't get enough butts in seats.

Our effort to "offer alternatives" that don't do better has led predictably to the starvation of normal DCPS, from Sousa to Anacostia.

Why are you assuming that everyone in Wards 7 and 8 are full of trauma/have parents who can’t give them extras, etc.?

To me, the article seems to indicate that there are many families in those Wards who are just the same as W3 families— if their kids were in Janney, they’d be scoring 5s just like your kid. The problem is that the DCPS schools around them aren’t offering the programs/support/instruction Janney does, and that’s the result of historic disinvestment, not because of the families. So naturally, these families have to travel long distances to get the schooling your kid gets to walk to in 5 min.

How can DCPS address this problem??

They can fund the extra support staff, for one. Many W3 schools pay for extra staff through PTA donations.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I think people need to really realize here is that the death of schools East of the Anacostia is about the charter sector eating DCPS' lunch over there. My take is that parents aren't seeing their children succeed in DCPS and want an alternative, which means the charter sector over there.

The unkind reality is that children of poor people who can't give extra to their kids, don't read to them, experience trauma, have little education themselves, etc., are going to have poor educational outcomes. I don't fault people for wanting better for their kids even if - because education is JUST NOT a game-changer for poorly-performing students - they are not likely to do better just because of these schools.

At some point, I really hope there are game-changing educational possibilities for poor and disadvantaged children, actually, I want it generations ago, but it appears we can only change the future. However, if there was truly such a thing, DCPS would do it too! DCPS totally would! Even a bureaucracy in America would eventually do what works.

But instead because no one can fix kids' outcomes, they say "well, let's go to a different service provider who promises better things!" And then the different outcomes are not one-to-one matched to the same kids. The mirage of different outcomes we perceive is really about sorting those who are more likely to succeed away from those who are less likely to. And it sucks. And it leads to crap like this - normal schools with minimal budgets able to do little to support kids who need A LOT because they can't get enough butts in seats.

Our effort to "offer alternatives" that don't do better has led predictably to the starvation of normal DCPS, from Sousa to Anacostia.

Why are you assuming that everyone in Wards 7 and 8 are full of trauma/have parents who can’t give them extras, etc.?

To me, the article seems to indicate that there are many families in those Wards who are just the same as W3 families— if their kids were in Janney, they’d be scoring 5s just like your kid. The problem is that the DCPS schools around them aren’t offering the programs/support/instruction Janney does, and that’s the result of historic disinvestment, not because of the families. So naturally, these families have to travel long distances to get the schooling your kid gets to walk to in 5 min.

How can DCPS address this problem??

They can fund the extra support staff, for one. Many W3 schools pay for extra staff through PTA donations.

The myths abound. A few NW schools pay for extra staff. And why? Because the class sizes are larger.

The main missing program they mention is bilingual, which is available at none of the upper NW schools.

Another program missing in 7 & 8 is IB, which exists only at Eastern HS. None of the upper NW schools have IB except Deal MS.