Explain how lottery changes would make Ward 3 Schools WORSE

[Anonymous]

Yep. It does seem to be the point of your post. No one has offered anything that isn't premised on good students plus parents with time and money to be involved is the minimum they will accept for Ward 3. Do underprepared students deserve a better chance at access to Ward 3 schoo

[Anonymous]

Schools?

[Anonymous]

It really has to do with the uncertainty in the lottery system. The parents who care most about education and are most likely to volunteer and contribute $$ to PTAs are likely to take their children out of the system as a whole because of the uncertainty. And once all the high performing students leave, DCPS will face bigger challenges and school quality will decline across the board.

I was one of those parents in a high performing DCPS school, but I definitely would have sent my children to private school if there had been uncertainty about the middle and high school feeder relationships. Fortunately, I made it through before this debacle.

[Anonymous]

Good luck applying out to private schools starting next year, if the DME plans aren't iced. Even if you can afford private school, admission odds in DC are likely going to be much, much tougher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So the Ward 3 parents suffer which makes the school suffer?

Have you given any thought to why some parents are willing to drive their kids long distances to ward 3 schools and that it perhaps is related to the fact that there are ward 3 kids in them, or do you think there's something in the water over there that makes kids higher performing?

[Anonymous]

So you really believe it is the Ward 3 kids that make the schools the way they are, and allowing in more from the rest of DC would make them worse?

[Anonymous]

^^ What is your explanation then?

[Anonymous]

Actually I've seen very little opposition to the idea of OOB set-asides -- I don't think I've heard one person say, "oh, if they do this, we would pull our kids." It's not letting OOB kids in, it's the inability to plan and the inconvenience. It's not as if only Ward 3 parents care about this -- Hearst didn't go up until 5th grade until it became a Deal feeder. Elementary schools EOTP that are perfectly good for PK3, PK4, and kindergarten undergo an enormous amount of churn as parents move their kids into Deal feeders. What makes you think Ward 3 parents are any different?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lottery city wide will ruin DC education, plan B is no big change.

Proposal B is actually a BIG negative change for Oyster-Adams students. O-A students would no longer feed into Wilson H.S. (proficient and advanced reading scores: 61% and math: 60%). Cardozo’s reading scores: 20% and math: 33%. Wilson is 31% FARMS, and Cardozo is 99% FARMS. Wilson is an ok school (with a lot of room for improvement), but Cardozo is a FAILING school by any objective measure. Cardozo is also 33% Hispanic. Wilson is 17%...guess which school many of Wilson’s Hispanic students come from? Yes, Oyster-Adams! Please tell me how moving O-A students from a higher performing high school to a failing high school helps anyone?

[Anonymous]

How about this instead:

1. Tweak the Ward 3 boundaries in a logical fashion.
2. Trash this rediculous idea of large scale city wide lotteries.
3. Invest in more teachers EotP and get classroom sizes down to 15-1 student-teacher ratio.
4. Extend the school day EotP by 1 hour a day to focus on math and reading.

Done. And no one has to sit in traffic for an extra 1.5 hours a day.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The unpredictiblity will have two certain effects on ward 3 schools: 1) families who can afford it will put their kids in private school rather than risk sending their kids to a previously OOB school and 2) families who can't afford private will move to maryland or attempt to get into a charter that does provide some predictibility. If even 25% of families (i'd guess it would be more) leave the schools those schools lose the sense of community that has made them so strong. And parents who currently pay $1000 per child to support the extras that make the school great have a percentage of kids who don't pay and are essentially free riding, they will not continue to pay the extra amount and the overall quality of school will go down.

You are WAY overestimating the number of kids that will be changing boundaries. And I think overreacting.

NP here, no over-reacting at all. I am a life long city dweller (not from DC) and I could never see me live in the burbs. until this proposal. I have lived in the city since we moved to the DC area in 2000, and bought out home in the city a few years ago, after considering Bethesda, only because we knew we could send our kids to public school all the way to HS. we live in upper NW and our boundaries have not changed (Lafayette). but if there is citywide HS lottery we will move to MOCO. I don't know how many people would move, but I suspect that a lot of people who are now in-boundary for Wilson would either go private, charter, or move. the changes in the boundary at the elementary level may have not much effect, I agree with you. but what happens after elementary school has a profound effect on all the chain, from elementary to HS. if we cannot go to Wilson, we will move and we will do it soon (our kids are in elementary school), so one less middle class local family at Deal. people who will send their kids to private, we will do it when kids are in 3grade. we will go to the situation of 10 years ago, when even in the goods JKLM schools kids would live in 3rd grade. it's not just the boundaries, it's the lottery system for HS that would affect eveybody.

[Anonymous]

In short:

Each school gets the same $ per student; so it's the parents and community and caliber of the students that make a school great. Without predictability the those types of parents/students will leave. No question. Deal and Wilson are great because the parents (IB an OOB) and Kids (IB and OOB) are generally more motivated and come from good elementary schools. The OOB families that are in the feeders took the extra step to get their kids in and schlepp them across town, that says something about them, regardless of their SES or race. The resources those schools spend on struggling kids pales in comparison to the resources schools EOTP spend. Inject more struggling and less motivated kids (and less active parents) into those schools and in a few years they will be in the same state as most of the schools EOTP.

So if take a school like Deal or Wilson, remove a substantial portion of the motivated, high achieving and committed families (whether IB or OBB) and then inject a substantial portion of kids who are testing seriously below proficient from families that aren't active in improving the schools, you are just giving Deal and Wilson the same problems the schools EOTP have. The new Deal and Wilson will have to divert $$ to address those issues, at the cost of the programs for the more advanced or even proficient kids leading to more abandonment to private and suburban schools. It's just a domino effect.

[Anonymous]

Each school does NOT receive the same per pupil $ allocation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Each school does NOT receive the same per pupil $ allocation.

Yes they do, but some PTAs raise money to supplement.

[Anonymous]

Compare initial budget allocatins for Janney, Key and Mann.