Wilson in 10 years?

[Anonymous]

I don't think the MD schools are better for an individual kid. They collectively have a larger group of similar students, but academically, they don't seem different at all in terms of what your child will learn while there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm a parent of 7 and 10 year olds (currently in a DCPS elementary) and while I have little problem with my kids attending an "inner city" high school like Wilson I do worry a lot about over crowding.
The school is currently overcrowded and the rising elementary school feeder classes are much larger than they were when the current Wilson students were in grade school.
The city is doing nothing about it beyond hoping to lose kids to attrition to MCPS and privates.
And I have ZERO and I mean ZERO hope that they will change anything.

Two of my kids will do fine in a mega high school with large classes. One may not. We are saving for private high school for all 3. We want to have the option.

There is literally nothing 'inner city' about Wilson.

Uh, not exactly accurate. There are definite Yale and Jail tracks (and some in-between), and let's not pretend otherwise.

Even the "jail' track isn't what you would find at Cardozo or Ballou. Only 33% of students are economically disadvantaged at this point.

And even those who are economically disadvantaged have parents who are sufficiently engaged to have enrolled them at Wilson, which puts them on a better track than those still at their neighborhood school.

Wilson's gerrymandered IB area pulls in some disadvantaged areas where the parents don't have to do anything special to get them to Wilson. And most OOB at Wilson gut pushed up from Hardy and Deal to an extent.

[Anonymous]

One other thing to consider is that if Wilson ever goes all IB, that's a tremendous loss of enrollment. Part of what makes Wilson so successful now is the large number of students- so they can offer lots of great classss plus advanced maths, physics, languages etc. Even if you counter with "well if we could just become all IB upper income white kids therefore we will attract more iB parents who currently send their kids private" the demographic projections don't bear this out. No matter how you slice those numbers, the HS pop of IB families is dropping, not growing enough to fill those empty OOB seats. So whenever people complain about OOB kids ruining Wilson, I thank god for them because if not for OOB Wilson would have died on the vine a long time ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Responding to PP's points in reverse order ...

Anonymous wrote:Parents on DCUM will always spout worries, rumors, pet peeves, and generally amplify the best and worst of schools. Sometimes they do it to complain and sometimes to try to gain momentum to change something specific. But it is never a full picture of a school. And parents who are active in their child's school will often feel that they are doing more for a school than the parents who were there a decade ago (and they are usually wrong about that).

I think your long-term viewpoint here is wise and useful. It's easy to think the present-day issues are more significant, more difficult, more *everything*, so it's wise to keep perspective that there always were issues in the past (some similar, some different), and there will always be issues in the future (some similar, some different).

Anonymous wrote:The kids I know who went to Wilson 10 years ago did very well, got into great universities, did well there and have successful careers - - as will the students of today and those of 10 years from now.

I need to push back on your broad statement in two ways:

1. I certainly know kids who went to Wilson 10 years ago and did very well, but I also know kids who struggled and still struggle. Not every student at a school like Wilson will do well. The school presents many opportunities, but also many hurdles for students. Some students seize on the opportunities, while others are tripped up by the hurdles. I suspect you did not really mean to suggest that every kid at Wilson does fine, so we likely are in agreement here with this clarification.

2. For the subset of kids who "did well" after Wilson, did they do well because of Wilson ... or did they do well despite Wilson? I honestly do not know the answer. It probably depends on the specific kid situation. Some kids did well because they were lucky enough to avoid the pitfalls of Wilson (or maybe they had enough parental guidance or were innately wise enough, or some other factor).

IMHO, we need to work together as parents, and with the wise heads at DCPS, to reduce the hurdles at Wilson and increase the opportunities, so that more kids do well and fewer struggle. My fear and frustration, however, is that different people define the goals differently. Many parents want to remove hurdles at Wilson (e.g., overcrowding, disruptive students). Other parents and many at DCPS seem to see those same aspects at Wilson as opportunities rather than hurdles, because those aspects reflect the opportunities of Wilson being offered to a wide array of kids from other parts of the city.

I do not know the solutions to these hard problems. Maybe there are many different solutions, or maybe there is no true solution and the problem cannot be solved with the tools currently available to DCPS. I do disagree, however, with the worldview that DCPS should just open all schools to as many students as possible to spread the opportunity wide. That approach feels good in the short term, but it's a recipe for long term mediocrity. First, it offers opportunity to only the small percentage of students lucky enough to end up at Wilson, and abandons the many others who are sent to other schools. Second, it allows DCPS to ignore development of other schools because the appearance of "equity" is achieved. Third, because it's the high-performing students themselves who boost Wilson's test scores and make it an attractive destination, it's ultimately destructive to Wilson if DCPS pushes those high-performing students out to make room for more low-performing students who desperately need the opportunity Wilson offers.

I do feel that DCPS and interested parents would be more productive in developing solutions if they focus less on the "achievement gap," and more on just raw improvement of the underperforming students. Worrying about the achievement gap, whether it's between rich-and-poor or between different racial groups or otherwise, just pits people against one another. It also focuses people on trying to seize short term steps to shrink the gap (often by watering down the successful schools), rather than the more difficult long-term steps to make other underperforming schools and students do better.

NP here -- current Janney parent; expect our 2 to go to Wilson in 10 years or so, assuming it's a good fit/meets their needs. Just wanted to write and say that this was a thoughtful, reasoned post about a complex problem. I appreciated the insight and agree with it generally.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:One other thing to consider is that if Wilson ever goes all IB, that's a tremendous loss of enrollment. Part of what makes Wilson so successful now is the large number of students- so they can offer lots of great classss plus advanced maths, physics, languages etc. Even if you counter with "well if we could just become all IB upper income white kids therefore we will attract more iB parents who currently send their kids private" the demographic projections don't bear this out. No matter how you slice those numbers, the HS pop of IB families is dropping, not growing enough to fill those empty OOB seats. So whenever people complain about OOB kids ruining Wilson, I thank god for them because if not for OOB Wilson would have died on the vine a long time ago.

I don't know what numbers you are referring to (and I've scrutinized them) but there is no evidence of this - at the rising 5th grade level at just Janney, Murch & Lafayette there are 375 students and that is just a fraction of the IB population and Deal is already almost as big as Wilson.

Sure some of the kids from the adjacent 3 schools will go private but most won't.

The loss of Wilson going all IB would be in diversity so for that reason I hope it doesn't happen but there is a crush of in-boundary kids bound for Wilson over the next 4-5 years.

[Anonymous]

I grew up in MoCo and always find these threads interesting.
There isn't as much 'school choice' or options there other than you take the school or go to private (unless you test to got to Blair/magnet). There isn't the OOB/IB dynamics - that can shift, and the families didn't have experience with elementaries where you offset what you don't like with PTA funding.
Those schools are generally the same size as Wilson
& are overcrowded (including more than 30 in APs etc) -- the closer in schools have far less "diversity" (lower SES and Black students to be blatant - there are forms of diversity (Asian, both have international & Latino (rapidly growing Latino in Montgomery)). They have other "pitfalls" - like your kid is so much like all the others that you can't stand out or few do -- ridiculously competitive natures in many ways, and kids can rarely can make any of the school based teams that they offer anyway. And some of those programs aren't really a bag of chips either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in MoCo and always find these threads interesting.
There isn't as much 'school choice' or options there other than you take the school or go to private (unless you test to got to Blair/magnet). There isn't the OOB/IB dynamics - that can shift, and the families didn't have experience with elementaries where you offset what you don't like with PTA funding.
Those schools are generally the same size as Wilson
& are overcrowded (including more than 30 in APs etc) -- the closer in schools have far less "diversity" (lower SES and Black students to be blatant - there are forms of diversity (Asian, both have international & Latino (rapidly growing Latino in Montgomery)). They have other "pitfalls" - like your kid is so much like all the others that you can't stand out or few do -- ridiculously competitive natures in many ways, and kids can rarely can make any of the school based teams that they offer anyway. And some of those programs aren't really a bag of chips either.

DCPS don't sent Luke magnet, which they view as elitist and discriminatory.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in MoCo and always find these threads interesting.
There isn't as much 'school choice' or options there other than you take the school or go to private (unless you test to got to Blair/magnet). There isn't the OOB/IB dynamics - that can shift, and the families didn't have experience with elementaries where you offset what you don't like with PTA funding.
Those schools are generally the same size as Wilson
& are overcrowded (including more than 30 in APs etc) -- the closer in schools have far less "diversity" (lower SES and Black students to be blatant - there are forms of diversity (Asian, both have international & Latino (rapidly growing Latino in Montgomery)). They have other "pitfalls" - like your kid is so much like all the others that you can't stand out or few do -- ridiculously competitive natures in many ways, and kids can rarely can make any of the school based teams that they offer anyway. And some of those programs aren't really a bag of chips either.

DCPS don't sent Luke magnet, which they view as elitist and discriminatory.

Doesn't like magnets

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One other thing to consider is that if Wilson ever goes all IB, that's a tremendous loss of enrollment. Part of what makes Wilson so successful now is the large number of students- so they can offer lots of great classss plus advanced maths, physics, languages etc. Even if you counter with "well if we could just become all IB upper income white kids therefore we will attract more iB parents who currently send their kids private" the demographic projections don't bear this out. No matter how you slice those numbers, the HS pop of IB families is dropping, not growing enough to fill those empty OOB seats. So whenever people complain about OOB kids ruining Wilson, I thank god for them because if not for OOB Wilson would have died on the vine a long time ago.

I don't know what numbers you are referring to (and I've scrutinized them) but there is no evidence of this - at the rising 5th grade level at just Janney, Murch & Lafayette there are 375 students and that is just a fraction of the IB population and Deal is already almost as big as Wilson.

Sure some of the kids from the adjacent 3 schools will go private but most won't.

The loss of Wilson going all IB would be in diversity so for that reason I hope it doesn't happen but there is a crush of in-boundary kids bound for Wilson over the next 4-5 years.

Diversity is a nice bonus. But not at the cost of overcrowding. There are lots of other opportunities to surround your child with diversity: sports, clubs, church, etc. Ward 3 parents who absolutely need diversity in schools should have no trouble lotterying into EOTP schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in MoCo and always find these threads interesting.
There isn't as much 'school choice' or options there other than you take the school or go to private (unless you test to got to Blair/magnet). There isn't the OOB/IB dynamics - that can shift, and the families didn't have experience with elementaries where you offset what you don't like with PTA funding.
Those schools are generally the same size as Wilson
& are overcrowded (including more than 30 in APs etc) -- the closer in schools have far less "diversity" (lower SES and Black students to be blatant - there are forms of diversity (Asian, both have international & Latino (rapidly growing Latino in Montgomery)). They have other "pitfalls" - like your kid is so much like all the others that you can't stand out or few do -- ridiculously competitive natures in many ways, and kids can rarely can make any of the school based teams that they offer anyway. And some of those programs aren't really a bag of chips either.

There are two kinds of overcrowding: naturally occurring and manufacturered. DCPS seems to favor the latter when it comes to Deal and Wilson. That's what drives W3 parents nuts.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One other thing to consider is that if Wilson ever goes all IB, that's a tremendous loss of enrollment. Part of what makes Wilson so successful now is the large number of students- so they can offer lots of great classss plus advanced maths, physics, languages etc. Even if you counter with "well if we could just become all IB upper income white kids therefore we will attract more iB parents who currently send their kids private" the demographic projections don't bear this out. No matter how you slice those numbers, the HS pop of IB families is dropping, not growing enough to fill those empty OOB seats. So whenever people complain about OOB kids ruining Wilson, I thank god for them because if not for OOB Wilson would have died on the vine a long time ago.

I don't know what numbers you are referring to (and I've scrutinized them) but there is no evidence of this - at the rising 5th grade level at just Janney, Murch & Lafayette there are 375 students and that is just a fraction of the IB population and Deal is already almost as big as Wilson.

Sure some of the kids from the adjacent 3 schools will go private but most won't.

The loss of Wilson going all IB would be in diversity so for that reason I hope it doesn't happen but there is a crush of in-boundary kids bound for Wilson over the next 4-5 years.

Diversity is a nice bonus. But not at the cost of overcrowding. There are lots of other opportunities to surround your child with diversity: sports, clubs, church, etc. Ward 3 parents who absolutely need diversity in schools should have no trouble lotterying into EOTP schools.

Um, the diversity is not a nice bonus to white parents! It's a legal obligation towards black kids. There was a school district in Mississippi that was forced to consolidated high schools and jr highs due to having an all-white school. So DCPS correctly and appropriately will be cautious about taking any measures that will result in the most academically advanced high school and jr high becoming all-white. Obviously the current Justice Department is not likely to take action in this way, but it's a little nuts to think that DCPS will consciously take policy steps that will result in re-segregation.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/14/us/cleveland-mississippi-school-desegregation-settlement/index.html

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One other thing to consider is that if Wilson ever goes all IB, that's a tremendous loss of enrollment. Part of what makes Wilson so successful now is the large number of students- so they can offer lots of great classss plus advanced maths, physics, languages etc. Even if you counter with "well if we could just become all IB upper income white kids therefore we will attract more iB parents who currently send their kids private" the demographic projections don't bear this out. No matter how you slice those numbers, the HS pop of IB families is dropping, not growing enough to fill those empty OOB seats. So whenever people complain about OOB kids ruining Wilson, I thank god for them because if not for OOB Wilson would have died on the vine a long time ago.

I don't know what numbers you are referring to (and I've scrutinized them) but there is no evidence of this - at the rising 5th grade level at just Janney, Murch & Lafayette there are 375 students and that is just a fraction of the IB population and Deal is already almost as big as Wilson.

Sure some of the kids from the adjacent 3 schools will go private but most won't.

The loss of Wilson going all IB would be in diversity so for that reason I hope it doesn't happen but there is a crush of in-boundary kids bound for Wilson over the next 4-5 years.

Diversity is a nice bonus. But not at the cost of overcrowding. There are lots of other opportunities to surround your child with diversity: sports, clubs, church, etc. Ward 3 parents who absolutely need diversity in schools should have no trouble lotterying into EOTP schools.

I think diversity is more than a "bonus" and consider it a fact of life my kids (and others) should be exposed to and my sense is most WOTP parents are open minded enough to agree - after all most of us could buy our way out of diversity if we so choose.

But there are a large number of OOB students at Wilson so there is no reason diversity needs to come at the expense of overcrowding - like everything else it is a question of whether there is enough political courage to actually enforce the paper boundaries the school has but that has been discussed elsewhere in this thead and others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:... The loss of Wilson going all IB would be in diversity so for that reason I hope it doesn't happen but there is a crush of in-boundary kids bound for Wilson over the next 4-5 years.

Diversity is a nice bonus. But not at the cost of overcrowding. There are lots of other opportunities to surround your child with diversity: sports, clubs, church, etc. Ward 3 parents who absolutely need diversity in schools should have no trouble lotterying into EOTP schools.

Different poster. I don't think a drive for diversity is really what's motivating anyone here. I do not think the DCPS planning teams sits around wringing their hands about how the Wilson IB students from W3 and W4 are going to get adequate exposure to diversity. Indeed, Wilson and Deal are probably the most racially diverse schools in the entire city. And if hypothetically 100% of the OOB students were removed from Deal and Wilson for 2017-18, I'd bet they'd still be the most racially diverse schools in the entire city. Let's be clear: This isn't really about promoting diversity at Deal/Wilson. It's more about (1) DCPS's desire to promote "equity" by ensuring pathways for students outside of Wilson's feeder network to attend Wilson, on the theory that those kids deserve as well-functioning a school as any other kids in Wards 3 or 4, and (2) it's about satisfying a political base. I'm not saying DCPS's goals aren't laudable - even if I think they're shortsighted and misguided - but we should all be clear about what those goals are.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One other thing to consider is that if Wilson ever goes all IB, that's a tremendous loss of enrollment. Part of what makes Wilson so successful now is the large number of students- so they can offer lots of great classss plus advanced maths, physics, languages etc. Even if you counter with "well if we could just become all IB upper income white kids therefore we will attract more iB parents who currently send their kids private" the demographic projections don't bear this out. No matter how you slice those numbers, the HS pop of IB families is dropping, not growing enough to fill those empty OOB seats. So whenever people complain about OOB kids ruining Wilson, I thank god for them because if not for OOB Wilson would have died on the vine a long time ago.

I don't know what numbers you are referring to (and I've scrutinized them) but there is no evidence of this - at the rising 5th grade level at just Janney, Murch & Lafayette there are 375 students and that is just a fraction of the IB population and Deal is already almost as big as Wilson.

Sure some of the kids from the adjacent 3 schools will go private but most won't.

The loss of Wilson going all IB would be in diversity so for that reason I hope it doesn't happen but there is a crush of in-boundary kids bound for Wilson over the next 4-5 years.

Diversity is a nice bonus. But not at the cost of overcrowding. There are lots of other opportunities to surround your child with diversity: sports, clubs, church, etc. Ward 3 parents who absolutely need diversity in schools should have no trouble lotterying into EOTP schools.

I think diversity is more than a "bonus" and consider it a fact of life my kids (and others) should be exposed to and my sense is most WOTP parents are open minded enough to agree - after all most of us could buy our way out of diversity if we so choose.

But there are a large number of OOB students at Wilson so there is no reason diversity needs to come at the expense of overcrowding - like everything else it is a question of whether there is enough political courage to actually enforce the paper boundaries the school has but that has been discussed elsewhere in this thead and others.

Without the OOB students Wilson would be segregated. If you end OOB rights you will lose diversity and it will still be overcrowded.

The only solution that solves both problems is re-routing at least 2 current schools from the feeder pattern and replacing with one feeder that is mostly minority.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One other thing to consider is that if Wilson ever goes all IB, that's a tremendous loss of enrollment. Part of what makes Wilson so successful now is the large number of students- so they can offer lots of great classss plus advanced maths, physics, languages etc. Even if you counter with "well if we could just become all IB upper income white kids therefore we will attract more iB parents who currently send their kids private" the demographic projections don't bear this out. No matter how you slice those numbers, the HS pop of IB families is dropping, not growing enough to fill those empty OOB seats. So whenever people complain about OOB kids ruining Wilson, I thank god for them because if not for OOB Wilson would have died on the vine a long time ago.

I don't know what numbers you are referring to (and I've scrutinized them) but there is no evidence of this - at the rising 5th grade level at just Janney, Murch & Lafayette there are 375 students and that is just a fraction of the IB population and Deal is already almost as big as Wilson.

Sure some of the kids from the adjacent 3 schools will go private but most won't.

The loss of Wilson going all IB would be in diversity so for that reason I hope it doesn't happen but there is a crush of in-boundary kids bound for Wilson over the next 4-5 years.

Diversity is a nice bonus. But not at the cost of overcrowding. There are lots of other opportunities to surround your child with diversity: sports, clubs, church, etc. Ward 3 parents who absolutely need diversity in schools should have no trouble lotterying into EOTP schools.

Um, the diversity is not a nice bonus to white parents! It's a legal obligation towards black kids. There was a school district in Mississippi that was forced to consolidated high schools and jr highs due to having an all-white school. So DCPS correctly and appropriately will be cautious about taking any measures that will result in the most academically advanced high school and jr high becoming all-white. Obviously the current Justice Department is not likely to take action in this way, but it's a little nuts to think that DCPS will consciously take policy steps that will result in re-segregation.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/14/us/cleveland-mississippi-school-desegregation-settlement/index.html

You think DCPS wants the Feds shining a flashlight on their failed system? Hah! Bring it on!