DC Graduation Problems Extend to Wilson High School, Councilmember Says

[Anonymous]

Perhaps DCPS should establish a magnet school for all students with attendance problems. That way, they could deal with them all in one place, rather than in every school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can schools remove OOB kids who don’t meet attendance requirements and not have them count against that school’s graduation rate?

* I realize they can’t do this now, but it might be a piece of the solution.

They do this already -- typically at the beginning of the year. In fall 2016 I know many students who were not allowed to re-enroll at Wilson and went back to their IB schools.

If that’s the case, how are we seeing 1 in 3?

The report is looking at senior year attendance -- they would have had to screw up junior year attendance to be sent to neighborhood school.

Also why do you assume that the kids with attendance problems are all OOB?

I actually assumed it should be easier to remove an OOB student for non-attendance. I didn’t think much about which students are most likely to fail to meet attendance requirements. Now that you mention it, though, I assume there’s a correlation between SES and attendance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps DCPS should establish a magnet school for all students with attendance problems. That way, they could deal with them all in one place, rather than in every school

It certainly would be a huge school -- since "75 percent of the 2,307 graduates systemwide missed more than 10 percent of the school days"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-schools-increasingly-graduating-chronically-absent-students-report-finds/2018/01/16/a1722404-bf01-44bc-a8c7-e9d9e3b3e9df_story.html?utm_term=.b60ce4514275

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can schools remove OOB kids who don’t meet attendance requirements and not have them count against that school’s graduation rate?

* I realize they can’t do this now, but it might be a piece of the solution.

They do this already -- typically at the beginning of the year. In fall 2016 I know many students who were not allowed to re-enroll at Wilson and went back to their IB schools.

If that’s the case, how are we seeing 1 in 3?

The report is looking at senior year attendance -- they would have had to screw up junior year attendance to be sent to neighborhood school.

Also why do you assume that the kids with attendance problems are all OOB?

I actually assumed it should be easier to remove an OOB student for non-attendance. I didn’t think much about which students are most likely to fail to meet attendance requirements. Now that you mention it, though, I assume there’s a correlation between SES and attendance.

There surely is. And there are a lot of low-SES students that are IB for Wilson.

[Anonymous]

Yes guys. The answer, as we all know, is "school prison," i.e., all students at 10th grade are sentenced to solitary confinement for two years (730 days) and pushed through mastery of all subjects required for high school graduation, eyes held open Clockwork Orange style. Once mastery is achieved, these students will be given back to their loving families and told to get jobs at Sweetgreen.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes guys. The answer, as we all know, is "school prison," i.e., all students at 10th grade are sentenced to solitary confinement for two years (730 days) and pushed through mastery of all subjects required for high school graduation, eyes held open Clockwork Orange style. Once mastery is achieved, these students will be given back to their loving families and told to get jobs at Sweetgreen.

This would be better than”graduating” illiterate students with worthless diplomas.

[Anonymous]

I heard that white females have some of the highest absences at Wilson. But they have high grades. There are a lot of different issues at play here for all SES groups. Just sayin' to be careful about just focusing on OOB...

[Anonymous]

Where are you all seeing the data that the studentsabsent at Wilson are from OOB? Or kids under the poverty line?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:the bigger issue are the test scores. the HS kids are so far behind why should they bother showing up? At ballou less than 3% meet grade expectations? how about you must have a 3 on a parcc test to move on?

That has been shown to increase drop out rates -- same problem by a different name. The kids who aren't showing up have effectively dropped out, but they are on the books all the way to graduation.

You need to do this from day one starting at elementary school.

DCPS should ship all youth who are over 2 years behind to either a KIPP or DC Prep school. They are the only ones that can get results from these populations. For the extra hard discipline cases there needs to be a military style school (this would be less than 5% per school)

by high school its too late and I agree most would drop out. Over time kids would get on grade level following the above, until then if kids are more than 3 grad levels behind in 9th grade they should go straight to an apprenticeship program. We are wasting time with the kids who can learn and these kids keeping them in a traditional high school program.

DC Prep and KIPP have very good results with the population they serve but they also have extremely high suspension rates. I'm not disagreeing with the suspensions rates but want to point out that Council and others have raised that the suspension practices drive the kids who don't conform out of KIPP and DC Prep and they wind back up in DCPS. That's part of the reason for the results. It's great for the kids who stay - they don't have to deal with the those who don't value the school as much (or for whatever reason are being suspended) but it doesn't help DCPS when those kids show back up in DCPS schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps DCPS should establish a magnet school for all students with attendance problems. That way, they could deal with them all in one place, rather than in every school

It certainly would be a huge school -- since "75 percent of the 2,307 graduates systemwide missed more than 10 percent of the school days"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-schools-increasingly-graduating-chronically-absent-students-report-finds/2018/01/16/a1722404-bf01-44bc-a8c7-e9d9e3b3e9df_story.html?utm_term=.b60ce4514275

I heard the FBI building will be vacant soon.

Or, why not focus graduation on GPA and not on attendance? A little more flexibility with respect to absences would seem to be in order here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps DCPS should establish a magnet school for all students with attendance problems. That way, they could deal with them all in one place, rather than in every school

It certainly would be a huge school -- since "75 percent of the 2,307 graduates systemwide missed more than 10 percent of the school days"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-schools-increasingly-graduating-chronically-absent-students-report-finds/2018/01/16/a1722404-bf01-44bc-a8c7-e9d9e3b3e9df_story.html?utm_term=.b60ce4514275

I heard the FBI building will be vacant soon.

Or, why not focus graduation on GPA and not on attendance? A little more flexibility with respect to absences would seem to be in order here.

Because GPA and attendance are linked.

If you miss the majority of class sessions, DCPS policy is that you cannot pass the class. But students who were absent more than half the time were routinely allowed to pass, often by being allowed to take 'credit recovery' classes. Credit recovery classes require significantly less work than if they showed up to class.

What the students did actually makes sense -- why slog through a class every day when you can skip school, do a modest amount of work online, and graduate on time anyway?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps DCPS should establish a magnet school for all students with attendance problems. That way, they could deal with them all in one place, rather than in every school

It certainly would be a huge school -- since "75 percent of the 2,307 graduates systemwide missed more than 10 percent of the school days"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-schools-increasingly-graduating-chronically-absent-students-report-finds/2018/01/16/a1722404-bf01-44bc-a8c7-e9d9e3b3e9df_story.html?utm_term=.b60ce4514275

I heard the FBI building will be vacant soon.

Or, why not focus graduation on GPA and not on attendance? A little more flexibility with respect to absences would seem to be in order here.

Because they don’t apply very rigorous standards to GPAs either. Now if we want to go with another PP’s suggestion and us the PARCC scores, that might be a meaningful metric.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps DCPS should establish a magnet school for all students with attendance problems. That way, they could deal with them all in one place, rather than in every school

It certainly would be a huge school -- since "75 percent of the 2,307 graduates systemwide missed more than 10 percent of the school days"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-schools-increasingly-graduating-chronically-absent-students-report-finds/2018/01/16/a1722404-bf01-44bc-a8c7-e9d9e3b3e9df_story.html?utm_term=.b60ce4514275

I heard the FBI building will be vacant soon.

Or, why not focus graduation on GPA and not on attendance? A little more flexibility with respect to absences would seem to be in order here.

Because they don’t apply very rigorous standards to GPAs either. Now if we want to go with another PP’s suggestion and us the PARCC scores, that might be a meaningful metric.

This is the most objective measure we have for now, and I'm sure you will see correlation! Teacher created tests show nothing, just like the fake attendance!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps DCPS should establish a magnet school for all students with attendance problems. That way, they could deal with them all in one place, rather than in every school

It certainly would be a huge school -- since "75 percent of the 2,307 graduates systemwide missed more than 10 percent of the school days"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-schools-increasingly-graduating-chronically-absent-students-report-finds/2018/01/16/a1722404-bf01-44bc-a8c7-e9d9e3b3e9df_story.html?utm_term=.b60ce4514275

I heard the FBI building will be vacant soon.

Or, why not focus graduation on GPA and not on attendance? A little more flexibility with respect to absences would seem to be in order here.

Because they don’t apply very rigorous standards to GPAs either. Now if we want to go with another PP’s suggestion and us the PARCC scores, that might be a meaningful metric.

This is the most objective measure we have for now, and I'm sure you will see correlation! Teacher created tests show nothing, just like the fake attendance!

So amidst all of this -- Ballou's PARCC scores actually inched up from 15-16 to 16-17. They are still bad, but better.

[Anonymous]

This isn’t surprising. Wilson students have to miss days because of ski trips and protest marches.