Proposal is up!

[Anonymous]

For those of us in wards with poorer DCPS schools, I feel like yelling IT DOESN'T MATTER. This is just rearranging the deck chairs on an already sinking ship. So now I am inbounds for one poorly performing school rather than having the choice of three poorly performing schools. When are either mayoral candidate going to talk about actually improving neighborhood schools, and not just messing with the boundaries?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Yeah, I'm blaming our ANC, who has spoken to me three times. All three times, she told me, unprompted and a propos of nothing, that Crestwood is safe in the Deal/Wilson boundaries.

Crestwood will stay inbounds for Deal/Wilson until MacFarland is reopened. So, if that worries you, start working now to get a historical designation placed on MacFarland, identify any environmental issues that will require years of study, and perhaps locate a endangered species on the grounds.

Better yet, I smell a lawsuit.

On what grounds?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For those of us in wards with poorer DCPS schools, I feel like yelling IT DOESN'T MATTER. This is just rearranging the deck chairs on an already sinking ship. So now I am inbounds for one poorly performing school rather than having the choice of three poorly performing schools. When are either mayoral candidate going to talk about actually improving neighborhood schools, and not just messing with the boundaries?

+1, though I was beginning to get behind one of those poor performing schools and seeing that it actually has some great potential. Now we're back to a different poor performing school which is actually (on paper at least) the worst performing of the three.

Ugh. At least my kid is at a charter for next year. I hope it works out because that other school that we're no longer in bound for was my back up plan.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All these discussions of OOB set asides always focus on what happens to the overcrowded Ward 3 schools. That is certainly understandable, but the better question is what happens to the Ward 7/8 type schools that lose more students? That's the key part of the question that never gets discussed, at least not nearly enough.

What happens to the at-risk families that don't have the means or ability or desire to leave their in-bounds school? Does this lead to more school closings and fewer neighborhood options? Is helping some, while leaving some in even worse shape worth it? And have they done any studies to see how many will be worse off compared to how many will be better off by pulling more kids out of neighborhood schools?

To me, this the important systemic question - much more important to the overall health of the school system than how Janney and Lafayette absorb the 10% OOB set aside because we may be making a policy choice to widen the education gap instead of close it and raise up all schools.

That's right. I think you're right that we can rest reasonably assured that the JKLM schools can successfully incorporate students, even if the capacity constraints are real. (They are.) You're also right that this could hamper progress at failing schools.

That said, I believe it beats the alternative.

As an aside, I think the OOB set-asides are well-designed. 10% in elementary school. These can be spread throughout multiple grades. Another 10% get added in 6th grade for middle school. There should be greater capacity to incorporate more students then, since some students would just be peeling off to privates. And, introducing the new students in 6th grade gives them 3 years to be brought up to speed (if need be) before sending them off to high school. (A persistent concern from within and without ward 3 parents is that the new students may not be adequately prepared, and that could hurt the incumbent students and the new student.) The same cycle repeats for 9th grade.

If you're going to do OOB set-asides, I think this is the way to do it. I was opposed to OOB set-asides before. I am no longer opposed to them.

With due respect, you just did exactly what I was talking about. You immediately went right back to focusing only on how it impacts or affects the schools gaining the OOB students, while completely ignoring how it works for the schools with a higher percentage of low SES students (I realize you paid lip service to "this could hamper progress at failing schools" but you simply dismissed that with any real discussion of how it could hamper them, how many kids would be left behind, what if anything could be done to mitigate the damage.

Without some study and data on those questions, how can we really conclude that, as you put it, "it beats the alternative"?

(FYI, the alternative, in my mind, being a real effort to deal with the harmful affects of poverty, directing more resources to schools that are struggling, and providing incentives and support for families to stay in and improve neighborhood families - if the contention is that the alternative is doing nothing, I reject that).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All these discussions of OOB set asides always focus on what happens to the overcrowded Ward 3 schools. That is certainly understandable, but the better question is what happens to the Ward 7/8 type schools that lose more students? That's the key part of the question that never gets discussed, at least not nearly enough.

What happens to the at-risk families that don't have the means or ability or desire to leave their in-bounds school? Does this lead to more school closings and fewer neighborhood options? Is helping some, while leaving some in even worse shape worth it? And have they done any studies to see how many will be worse off compared to how many will be better off by pulling more kids out of neighborhood schools?

To me, this the important systemic question - much more important to the overall health of the school system than how Janney and Lafayette absorb the 10% OOB set aside because we may be making a policy choice to widen the education gap instead of close it and raise up all schools.

That's right. I think you're right that we can rest reasonably assured that the JKLM schools can successfully incorporate students, even if the capacity constraints are real. (They are.) You're also right that this could hamper progress at failing schools.

That said, I believe it beats the alternative.

As an aside, I think the OOB set-asides are well-designed. 10% in elementary school. These can be spread throughout multiple grades. Another 10% get added in 6th grade for middle school. There should be greater capacity to incorporate more students then, since some students would just be peeling off to privates. And, introducing the new students in 6th grade gives them 3 years to be brought up to speed (if need be) before sending them off to high school. (A persistent concern from within and without ward 3 parents is that the new students may not be adequately prepared, and that could hurt the incumbent students and the new student.) The same cycle repeats for 9th grade.

If you're going to do OOB set-asides, I think this is the way to do it. I was opposed to OOB set-asides before. I am no longer opposed to them.

With due respect, you just did exactly what I was talking about. You immediately went right back to focusing only on how it impacts or affects the schools gaining the OOB students, while completely ignoring how it works for the schools with a higher percentage of low SES students (I realize you paid lip service to "this could hamper progress at failing schools" but you simply dismissed that with any real discussion of how it could hamper them, how many kids would be left behind, what if anything could be done to mitigate the damage.

Without some study and data on those questions, how can we really conclude that, as you put it, "it beats the alternative"?

(FYI, the alternative, in my mind, being a real effort to deal with the harmful affects of poverty, directing more resources to schools that are struggling, and providing incentives and support for families to stay in and improve neighborhood families - if the contention is that the alternative is doing nothing, I reject that).

+1

[Anonymous]

I don't see why people were so worried about Eastern boundaries it has never been a factor. The school population at Eastern has always been sturdy and formidable. The only thing the boundary change has done was to ensure that Jefferson students are directly funneled to Eastern. Which was never or ever a concerned because when Jefferson was a powerhouse in middle-schools the best and the brightest selected Eastern over Wilson. So, for it now to be such a victory is so unnecessary and goes to show newcomers that the Chancellor really hasn't done anything new. What is glaringly missing is the neighborhood availability for the families who no longer have Spingarn. Doesn't seem that Browne Educational Center has a comprehensive school that is neighborhood conducive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For those of us in wards with poorer DCPS schools, I feel like yelling IT DOESN'T MATTER. This is just rearranging the deck chairs on an already sinking ship. So now I am inbounds for one poorly performing school rather than having the choice of three poorly performing schools. When are either mayoral candidate going to talk about actually improving neighborhood schools, and not just messing with the boundaries?

I agree and this is a discussion that DCPS, not the DME, needs to have and this is an area where who is Mayor makes a very real difference.

For everyone who says, well okay, now I can be comfortable with a Mayor Bowser, we would be missing a huge opportunity where there is so much focus on improving schools. What can we do to improve schools now that the DME has given up on trying to force families to move schools (for the most part). How can DCPS transform these schools into ones that families want their children to attend. How can they build the pathway from successful ESs to successful MSs to successful HSs.

I heard Catania speak last week and he talked about the fact that something unique about the Wilson/Deal/Feeder ESs is that the principals speak across levels about aligning their curriculums. Hardy may be part of this as well. The point was this does not happen everywhere. What can we change so that this is the norm, not unique. What other practices can we change that make a difference?

It looks to me as if they have not done enough to bring together cohorts of successful ES students together in MS on capital hill. I think we should all raise heck about that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If they are going to get rid of the PS-8 model because it doesn't work, why are they hanging on to it at Walker Jones?

The city really screwed up by building a new school there, and now they're tying themselves in knots to pretend that it makes any kind of sense.

I'd like to see that zone broken up into adjacent elementary schools and the new, nice W-J building used for one of the new middle schools.

There are several PS-8 models still in the proposal. Other PPs aren't reading carefully. (Wheatley and Browne, for instance)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All these discussions of OOB set asides always focus on what happens to the overcrowded Ward 3 schools. That is certainly understandable, but the better question is what happens to the Ward 7/8 type schools that lose more students? That's the key part of the question that never gets discussed, at least not nearly enough.

What happens to the at-risk families that don't have the means or ability or desire to leave their in-bounds school? Does this lead to more school closings and fewer neighborhood options? Is helping some, while leaving some in even worse shape worth it? And have they done any studies to see how many will be worse off compared to how many will be better off by pulling more kids out of neighborhood schools?

To me, this the important systemic question - much more important to the overall health of the school system than how Janney and Lafayette absorb the 10% OOB set aside because we may be making a policy choice to widen the education gap instead of close it and raise up all schools.

That's right. I think you're right that we can rest reasonably assured that the JKLM schools can successfully incorporate students, even if the capacity constraints are real. (They are.) You're also right that this could hamper progress at failing schools.

That said, I believe it beats the alternative.

As an aside, I think the OOB set-asides are well-designed. 10% in elementary school. These can be spread throughout multiple grades. Another 10% get added in 6th grade for middle school. There should be greater capacity to incorporate more students then, since some students would just be peeling off to privates. And, introducing the new students in 6th grade gives them 3 years to be brought up to speed (if need be) before sending them off to high school. (A persistent concern from within and without ward 3 parents is that the new students may not be adequately prepared, and that could hurt the incumbent students and the new student.) The same cycle repeats for 9th grade.

If you're going to do OOB set-asides, I think this is the way to do it. I was opposed to OOB set-asides before. I am no longer opposed to them.

With due respect, you just did exactly what I was talking about. You immediately went right back to focusing only on how it impacts or affects the schools gaining the OOB students, while completely ignoring how it works for the schools with a higher percentage of low SES students (I realize you paid lip service to "this could hamper progress at failing schools" but you simply dismissed that with any real discussion of how it could hamper them, how many kids would be left behind, what if anything could be done to mitigate the damage.

Without some study and data on those questions, how can we really conclude that, as you put it, "it beats the alternative"?

(FYI, the alternative, in my mind, being a real effort to deal with the harmful affects of poverty, directing more resources to schools that are struggling, and providing incentives and support for families to stay in and improve neighborhood families - if the contention is that the alternative is doing nothing, I reject that).

Fair criticism. The omission was intentional. Fixing failed schools is hard. I don't know how to do it and I haven't read anything truly convincing on the topic. Despite these challenges, that remains the singular goal for much of the city.

Even ignoring that we don't have a plan to fix these schools (let's suppose, for argument, that we do), it will still take time. Lots of time. It seems, to me, that giving families stuck in the interim additional outs is a charitable move. It may make achieving true progress somewhat harder and somewhat slower, but I'm willing to accept that tradeoff.

Moreover, as you mention, I firmly believe that solutions must involve engaging the families and communities. Schools are too late of an intervention to address much deeper problems. They're a part of the solution, at most. Use them to deploy wrap-around services, expanded meals and nutrition, and a warm, safe environment late into the night. Addressing abject poverty and a poverty in attitudes towards education through fiddling with academic offerings seems misplaced.

That said, the proposal should be lauded for the way it implements OOB set-asides. The incentives are aligned well and the timing of introduction is such that opponents' (like me, previously) objections have been effectively neutered. So, if you're going to do OOB set-asides, then do it this way.

[Anonymous]

The changing of Eastern feeder pattern is not highly controversial. It just makes more sense in some form by making Jefferson exclusively Eastern and taking the neighborhood of Kelly Miller students out of the mix. Now the questions still remains, how can DCPS ignore one of the largest middle schools of them all and that is Friendship MS. We constantly say that we are all one school system but the majority of Eastern eligible feeder students attend the second largest middle school in comparison to Deal. Friendship MS is located in Ward 6 neighborhood close to Eastern but many of those kids are shuffled off to Friendship HS in Ward 7. I will say it on this post too, where do the students from Browne Educational go to school when all is seemingly neighborhood generated...Spingarn is no longer available.


History note: Eastern used to have the following feeder schools:
Eliot
Browne
Sousa
Jefferson
Hine
Evans
Kelly Miller
Roper (Ron Brown)
Fletcher-Johnson
Stuart-Hobson
Woodson Jr

So the inventory of feeder schools have dwindled down from 11 to 3 but Eastern is still projected to be the second largest high-school next year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:For those of us in wards with poorer DCPS schools, I feel like yelling IT DOESN'T MATTER. This is just rearranging the deck chairs on an already sinking ship. So now I am inbounds for one poorly performing school rather than having the choice of three poorly performing schools. When are either mayoral candidate going to talk about actually improving neighborhood schools, and not just messing with the boundaries?

I agree and this is a discussion that DCPS, not the DME, needs to have and this is an area where who is Mayor makes a very real difference.

For everyone who says, well okay, now I can be comfortable with a Mayor Bowser, we would be missing a huge opportunity where there is so much focus on improving schools. What can we do to improve schools now that the DME has given up on trying to force families to move schools (for the most part). How can DCPS transform these schools into ones that families want their children to attend. How can they build the pathway from successful ESs to successful MSs to successful HSs.

I heard Catania speak last week and he talked about the fact that something unique about the Wilson/Deal/Feeder ESs is that the principals speak across levels about aligning their curriculums. Hardy may be part of this as well. The point was this does not happen everywhere. What can we change so that this is the norm, not unique. What other practices can we change that make a difference?

It looks to me as if they have not done enough to bring together cohorts of successful ES students together in MS on capital hill. I think we should all raise heck about that.

I feel like Catania does talk about improving failing schools. And I agree that redrawing the boundaries isn't a solution for bad schools. I think the problem was that the DME took the boundary redrawing as an opportunity to try to propose all sorts of other stuff that not only wasn't a solution to poor schools, but could actually worsen existing schools. If the boundaries are settled (at least for a while) maybe we can return the focus to how to improve all schools, not just mess around with deciding who gets to go to the already-good schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:All these discussions of OOB set asides always focus on what happens to the overcrowded Ward 3 schools. That is certainly understandable, but the better question is what happens to the Ward 7/8 type schools that lose more students? That's the key part of the question that never gets discussed, at least not nearly enough.

What happens to the at-risk families that don't have the means or ability or desire to leave their in-bounds school? Does this lead to more school closings and fewer neighborhood options? Is helping some, while leaving some in even worse shape worth it? And have they done any studies to see how many will be worse off compared to how many will be better off by pulling more kids out of neighborhood schools?

To me, this the important systemic question - much more important to the overall health of the school system than how Janney and Lafayette absorb the 10% OOB set aside because we may be making a policy choice to widen the education gap instead of close it and raise up all schools.

This. Plus the fact that the proposal doesn't really get the charters to be part of an improved DCPS. This proposal is going to lead to more school closings in Wards 6,7,8 and more charters.

Which "Ward 6" school will be closing?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The changing of Eastern feeder pattern is not highly controversial. It just makes more sense in some form by making Jefferson exclusively Eastern and taking the neighborhood of Kelly Miller students out of the mix. Now the questions still remains, how can DCPS ignore one of the largest middle schools of them all and that is Friendship MS. We constantly say that we are all one school system but the majority of Eastern eligible feeder students attend the second largest middle school in comparison to Deal. Friendship MS is located in Ward 6 neighborhood close to Eastern but many of those kids are shuffled off to Friendship HS in Ward 7. I will say it on this post too, where do the students from Browne Educational go to school when all is seemingly neighborhood generated...Spingarn is no longer available.


History note: Eastern used to have the following feeder schools:
Eliot
Browne
Sousa
Jefferson
Hine
Evans
Kelly Miller
Roper (Ron Brown)
Fletcher-Johnson
Stuart-Hobson
Woodson Jr

So the inventory of feeder schools have dwindled down from 11 to 3 but Eastern is still projected to be the second largest high-school next year.

Oh who bloody cares. I'll be surprised if a single kid from my child's DCPS Hill early childhood program (which is almost entirely high SES for PreK3, PreK4 and K, and white) ended up at Eastern (which is almost entirely low SES and AA). You'd need a generation to turn things around at this rate, not a mere decade.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The changing of Eastern feeder pattern is not highly controversial. It just makes more sense in some form by making Jefferson exclusively Eastern and taking the neighborhood of Kelly Miller students out of the mix. Now the questions still remains, how can DCPS ignore one of the largest middle schools of them all and that is Friendship MS. We constantly say that we are all one school system but the majority of Eastern eligible feeder students attend the second largest middle school in comparison to Deal. Friendship MS is located in Ward 6 neighborhood close to Eastern but many of those kids are shuffled off to Friendship HS in Ward 7. I will say it on this post too, where do the students from Browne Educational go to school when all is seemingly neighborhood generated...Spingarn is no longer available.


History note: Eastern used to have the following feeder schools:
Eliot
Browne
Sousa
Jefferson
Hine
Evans
Kelly Miller
Roper (Ron Brown)
Fletcher-Johnson
Stuart-Hobson
Woodson Jr

So the inventory of feeder schools have dwindled down from 11 to 3 but Eastern is still projected to be the second largest high-school next year.

Oh who bloody cares. I'll be surprised if a single kid from my child's DCPS Hill early childhood program (which is almost entirely high SES for PreK3, PreK4 and K, and white) ended up at Eastern (which is almost entirely low SES and AA). You'd need a generation to turn things around at this rate, not a mere decade.

It didn't take a generation for that to happen at Deal. Why not join up with your neighbors and make it happen sooner?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I thought Janney was overcapacity the day it opened after renovation?

That is why it is being renovated again right now. The new second floor addition will be ready for the Fall. Increasing capacity was the justification for the second renovation and there are more slots available as a result, pre-K 4 optional seats were significantly expanded for 2014. Murch is preparing for a major expansion as part of the modernization process. Two "bins" have been contracted and a 750+ school is being envisioned by the Murch principal. Hearst is fully utilized with a new optional pre-K 3 program, one of the first in Ward 3. Lafayette is expecting a decrease in enrollment.

Ward 3 overcrowding is a bit of an urban legend and/or will soon be resolved with the Murch modernization.

DCPS insiders say that the enrollment numbers will likely continue to decrease. DCPS may actually be accelerating this process with this boundary exercise that is scaring young parents. I know several over the last few months who moved straight to Bethesda, skipping DCPS for elementary. We thought we could at least handle the early years in DCPS, but I am not sure if we have the stomach for it anymore.

Tell that to the trailers at Key. Tell that to the 80+ inboundary families at Stoddert waitlisted for pre-K.

who wants to go to an elementary school with more than 750 kids? Seems like a zoo.