Boundary review can’t come soon enough
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Anonymous
Agree. We are a UMC Latino family. Our children are extremely high scoring and well behaved. We don’t smoke pot. None of their black friends have these issues either... and some are even OOB!! Gasp! The horror! |
Anonymous
The point is slower growth means the city budget wont continue to expand at the rate it has over the past 10 years. Increases in spending will need to slow or the city we will have to raise taxes. We are seeing the fallout in this year's budget. |
Anonymous
I'm the bolded PP. Perhaps I typed too quickly and I wasn't clear. In DC, due to the effects of institutional racism and concentrated poverty, schools that are 99% minority are mostly low-SES, often highly traumatized kids with lots of family, environmental, and poverty-related stressors. The issues mentioned by a PP that pulled her kids out reflect that. I was not suggesting that these issues are reflective of anything fundamental about these racial/ethnic groups at all. Which is why I think school systems try to continue a legacy of desegregation. They try to minimize the inequities in the system by drawing school boundaries in such a way that maximizes integration, when possible to do so. *As for Banneker and Shepherd, they're unicorns in the city--Banneker is an application school, and Shepherd is really the only DCPS school that draws middle/upper middle class black families in significant numbers. They're special cases that don't reflect the general situation in majority minority DC schools. |
Anonymous
This. |
Anonymous
Everyone repeat after me: There arent enough UMC kids in DCPS to fix the problem regardless of how you draw the boundries. You would need to prohibit DC residents from attending private and include the MCPS "W" schools and McLean/Langley to get enough kids to move the needle through integration alone. |
Anonymous
PP here. Note the bolded. I never said desegregation would "fix" everything wrong with DC schools. However, it's part of the equation, IMO. Stopping the proliferation of charters* may also help, as they certainly serve to keep some neighborhood schools segregated. And then, investing in wraparound services would also move the needle, although I'm not sure when we'll get there. *Certainly, charters have helped keep middle class families in the city over the past decade or so. However, they are now perhaps less necessary, and are undermining neighborhood schools. I'm for slowing their growth, and closing those that are under-performing. I do see a place for "niche" charters that don't directly compete with DCPS, but offer something different (language immersion, Montessori, etc.). |
Anonymous
DP here. I understood what you meant the first time and I agree with you. Some posters are far too quick to cry racism when in fact you're pointing out the actual racism. It's hard to have a productive discussion with these outlandish accusations. |
Anonymous
| Poverty and race go hand in hand in dc. It’s not racist to point that out. |
Anonymous
If PP meant it was an income thing, she should have said income and not race. There is no way to misinterpret what she said, period. However, I do accept her apology and agree we should move forward. |
Anonymous
Exactly. It's pointing out racism, not creating it. |
Anonymous
Then why did you misinterpret it? We're talking about DC public schools; it's obvious what she meant. In DC, 99% black/Latino schools = high poverty. Nowhere did she say what you claim she did. BTW she didn't apologize either, nor should she. However it would be a positive step forward if you would apologize to her (and everyone) for making heinous false allegations of racism against her, and derailing the thread. |
Anonymous
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What everyone misses with these boundary discussions is it's impossible to draw diverse districts in DC
It's an open secret that gentrification is continuing to spread from West to East Pretty soon the entire greater Capitol Hill area will be done gentrifying. The schools follow a couple years later School choice is the only way out of these facts Most people in DC are fine with elementary school and high school with the test in options The final piece of the puzzle is middle school. Tracking at Stuart Hobson and Jefferson is a start. Adding a couple more test-in schools would solve the issue. As other posters have said the majority of the DCPS student body has some type of at-risk issue. When there aren't enough high performing students for all the schools the best option is tracking and magnets. |
Anonymous
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Yes. By the time of the boundary review it will be clear that all of the WITP schools are full. That will be a key fact.
We get to make choices about that. Fundamentally I see three choices, maybe four. First, we can decide to go along with the residential segregation and transportation patterns and say they’re full and out-of-boundary students are basically excluded. Sounds bad, but it might have the most impact for neighborhoods from which students travel west for elementary and feed upward in terms of keeping their best students in those schools. Second, we could keep everything the same and start construction WOTP to meet demand. Build out bigger elementary schools, build more middle and high schools. Third, we could make a rule that reserves some spots in each of these schools for OOB students. Maybe based on at-risk status and maybe not. Would have good effects but could create stigma. Could exclude or include people who don’t need access to schools like this. Fourth, we could equalize further by establishing a lottery not tied to residence of applicant, i.e., no inboundary preference. I see this as the best choice functionally but politically unachievable. This forum’s reaction to that choice is always that every person with a better than 9th grade education and a tent will move to some suburb and leave DC to the zombies if that’s even mentioned and while that’s handwringing bullshit it’s politically reflective of something for sure. That’s why I only say it’s 3 choices really. Other choices like choice grouped pyramids were run up the flagpole and failed during the last go round. I doubt we’re more likely to turn those choices into reality than last time. What do you all think? |
Anonymous
| I honestly think people in here are upset about over crowding but don’t really care what is done about it as long as their child gets to stay in a “good” school and feeder. I don’t think anyone here cares enough about low performing schools to actively try to change anything for the better. |
Anonymous
I think the reason #4 is politically unfeasible is because I don’t want to drive across town (potentially) to drop my kids off a school (possibly two different schools) and then drive across town again to get to work. This could be 90+ minutes. This is why I want neighborhood schools. |