I feel the same way. We have tons of friends with kids in dci who are really happy. I find it confusing they there is so much vitriol on this thread. |
Middle school or high school? Language track? Are they in advanced math? Have they ever had a teacher quit or get fired mid-year? The DCI experience is quite varied. |
This is true in DCPS and the Charters in general. You can have a fabulous experience or a horrendous experience. It varies by year and the luck of the draw of which teachers you get. My kids are at Deal and some years have been amazing. One year was horrible (we had an ELA teacher quit and she wasn't replaced for 4 months, another teacher was out on maternity leave for 3 months with no sub). If you lucked out and didn't have a kid on that team, your kid probably had a great year at Deal. If you had a kid on that team, it was terrible as there was NO instruction in 2 of the 4 core subjects for half of the year. My motto for the DCPS experience is: "it's great until it isn't". |
Maybe your child at DCI is just a bad apple or doesn’t apply themselves. Let the happy DCI folks be happy. |
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Come on, don't be spiteful. It's not necessarily smooth sailing at DCI for even the most diligent and well-behaved students.
The lack of middle school tracking outside math and languages can be a real drag. |
Huh? What do teachers quitting/being fired have to do with my child? |
To be sure, there are some crazy kids/weak students in class with yours in the DCI middle school. |
Not unique to DCI. The lack of tracking is prevalent throughout the middle schools in the city |
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Prevalent but not universal.
Deal and Washington Latin attract a much higher percentage of high-performing students in non-tracked middle school humanities classes than DCI does. BASIS demands that middle school students who can't work at grade level repeat grades to stay in the program. Stuart Hobson tracks not just for math and Spanish, but for English. |
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DCI tracks for languages.
Tracking, in general, is a racist and classist practice. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/11/modern-day-segregation-in-public-schools/382846/ |
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This POC who grew up poor begs to differ. If my MS and HS hadn't been tracked, my childhood pals and I wouldn't have made it to great colleges. Michelle Obama and her brother (Princeton grads) have said the same thing, on the record, many times over the years.
It all depends how the selection for advanced classes is done. The city of Chicago and MoCo practice "flex tracking" these days, whereby a student, parent, teacher or admin can recommend a track assignment or change any quarter or any year. Tracking is now flexible in many urban school systems. What doesn't work well at DCI, and in a dozen other DC public middle schools, is lumping MS kids who read 2, 3, even 4 or 5 grade levels apart in the very same humanities and science classes. We'd being seeing far more IBD passes senior year in HS if the practice were dumped. The prep for Diploma studies is just too little too late for the strongest, most ambitious and hardest-working students of all stripes (low SES, high SES, white, black, Latino, Asian). |
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Also a POC who grew up poor: So if you're not, through no fault of your own, one of the "strongest, most ambitious and hardest-working students of all stripes", you don't deserve the most challenging classes with the best teachers?
Hmmmmmmm.......makes me think that you believe your snowflake to be one of them and screw everybody else. Yikes. |
DCI also tracks for math. |
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Get a life.
Nobody argued that the weakest students at DCI shouldn't have access to challenging classes and great teachers. What was argued that these kids don't belong in the same classes as students who can handle work that's pitched multiple grade levels ahead of where the weakest students are. Stuart Hobson admins figured that one out a decade ago. They began tracking for English with the strong support of DCPS HQ, teachers and parents. At least DCI tracks for math these days; they didn't used to. |
They’ve always tracked for math - not sure why you were given false information. |