Maury Capitol Hill

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I want to address the suggestion that that the boundary between Maury and Miner be redrawn to balance populations between the schools, as opposed to a cluster. I am curious as to whether there is genuinely support for that plan from Maury families.

The DME has said that they can't find a way to redraw the boundary to do this, but that simply cannot be correct. I'm guessing what they really mean is the the only way to do it is to create two severely gerrymandered boundaries. I think what they looked at was drawing the boundary vertically instead of horizontally, as it is now, and the reason this probably didn't work is because Maury is to the west of Miner and the demographics of this neighborhood get whiter and wealthier as you go west and south, and blacker and poorer as you go north and east. Due to the position of the schools, this means that if you draw fairly straight, logical boundaries, you wind up with lopsided demographics whether you draw them N-S or E-W.

So what if instead, they created gerrymandered zones, where they specifically carved out some of the low-income housing now zoned for Miner and assigned it to Maury (this might even require creating a zone that is not contiguous, I'm not sure), and then carved out some of the high-income housing now zoned for Maury and assigned it to Miner.

My question is: how would Maury families feel about this proposal, and does their opinion changed depending on whether their home would be assigned to Miner (and if it wouldn't change, please state whether you have children who would be zoned to Miner as a result of this change, as I know some people on this thread had kids at Maury but no longer have elementary kids).

Follow up question: If they did this, wouldn't this essentially be busing? It was argued up thread that the cluster idea is "essential" busing, but wouldn't gerrymandered zones designed to assign low-SES kids to Maury and high-SES kids to Miner be actual busing?

I am asking this question because I don't think at risk set asides will meaningfully increase the number of at risk kids at Maury, so I am looking for a way to actually increase that percentage without a cluster.

Say more about what you mean by this -- I think this plan can be accomplished if you tighten the Maury boundary by expanding Miner's boundary to capture some of the Maury border houses (assuming that you don't capture Maury's current at-risk kids), but not sure if what you are suggesting is finding Maury's highest SES housing and adding that to Miner even if non-contiguous. When it comes down to it, MC kids you reallocate from Maury to Miner are unlikely to attend if they can lottery anywhere else (just the same as MC kids currently in the Miner boundary). But would need to change the border to make room for low-income housing kids at Maury.

It would certainly do something to change the numbers, but strikes me as having a similar effect as the high-risk set aside. Which I think is fine—I think the only responsible way to do something like this is to do it gradually, to avoid overwhelming Maury and making two schools that are considered undesirable instead of one. Your thesis seems to be that the only acceptable solution is one that creates even numbers of at-risk kids at Maury and Miner instantly -- which I think is neither realistic/possible nor at all desirable.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:To me it's clear something needs to be done to lower the at risk percentage at Miner. I understand the objections to the cluster, but you can make similar objections to any proposal.

It feels like a lot of people are basically arguing for the status quo, which means Miner remains a school with a lot of at risk kids who it ultimately fails.

It feels like no matter what is proposed, it will be rejected as infeasible, and nothing will change.

How about DC actually figure out how to teach at-risk kids? Moving them from one school to another is NOT an instructional strategy!!! The status quo id terrible but moving kids around does ZERO to fix it.

Are you a Maury parent? Then you are a DCPS parent. If you don't think DC does a good job educating the 46% of DCPS students who are at risk, then why do you live here and send your kid to a DSPS school? Especially one that feeds to a MS and HS that are majority at risk.

Maury parents want it both ways. Please leave us alone to run our school with a 12% at risk percentage and don't you dare interfere in any way, but also the fact that DCPS, the school system we participate in and pay taxes into, is crap at educating at risk kids (heck we can't even handle the 12% at risk kids at our school and are demanding more resources to handle them in upper grades when the non-at-risk families bail for charters or private anyway because, again, our MS/HS feed is majority at risk) is someone else's problem, please deal with it but not in a way that impacts our school at all.

This is the reality of being in DCPS. You don't want to deal with at risk kids, high percentages of SpEd kids, administrative challenges, etc.? MOVE. And before you cry "But Ward 3!!!" at me, guess what -- Ward 3 has problems, too. Go talk to families with kids at Deal, Hardy, and JR about behavior, discipline, drug use, etc. We have friends with kids at Deal and JR who simply do not use the bathroom at school because it feels dangerous to them. These are inner-city schools. They have the problems of inner city schools.

As for Brent and LT, I would absolutely support at risk set asides for them and exploring cluster options. An LT-JOW cluster does have certain synergies, though I understand why Maury-Miner was selected first because of the more dramatic differences in demographics. I don't know that Brent lends itself as well to a cluster. Maybe with Van Ness, though being on either side of the freeway makes that less appealing, IMO. I actually think some kind of program that unites Brent with Amidon-Bowen could be beneficial -- the Jefferson Middle triangle is weirdly disjointed geographically, and finding ways to build community across the triangle could have real benefits for Jefferson as well as the participating elementary schools.

No. Watkins parent here. I am completely against half-baked experiments that will inevitably cause a functioning school - that mere years ago NOBODY WOULD ATTEND - to turn it into another Peabody/Watkins cluster, with its abysmal 30% IB buy-in (propped up almost entirely by Peabody). That is not good for the DCPS educational landscape, as a whole. It is not good for the Hill, as a whole, which people are already increasingly nervous to invest in due to spiking crime. Taking a successful school and blowing it up to make your own stats look good is incredibly short sighted.

Surely you must know this is offensive, right? It wasn't an empty building - absolutely people were attending. Even on purpose.

Isn't that the same way people are talking about Eastern?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hey all. Billy Lynch here, your local fair housing attorney who specializes in housing and school integration. Thought I’d drop some evidenced-based research into this riveting anonymous discussion. TLDR- integrated schools help all students and do not affect white student performance.

http://school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityResearchBriefNo10.pdf

Integrationists in this thread: I see you and applaud you.

Ok Billy: #1. Maury IS integrated
#2. There will never be enough white students in DCPS to integrate it
#3. There is no evidence that this particular change will help at-risk kids
#4. Integration could happen if DCPS adopted a voluntary approached that considered the IB parents preferences, but for some reason this is considered verboten
#5. Where do your kids go to school?

#6. Gonzaga (where Billy went to high school) is private and 75% white
#7. Loyola Chicago (where Billy went to undergrad) is private and 7% AA
#8. Catholic (where Billy went to law school) is private, 70% white and 6% AA
#9. Harvard Kennedy School (where Billy was a Fellow)...well, you know

By all means, Billy. Lecture us some more from your glass house and pristine throne.

No matter how this school decision shakes out you will still be the loser who took the time to pull this personal information.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Data point: Payne is doing overall really well recently. It is 34% at-risk.

Imagine if Payne continued this trajectory and a Miner-Maury cluster got it's at risk percentage to 30% or less. Then imagine EH gets its at risk percentage down to 30% or less. Now look at the trajectory of LT, and the potential for JOW to capitalize on the decline of Two Rivers and its new building to follow suit, and the impact this could have on SH. Now consider that Amidon-Bowen has also received increased neighborhood buy-in recently and is ALSO slated for an upcoming renovation, and it feeds to Jefferson along with Brent.

Now remember all of this happens and what the impact could be on Eastern High School.

But it requires families in Ward 6 to work together, instead of being pitted against each other. It means acting in collective interest instead of individual self-interest. Which is the entire premise behind public education.

I love the idyllic picture you have painted of a world in which we have managed to get rid of most of the poors.

Alternatively -- a world in which poor people who live in Ward 6 are better served by Ward 6 schools because they are good across the board instead of becoming landing places for poor children from the entire East side.

We're not talking about getting the at risk percentage to zero, we're talking about getting it down to a manageable percentage that actually allows schools to serve both at risk and non-at-risk at the same time.

The borders of Ward 6 are every bit as arbitrary as the borders of the Maury and Miner zones.

While we're at it, by my reckoning the at-risk percentage across CH schools is about 25%, so the proposed cluster overcorrects Maury by quite a bit. If we correct SWS, Peabody, LT, CHMS, and most of all Brent up to 25%, that would be much more fair.

Agree. A Miner-SWS cluster actually makes the most sense. Give Miner IB rights to SWS and fill the rest of the seats in the lottery.

LT families tried to get IB rights to SWS 10 years ago and DCPS refused.

I think it was actually going to be a proximity preference that would mostly apply to LT students (since SWS is in the LT IB), but actually (ironically) likely would have applied to some Miner families as well given the distance discussions.

I'm glad DCPS said no, given the enormous improvement in IB buy-in LT has made since then. 10 years ago, LT was 297 students; this year it has 487. It was 77% Black, 12% white & only 23% IB; I can't find the at risk percentage, because everything from the time just reports it as 99% FARMS because of its T1 status. It had a principal who was extremely antagonistic to IB parents and told them it was not their school during an open house. However, the metrics of student performance & growth and teacher retention, discipline, etc were actually incredibly solid. When a new principal came in a few years later and aggressively courted IB families while maintaining teacher support, everything started to change fast because the fundamentals for a good school were in place. Last year (so 9 years later), it was 34% Black, 49% white, 60% IB & 17% at risk; given the 50 additional students LT added this school year, I think these trends will only accelerate. The point is, change can actually come from within if the building blocks are in place. Yes, the LT IB demographics are different than the Miner demographics (although note that Miner already has a higher percentage of white kids than LT did only 9 years ago), but LT had solid test scores and school fundamentals before IB families came when it was heavily minority, OOB and at-risk. The school was never failing even if it was unpopular with IB families. The IB families followed a very good & welcoming principal and solid fundamentals; if Miner gets those pieces in place, IB families will come. 9 years is nothing in DCPS land, it's one single boundary review. Just think: When these conversations were happening 10 years ago, LT demographically (which is what DME is focused on) was very similar to Miner now only with LESS IB buy-in.

The problem is that the bolded cannot currently be said for Miner. LT was able to rapidly get IB buy in when it got a principal who was not openly hostile to IB families because LT already had proven it could educate kids -- it had and still has phenomenal staff who get results with kids from all backgrounds.

Miner can't say the same, and that will stand in the way of IB buy in even if they get a principal who focuses on welcoming IB families, which by itself is hard because politically things are different now than they were 9 years ago and it's actually harder to openly welcoming IB, UMC white families to a title 1 school today than it was back then.

I agree with you that Miner now is not what LT was then in terms of school quality. That is my point. DCPS could focus on improving Miner and make it into a solid school just like LT always has been. THAT would lead to the demographic changes they want. LT was a solid school when it was heavily minority, OOB and at risk. It isn't actually the white/SES parents that made it into a solid school despite DCPS' apparent thinking. Now, obviously, when those parents started picking LT and staying, it made more attractive to other IB parents, so once the momentum starts you don't need to do much for it to continue. LT now has all of the extras that attract UMC parents; so much so that it has continued to succeed despite the pandemic and shaky admin/rapid admin turnover. So rather than create a Cluster that will have a bunch of problems inherently built into it, DCPS could focus on actually improving Miner by parachuting in an excellent principal (perfect timing since there is no incumbent to turf out) and giving it the high quality interventions/supports it needs. I don't know exactly what those are, but they could certainly find out if they listened to Miner teachers and families.

DC could and should also focus on addressing crime rates, and especially the starburst. If Miner builds a solid school and DC offers support to the area, MC families will follow.

Wholeheartedly agree that addressing crime is important for the well-being of schools on the Hill generally. But neither DCPS nor the DME is in charge of crime policy, so this might not be the most useful place to discuss that.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Data point: Payne is doing overall really well recently. It is 34% at-risk.

Imagine if Payne continued this trajectory and a Miner-Maury cluster got it's at risk percentage to 30% or less. Then imagine EH gets its at risk percentage down to 30% or less. Now look at the trajectory of LT, and the potential for JOW to capitalize on the decline of Two Rivers and its new building to follow suit, and the impact this could have on SH. Now consider that Amidon-Bowen has also received increased neighborhood buy-in recently and is ALSO slated for an upcoming renovation, and it feeds to Jefferson along with Brent.

Now remember all of this happens and what the impact could be on Eastern High School.

But it requires families in Ward 6 to work together, instead of being pitted against each other. It means acting in collective interest instead of individual self-interest. Which is the entire premise behind public education.

I love the idyllic picture you have painted of a world in which we have managed to get rid of most of the poors.

Alternatively -- a world in which poor people who live in Ward 6 are better served by Ward 6 schools because they are good across the board instead of becoming landing places for poor children from the entire East side.

We're not talking about getting the at risk percentage to zero, we're talking about getting it down to a manageable percentage that actually allows schools to serve both at risk and non-at-risk at the same time.

The borders of Ward 6 are every bit as arbitrary as the borders of the Maury and Miner zones.

While we're at it, by my reckoning the at-risk percentage across CH schools is about 25%, so the proposed cluster overcorrects Maury by quite a bit. If we correct SWS, Peabody, LT, CHMS, and most of all Brent up to 25%, that would be much more fair.

Agree. A Miner-SWS cluster actually makes the most sense. Give Miner IB rights to SWS and fill the rest of the seats in the lottery.

LT families tried to get IB rights to SWS 10 years ago and DCPS refused.

I think it was actually going to be a proximity preference that would mostly apply to LT students (since SWS is in the LT IB), but actually (ironically) likely would have applied to some Miner families as well given the distance discussions.

I'm glad DCPS said no, given the enormous improvement in IB buy-in LT has made since then. 10 years ago, LT was 297 students; this year it has 487. It was 77% Black, 12% white & only 23% IB; I can't find the at risk percentage, because everything from the time just reports it as 99% FARMS because of its T1 status. It had a principal who was extremely antagonistic to IB parents and told them it was not their school during an open house. However, the metrics of student performance & growth and teacher retention, discipline, etc were actually incredibly solid. When a new principal came in a few years later and aggressively courted IB families while maintaining teacher support, everything started to change fast because the fundamentals for a good school were in place. Last year (so 9 years later), it was 34% Black, 49% white, 60% IB & 17% at risk; given the 50 additional students LT added this school year, I think these trends will only accelerate. The point is, change can actually come from within if the building blocks are in place. Yes, the LT IB demographics are different than the Miner demographics (although note that Miner already has a higher percentage of white kids than LT did only 9 years ago), but LT had solid test scores and school fundamentals before IB families came when it was heavily minority, OOB and at-risk. The school was never failing even if it was unpopular with IB families. The IB families followed a very good & welcoming principal and solid fundamentals; if Miner gets those pieces in place, IB families will come. 9 years is nothing in DCPS land, it's one single boundary review. Just think: When these conversations were happening 10 years ago, LT demographically (which is what DME is focused on) was very similar to Miner now only with LESS IB buy-in.

The problem is that the bolded cannot currently be said for Miner. LT was able to rapidly get IB buy in when it got a principal who was not openly hostile to IB families because LT already had proven it could educate kids -- it had and still has phenomenal staff who get results with kids from all backgrounds.

Miner can't say the same, and that will stand in the way of IB buy in even if they get a principal who focuses on welcoming IB families, which by itself is hard because politically things are different now than they were 9 years ago and it's actually harder to openly welcoming IB, UMC white families to a title 1 school today than it was back then.

I agree with you that Miner now is not what LT was then in terms of school quality. That is my point. DCPS could focus on improving Miner and make it into a solid school just like LT always has been. THAT would lead to the demographic changes they want. LT was a solid school when it was heavily minority, OOB and at risk. It isn't actually the white/SES parents that made it into a solid school despite DCPS' apparent thinking. Now, obviously, when those parents started picking LT and staying, it made more attractive to other IB parents, so once the momentum starts you don't need to do much for it to continue. LT now has all of the extras that attract UMC parents; so much so that it has continued to succeed despite the pandemic and shaky admin/rapid admin turnover. So rather than create a Cluster that will have a bunch of problems inherently built into it, DCPS could focus on actually improving Miner by parachuting in an excellent principal (perfect timing since there is no incumbent to turf out) and giving it the high quality interventions/supports it needs. I don't know exactly what those are, but they could certainly find out if they listened to Miner teachers and families.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but I think there are issues at Miner you are overlooking.

The reason LT was a solid school well before it got IB buy in is because LT developed a strong reputation as, essentially, a commuter school for MC Ward 7 and 8 families. It was openly described this way by staff at the school and the OOB families who attended. Even among the at risk population, you had a lot of kids who received that designation because they had parents with low incomes, but many of those kids had MC grandparents who were heavily involved in their lives (and in many cases were the driving force to getting them into LT, and were essentially the primary caregiver).

By definition, the OOB families sending their kids to LT had to have it together enough to lottery them in (or submit enrollment paperwork under the in-zone family member who lived near LT, another common way kids came to the school back then). While the principal who openly told IB families the school was not "theirs" was antagonistic to IB white families, the clear implication is that the school was "ours" for someone -- and that someone was a pretty committed group of MC black families who had adopted the school as their own.

I simply do not see the same dynamics at Miner and I'm not sure if that experience can be replicated. Especially if the longterm goal is to take the school away from those committed MC black families and give it instead to high income white families IB for Miner.

While I too am impressed with what LT has accomplished in the last 10 years, I am not convinced that it is replicable at Miner today. That doesn't mean I think the solution is a cluster with Maury, but I think it might be naive to think that you can "parachute" in a principal who can solve what currently ails the school. You need more invested families at Miner, period. Whether they come from the current Maury zone, the existing Miner zone, or somewhere else. I don't think a principal can fix it before that investment takes place. You need a reason for families invested in education to send their kids to Miner and keep them there.

But location-wise, Miner is actually perfectly situated to serve exactly the same community that L-T did and still, to a significant extent, does. It just doesn't have a reputation as a good school. It needs to start there. Also, to be clear, the goal is not to take Miner away from MC Black families and give it to UMC white families. Miner is currently underenrolled in the upper grades and it will be a very long time (if ever) before the two populations couldn't co-exist. LT, for instance, still has a solid MC Black population (and lots of at risk kids with MC grandparents living nearby) and I don't think any LT families wants to drive them out. In fact, the number of LT teachers who move or lottery to send their own kids to LT is a point of pride for the school. Both populations co-exist now and really there has been minimal evident friction (nothing like the Peabody/Watkins experience); LT is slated for mild enlargement next year, so even if the IB populations continues to increase, there is no reason to think that there won't still be considerable OOB space. While the number of Black families at LT has certainly decreased over time (and that is because the school has become harder to get into in the lottery, so I am aware there is some trade off, obviously), a lot of the demographics changes have been driven by the school adding almost 200 additional kids.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:To me it's clear something needs to be done to lower the at risk percentage at Miner. I understand the objections to the cluster, but you can make similar objections to any proposal.

It feels like a lot of people are basically arguing for the status quo, which means Miner remains a school with a lot of at risk kids who it ultimately fails.

It feels like no matter what is proposed, it will be rejected as infeasible, and nothing will change.

How about DC actually figure out how to teach at-risk kids? Moving them from one school to another is NOT an instructional strategy!!! The status quo id terrible but moving kids around does ZERO to fix it.

Are you a Maury parent? Then you are a DCPS parent. If you don't think DC does a good job educating the 46% of DCPS students who are at risk, then why do you live here and send your kid to a DSPS school? Especially one that feeds to a MS and HS that are majority at risk.

Maury parents want it both ways. Please leave us alone to run our school with a 12% at risk percentage and don't you dare interfere in any way, but also the fact that DCPS, the school system we participate in and pay taxes into, is crap at educating at risk kids (heck we can't even handle the 12% at risk kids at our school and are demanding more resources to handle them in upper grades when the non-at-risk families bail for charters or private anyway because, again, our MS/HS feed is majority at risk) is someone else's problem, please deal with it but not in a way that impacts our school at all.

This is the reality of being in DCPS. You don't want to deal with at risk kids, high percentages of SpEd kids, administrative challenges, etc.? MOVE. And before you cry "But Ward 3!!!" at me, guess what -- Ward 3 has problems, too. Go talk to families with kids at Deal, Hardy, and JR about behavior, discipline, drug use, etc. We have friends with kids at Deal and JR who simply do not use the bathroom at school because it feels dangerous to them. These are inner-city schools. They have the problems of inner city schools.

As for Brent and LT, I would absolutely support at risk set asides for them and exploring cluster options. An LT-JOW cluster does have certain synergies, though I understand why Maury-Miner was selected first because of the more dramatic differences in demographics. I don't know that Brent lends itself as well to a cluster. Maybe with Van Ness, though being on either side of the freeway makes that less appealing, IMO. I actually think some kind of program that unites Brent with Amidon-Bowen could be beneficial -- the Jefferson Middle triangle is weirdly disjointed geographically, and finding ways to build community across the triangle could have real benefits for Jefferson as well as the participating elementary schools.

No. Watkins parent here. I am completely against half-baked experiments that will inevitably cause a functioning school - that mere years ago NOBODY WOULD ATTEND - to turn it into another Peabody/Watkins cluster, with its abysmal 30% IB buy-in (propped up almost entirely by Peabody). That is not good for the DCPS educational landscape, as a whole. It is not good for the Hill, as a whole, which people are already increasingly nervous to invest in due to spiking crime. Taking a successful school and blowing it up to make your own stats look good is incredibly short sighted.

Surely you must know this is offensive, right? It wasn't an empty building - absolutely people were attending. Even on purpose.

Isn't that the same way people are talking about Eastern?

The whataboutism on this thread is out of control. Anytime someone challenges some of these exaggerated or just plain false assertions, the response is "what about Brent, what about LT, what about doing a different cluster, what about Ward 3, what about what people say about Easter, blah blah blah." Never a direct response.

Some of you would feel at home working for Vladimir Putin. Same strategy -- "oh you don't like something I said or did? well what about someone else who said or did something that also seems bad, let's discuss that instead." It is so counterproductive.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I want to address the suggestion that that the boundary between Maury and Miner be redrawn to balance populations between the schools, as opposed to a cluster. I am curious as to whether there is genuinely support for that plan from Maury families.

The DME has said that they can't find a way to redraw the boundary to do this, but that simply cannot be correct. I'm guessing what they really mean is the the only way to do it is to create two severely gerrymandered boundaries. I think what they looked at was drawing the boundary vertically instead of horizontally, as it is now, and the reason this probably didn't work is because Maury is to the west of Miner and the demographics of this neighborhood get whiter and wealthier as you go west and south, and blacker and poorer as you go north and east. Due to the position of the schools, this means that if you draw fairly straight, logical boundaries, you wind up with lopsided demographics whether you draw them N-S or E-W.

So what if instead, they created gerrymandered zones, where they specifically carved out some of the low-income housing now zoned for Miner and assigned it to Maury (this might even require creating a zone that is not contiguous, I'm not sure), and then carved out some of the high-income housing now zoned for Maury and assigned it to Miner.

My question is: how would Maury families feel about this proposal, and does their opinion changed depending on whether their home would be assigned to Miner (and if it wouldn't change, please state whether you have children who would be zoned to Miner as a result of this change, as I know some people on this thread had kids at Maury but no longer have elementary kids).

Follow up question: If they did this, wouldn't this essentially be busing? It was argued up thread that the cluster idea is "essential" busing, but wouldn't gerrymandered zones designed to assign low-SES kids to Maury and high-SES kids to Miner be actual busing?

I am asking this question because I don't think at risk set asides will meaningfully increase the number of at risk kids at Maury, so I am looking for a way to actually increase that percentage without a cluster.

Say more about what you mean by this -- I think this plan can be accomplished if you tighten the Maury boundary by expanding Miner's boundary to capture some of the Maury border houses (assuming that you don't capture Maury's current at-risk kids), but not sure if what you are suggesting is finding Maury's highest SES housing and adding that to Miner even if non-contiguous. When it comes down to it, MC kids you reallocate from Maury to Miner are unlikely to attend if they can lottery anywhere else (just the same as MC kids currently in the Miner boundary). But would need to change the border to make room for low-income housing kids at Maury.

It would certainly do something to change the numbers, but strikes me as having a similar effect as the high-risk set aside. Which I think is fine—I think the only responsible way to do something like this is to do it gradually, to avoid overwhelming Maury and making two schools that are considered undesirable instead of one. Your thesis seems to be that the only acceptable solution is one that creates even numbers of at-risk kids at Maury and Miner instantly -- which I think is neither realistic/possible nor at all desirable.

This is particularly true because if you actually cleaved off the one area with the most expensive houses, it would be the Western end of the zone, which would then have proximity preference to LT. As a result, those families would have a virtually guaranteed alternative option. While I have no doubt those families would prefer to stay at Maury, I would be surprised if 90% of them didn't choose LT over Miner.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Hey all. Billy Lynch here, your local fair housing attorney who specializes in housing and school integration. Thought I’d drop some evidenced-based research into this riveting anonymous discussion. TLDR- integrated schools help all students and do not affect white student performance.

http://school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityResearchBriefNo10.pdf

Integrationists in this thread: I see you and applaud you.

Ok Billy: #1. Maury IS integrated
#2. There will never be enough white students in DCPS to integrate it
#3. There is no evidence that this particular change will help at-risk kids
#4. Integration could happen if DCPS adopted a voluntary approached that considered the IB parents preferences, but for some reason this is considered verboten
#5. Where do your kids go to school?

#6. Gonzaga (where Billy went to high school) is private and 75% white
#7. Loyola Chicago (where Billy went to undergrad) is private and 7% AA
#8. Catholic (where Billy went to law school) is private, 70% white and 6% AA
#9. Harvard Kennedy School (where Billy was a Fellow)...well, you know

By all means, Billy. Lecture us some more from your glass house and pristine throne.

No matter how this school decision shakes out you will still be the loser who took the time to pull this personal information.

Also, my take away from that is that the person in question might recognize that his education was severely lacking specifically because of how not diverse his experience was, and might be looking to rectify that for his kids. I attended very diverse K-12 schools and a diverse state flagship university, but then attended an "elite" law school where for the first time in my life I encountered a large population of people who had never attended public schools and had very little experience with people from less privileged backgrounds than their own. My perception is that these folks were/are very myopic and lacked some basic understanding about how the world works. So if one such person might choose to give his kids a different experience, I am personally very supportive of that.

I also think punishing a PP who chose to drop anonymity specifically to have a more open discussion in this way is incredibly counterproductive. Notice that not a single person has taken him up on his offer to discuss his family's experience at Miner -- they don't care. Instead all questions have been personal questions about his kid and his background. And most haven't been questions at all, just attacks lobbed from behind the safety of anonymity.

Some of you should be ashamed of yourselves. You won't be, I know, you don't have to tell me. But you should be.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:To me it's clear something needs to be done to lower the at risk percentage at Miner. I understand the objections to the cluster, but you can make similar objections to any proposal.

It feels like a lot of people are basically arguing for the status quo, which means Miner remains a school with a lot of at risk kids who it ultimately fails.

It feels like no matter what is proposed, it will be rejected as infeasible, and nothing will change.

How about DC actually figure out how to teach at-risk kids? Moving them from one school to another is NOT an instructional strategy!!! The status quo id terrible but moving kids around does ZERO to fix it.

Are you a Maury parent? Then you are a DCPS parent. If you don't think DC does a good job educating the 46% of DCPS students who are at risk, then why do you live here and send your kid to a DSPS school? Especially one that feeds to a MS and HS that are majority at risk.

Maury parents want it both ways. Please leave us alone to run our school with a 12% at risk percentage and don't you dare interfere in any way, but also the fact that DCPS, the school system we participate in and pay taxes into, is crap at educating at risk kids (heck we can't even handle the 12% at risk kids at our school and are demanding more resources to handle them in upper grades when the non-at-risk families bail for charters or private anyway because, again, our MS/HS feed is majority at risk) is someone else's problem, please deal with it but not in a way that impacts our school at all.

This is the reality of being in DCPS. You don't want to deal with at risk kids, high percentages of SpEd kids, administrative challenges, etc.? MOVE. And before you cry "But Ward 3!!!" at me, guess what -- Ward 3 has problems, too. Go talk to families with kids at Deal, Hardy, and JR about behavior, discipline, drug use, etc. We have friends with kids at Deal and JR who simply do not use the bathroom at school because it feels dangerous to them. These are inner-city schools. They have the problems of inner city schools.

As for Brent and LT, I would absolutely support at risk set asides for them and exploring cluster options. An LT-JOW cluster does have certain synergies, though I understand why Maury-Miner was selected first because of the more dramatic differences in demographics. I don't know that Brent lends itself as well to a cluster. Maybe with Van Ness, though being on either side of the freeway makes that less appealing, IMO. I actually think some kind of program that unites Brent with Amidon-Bowen could be beneficial -- the Jefferson Middle triangle is weirdly disjointed geographically, and finding ways to build community across the triangle could have real benefits for Jefferson as well as the participating elementary schools.

No. Watkins parent here. I am completely against half-baked experiments that will inevitably cause a functioning school - that mere years ago NOBODY WOULD ATTEND - to turn it into another Peabody/Watkins cluster, with its abysmal 30% IB buy-in (propped up almost entirely by Peabody). That is not good for the DCPS educational landscape, as a whole. It is not good for the Hill, as a whole, which people are already increasingly nervous to invest in due to spiking crime. Taking a successful school and blowing it up to make your own stats look good is incredibly short sighted.

Surely you must know this is offensive, right? It wasn't an empty building - absolutely people were attending. Even on purpose.

Isn't that the same way people are talking about Eastern?

The whataboutism on this thread is out of control. Anytime someone challenges some of these exaggerated or just plain false assertions, the response is "what about Brent, what about LT, what about doing a different cluster, what about Ward 3, what about what people say about Easter, blah blah blah." Never a direct response.

Some of you would feel at home working for Vladimir Putin. Same strategy -- "oh you don't like something I said or did? well what about someone else who said or did something that also seems bad, let's discuss that instead." It is so counterproductive.

I have seen lots of direct responses and a lot of substantive engagement from people opposed to the cluster idea. You do not post in good faith and I don't think it's productive to continue trying to discuss anything with you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I want to address the suggestion that that the boundary between Maury and Miner be redrawn to balance populations between the schools, as opposed to a cluster. I am curious as to whether there is genuinely support for that plan from Maury families.

The DME has said that they can't find a way to redraw the boundary to do this, but that simply cannot be correct. I'm guessing what they really mean is the the only way to do it is to create two severely gerrymandered boundaries. I think what they looked at was drawing the boundary vertically instead of horizontally, as it is now, and the reason this probably didn't work is because Maury is to the west of Miner and the demographics of this neighborhood get whiter and wealthier as you go west and south, and blacker and poorer as you go north and east. Due to the position of the schools, this means that if you draw fairly straight, logical boundaries, you wind up with lopsided demographics whether you draw them N-S or E-W.

So what if instead, they created gerrymandered zones, where they specifically carved out some of the low-income housing now zoned for Miner and assigned it to Maury (this might even require creating a zone that is not contiguous, I'm not sure), and then carved out some of the high-income housing now zoned for Maury and assigned it to Miner.

My question is: how would Maury families feel about this proposal, and does their opinion changed depending on whether their home would be assigned to Miner (and if it wouldn't change, please state whether you have children who would be zoned to Miner as a result of this change, as I know some people on this thread had kids at Maury but no longer have elementary kids).

Follow up question: If they did this, wouldn't this essentially be busing? It was argued up thread that the cluster idea is "essential" busing, but wouldn't gerrymandered zones designed to assign low-SES kids to Maury and high-SES kids to Miner be actual busing?

I am asking this question because I don't think at risk set asides will meaningfully increase the number of at risk kids at Maury, so I am looking for a way to actually increase that percentage without a cluster.

Say more about what you mean by this -- I think this plan can be accomplished if you tighten the Maury boundary by expanding Miner's boundary to capture some of the Maury border houses (assuming that you don't capture Maury's current at-risk kids), but not sure if what you are suggesting is finding Maury's highest SES housing and adding that to Miner even if non-contiguous. When it comes down to it, MC kids you reallocate from Maury to Miner are unlikely to attend if they can lottery anywhere else (just the same as MC kids currently in the Miner boundary). But would need to change the border to make room for low-income housing kids at Maury.

It would certainly do something to change the numbers, but strikes me as having a similar effect as the high-risk set aside. Which I think is fine—I think the only responsible way to do something like this is to do it gradually, to avoid overwhelming Maury and making two schools that are considered undesirable instead of one. Your thesis seems to be that the only acceptable solution is one that creates even numbers of at-risk kids at Maury and Miner instantly -- which I think is neither realistic/possible nor at all desirable.

PP here and I want to clarify that this is not my thesis at all. Rather, people on this thread have stated that they are not opposed to increasing Maury's at risk percentage from 12%, but opposed using the cluster as the means. I very much understand the concerns about the proposed cluster and share many of them, but I'm interested in how else we might increase Maury's at risk percentage.

Some have suggested at risk set asides for Maury, but I have a lot of experience looking at how the EA preferences have worked at other schools and the truth is -- they haven't really. And most of those are charter schools where everyone is littering in, so you'd expect the EA preference to be more effective. What you see over and over is that EA spots go unfilled, and this actually causes problems for the schools because it becomes difficult to asses how many EA and regular lottery slots to offer in subsequent years, and also raises questions as to whether those unfilled EA slots maybe given over to people on the non-EA waitlist, and if so at what point. At risk set asides in the lottery sound like an easy fix, but like a lot of things that sound great and easy, they have not shown to be particularly effective.

Also, my goal is not to make the at risk numbers between Maury and Miner equal. I don't really care what the specific numbers are. I just think it's valid in a district with 46% at risk kids to say that Maury needs to take on more at risk students, and I'm wondering how we might achieve that given Maury's current boundary has few at risk families and the school has very high IB buy in. So I'm curious what people would think of a gerrymandered boundary between Maury and Miner, as that looks like the most likely way to increase Maury's at-risk percentage.

I agree that you likely would not see a lot of the Maury families re-zoned to Miner going to Miner. I view that as a separate question. It's obvious that Miner needs to fix some things if they ever hope to attract more non-at-risk families, whether IB or OOB. I'm focused on Maury at the moment.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hey all. Billy Lynch here, your local fair housing attorney who specializes in housing and school integration. Thought I’d drop some evidenced-based research into this riveting anonymous discussion. TLDR- integrated schools help all students and do not affect white student performance.

http://school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityResearchBriefNo10.pdf

Integrationists in this thread: I see you and applaud you.

Ok Billy: #1. Maury IS integrated
#2. There will never be enough white students in DCPS to integrate it
#3. There is no evidence that this particular change will help at-risk kids
#4. Integration could happen if DCPS adopted a voluntary approached that considered the IB parents preferences, but for some reason this is considered verboten
#5. Where do your kids go to school?

#6. Gonzaga (where Billy went to high school) is private and 75% white
#7. Loyola Chicago (where Billy went to undergrad) is private and 7% AA
#8. Catholic (where Billy went to law school) is private, 70% white and 6% AA
#9. Harvard Kennedy School (where Billy was a Fellow)...well, you know

By all means, Billy. Lecture us some more from your glass house and pristine throne.

No matter how this school decision shakes out you will still be the loser who took the time to pull this personal information.

I didn't post this info but it's not hard to find. All on his public LinkedIn bio.

[Anonymous]

It does not really make sense to zone the western portion of the Maury boundary past Maury left as is to Miner or the blocks right around Miner past Miner left as is to Maury. That heavily cuts against the advantages of neighborhood schools and would be recreating the flaws of the current cluster.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To me it's clear something needs to be done to lower the at risk percentage at Miner. I understand the objections to the cluster, but you can make similar objections to any proposal.

It feels like a lot of people are basically arguing for the status quo, which means Miner remains a school with a lot of at risk kids who it ultimately fails.

It feels like no matter what is proposed, it will be rejected as infeasible, and nothing will change.

How about DC actually figure out how to teach at-risk kids? Moving them from one school to another is NOT an instructional strategy!!! The status quo id terrible but moving kids around does ZERO to fix it.

Are you a Maury parent? Then you are a DCPS parent. If you don't think DC does a good job educating the 46% of DCPS students who are at risk, then why do you live here and send your kid to a DSPS school? Especially one that feeds to a MS and HS that are majority at risk.

Maury parents want it both ways. Please leave us alone to run our school with a 12% at risk percentage and don't you dare interfere in any way, but also the fact that DCPS, the school system we participate in and pay taxes into, is crap at educating at risk kids (heck we can't even handle the 12% at risk kids at our school and are demanding more resources to handle them in upper grades when the non-at-risk families bail for charters or private anyway because, again, our MS/HS feed is majority at risk) is someone else's problem, please deal with it but not in a way that impacts our school at all.

This is the reality of being in DCPS. You don't want to deal with at risk kids, high percentages of SpEd kids, administrative challenges, etc.? MOVE. And before you cry "But Ward 3!!!" at me, guess what -- Ward 3 has problems, too. Go talk to families with kids at Deal, Hardy, and JR about behavior, discipline, drug use, etc. We have friends with kids at Deal and JR who simply do not use the bathroom at school because it feels dangerous to them. These are inner-city schools. They have the problems of inner city schools.

As for Brent and LT, I would absolutely support at risk set asides for them and exploring cluster options. An LT-JOW cluster does have certain synergies, though I understand why Maury-Miner was selected first because of the more dramatic differences in demographics. I don't know that Brent lends itself as well to a cluster. Maybe with Van Ness, though being on either side of the freeway makes that less appealing, IMO. I actually think some kind of program that unites Brent with Amidon-Bowen could be beneficial -- the Jefferson Middle triangle is weirdly disjointed geographically, and finding ways to build community across the triangle could have real benefits for Jefferson as well as the participating elementary schools.

No. Watkins parent here. I am completely against half-baked experiments that will inevitably cause a functioning school - that mere years ago NOBODY WOULD ATTEND - to turn it into another Peabody/Watkins cluster, with its abysmal 30% IB buy-in (propped up almost entirely by Peabody). That is not good for the DCPS educational landscape, as a whole. It is not good for the Hill, as a whole, which people are already increasingly nervous to invest in due to spiking crime. Taking a successful school and blowing it up to make your own stats look good is incredibly short sighted.

Surely you must know this is offensive, right? It wasn't an empty building - absolutely people were attending. Even on purpose.

Enrollment went up by 200 kids. It's clearly more in demand, and still educating at risk kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hey all. Billy Lynch here, your local fair housing attorney who specializes in housing and school integration. Thought I’d drop some evidenced-based research into this riveting anonymous discussion. TLDR- integrated schools help all students and do not affect white student performance.

http://school-diversity.org/pdf/DiversityResearchBriefNo10.pdf

Integrationists in this thread: I see you and applaud you.

Ok Billy: #1. Maury IS integrated
#2. There will never be enough white students in DCPS to integrate it
#3. There is no evidence that this particular change will help at-risk kids
#4. Integration could happen if DCPS adopted a voluntary approached that considered the IB parents preferences, but for some reason this is considered verboten
#5. Where do your kids go to school?

#6. Gonzaga (where Billy went to high school) is private and 75% white
#7. Loyola Chicago (where Billy went to undergrad) is private and 7% AA
#8. Catholic (where Billy went to law school) is private, 70% white and 6% AA
#9. Harvard Kennedy School (where Billy was a Fellow)...well, you know

By all means, Billy. Lecture us some more from your glass house and pristine throne.

No matter how this school decision shakes out you will still be the loser who took the time to pull this personal information.

Also, my take away from that is that the person in question might recognize that his education was severely lacking specifically because of how not diverse his experience was, and might be looking to rectify that for his kids. I attended very diverse K-12 schools and a diverse state flagship university, but then attended an "elite" law school where for the first time in my life I encountered a large population of people who had never attended public schools and had very little experience with people from less privileged backgrounds than their own. My perception is that these folks were/are very myopic and lacked some basic understanding about how the world works. So if one such person might choose to give his kids a different experience, I am personally very supportive of that.

I also think punishing a PP who chose to drop anonymity specifically to have a more open discussion in this way is incredibly counterproductive. Notice that not a single person has taken him up on his offer to discuss his family's experience at Miner -- they don't care. Instead all questions have been personal questions about his kid and his background. And most haven't been questions at all, just attacks lobbed from behind the safety of anonymity.

Some of you should be ashamed of yourselves. You won't be, I know, you don't have to tell me. But you should be.

Your confusing the two non-anonymous posters.

Billy supposedly lotteried his kids to LT.
Chris had kids at Miner but moved.

It matters because neither has any skin in the game.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I want to address the suggestion that that the boundary between Maury and Miner be redrawn to balance populations between the schools, as opposed to a cluster. I am curious as to whether there is genuinely support for that plan from Maury families.

The DME has said that they can't find a way to redraw the boundary to do this, but that simply cannot be correct. I'm guessing what they really mean is the the only way to do it is to create two severely gerrymandered boundaries. I think what they looked at was drawing the boundary vertically instead of horizontally, as it is now, and the reason this probably didn't work is because Maury is to the west of Miner and the demographics of this neighborhood get whiter and wealthier as you go west and south, and blacker and poorer as you go north and east. Due to the position of the schools, this means that if you draw fairly straight, logical boundaries, you wind up with lopsided demographics whether you draw them N-S or E-W.

So what if instead, they created gerrymandered zones, where they specifically carved out some of the low-income housing now zoned for Miner and assigned it to Maury (this might even require creating a zone that is not contiguous, I'm not sure), and then carved out some of the high-income housing now zoned for Maury and assigned it to Miner.

My question is: how would Maury families feel about this proposal, and does their opinion changed depending on whether their home would be assigned to Miner (and if it wouldn't change, please state whether you have children who would be zoned to Miner as a result of this change, as I know some people on this thread had kids at Maury but no longer have elementary kids).

Follow up question: If they did this, wouldn't this essentially be busing? It was argued up thread that the cluster idea is "essential" busing, but wouldn't gerrymandered zones designed to assign low-SES kids to Maury and high-SES kids to Miner be actual busing?

I am asking this question because I don't think at risk set asides will meaningfully increase the number of at risk kids at Maury, so I am looking for a way to actually increase that percentage without a cluster.

Say more about what you mean by this -- I think this plan can be accomplished if you tighten the Maury boundary by expanding Miner's boundary to capture some of the Maury border houses (assuming that you don't capture Maury's current at-risk kids), but not sure if what you are suggesting is finding Maury's highest SES housing and adding that to Miner even if non-contiguous. When it comes down to it, MC kids you reallocate from Maury to Miner are unlikely to attend if they can lottery anywhere else (just the same as MC kids currently in the Miner boundary). But would need to change the border to make room for low-income housing kids at Maury.

It would certainly do something to change the numbers, but strikes me as having a similar effect as the high-risk set aside. Which I think is fine—I think the only responsible way to do something like this is to do it gradually, to avoid overwhelming Maury and making two schools that are considered undesirable instead of one. Your thesis seems to be that the only acceptable solution is one that creates even numbers of at-risk kids at Maury and Miner instantly -- which I think is neither realistic/possible nor at all desirable.

PP here and I want to clarify that this is not my thesis at all. Rather, people on this thread have stated that they are not opposed to increasing Maury's at risk percentage from 12%, but opposed using the cluster as the means. I very much understand the concerns about the proposed cluster and share many of them, but I'm interested in how else we might increase Maury's at risk percentage.

Some have suggested at risk set asides for Maury, but I have a lot of experience looking at how the EA preferences have worked at other schools and the truth is -- they haven't really. And most of those are charter schools where everyone is littering in, so you'd expect the EA preference to be more effective. What you see over and over is that EA spots go unfilled, and this actually causes problems for the schools because it becomes difficult to asses how many EA and regular lottery slots to offer in subsequent years, and also raises questions as to whether those unfilled EA slots maybe given over to people on the non-EA waitlist, and if so at what point. At risk set asides in the lottery sound like an easy fix, but like a lot of things that sound great and easy, they have not shown to be particularly effective.

Also, my goal is not to make the at risk numbers between Maury and Miner equal. I don't really care what the specific numbers are. I just think it's valid in a district with 46% at risk kids to say that Maury needs to take on more at risk students, and I'm wondering how we might achieve that given Maury's current boundary has few at risk families and the school has very high IB buy in. So I'm curious what people would think of a gerrymandered boundary between Maury and Miner, as that looks like the most likely way to increase Maury's at-risk percentage.

I agree that you likely would not see a lot of the Maury families re-zoned to Miner going to Miner. I view that as a separate question. It's obvious that Miner needs to fix some things if they ever hope to attract more non-at-risk families, whether IB or OOB. I'm focused on Maury at the moment.

I'm PP, and I really appreciate you clarifying (and apologize for putting words in your mouth!). I see what you are saying. I think essentially tacking on some of the public housing to Maury and tightening the Maury boundary along Miner's borders (assuming again that it wouldn't re-zone Maury's current at-risk kids) would make sense. The big challenge I see would be that it would be pretty clear, if not to the kids then at least to the parents, that the kids coming into Maury from non-contiguous areas are coming from low-income housing. I like to think that wouldn't affect how anyone treats them or their own perception of their experience at Maury (alienation etc.), but potentially there could be impacts there. The other big challenge is if the commute or some other logistical issue puts a larger burden on the families re-zoned into Maury that makes their lives more difficult, or potentially leads to increased truancy for the kids. I'd be fine with a shuttle or something, but I guess there we are edging into busing?

Comparing the merits of the at-risk set aside to the proposed cluster, my question would be that if an at-risk set aside at Maury would go unfilled with so many at-risk students in the next boundary over, doesn't that indicate that a cluster wouldn't work for those families either? They would have to go to Maury in that case, but they won't volunteer to go right now? If it's a matter of families of at-risk students not necessarily being aware of at-risk set asides, I would think that information could be targeted toward the Miner boundary pretty easily.