what have Hill parents demanded of middle schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The the answer needs to be economic integration in schools. The new bussing?

Except there aren't enough high-SES families with school aged to make the numbers work. It's an easy proposition if the city were roughly divided among high-, middle- and low-SES. Oh, and it would result in white flight part deux.

If 30-40% of all DCPS students were low-SES and below proficiency, busing would be a workable solution. Instead, 80% of all DCPS students are low-SES and below proficiency. So by implementing random busing you'd basically ensure that every single DCPS school was a failure.

That's the dirty little secret behind pretty much all education discussions in high-poverty jurisdictions like DC. Aside from schools like KIPP (where there's a combination of self-selection and aggressive discipline policies) no one knows how to successfully education extremely poor kids. The problem is one of poverty, not one of education.

So the only successful schools are one's that manage to "hack" the system by tweaking the demographics. You either do that via wealthy IB cohort (e.g. JKLM and some Capitol Hill schools), or by carefully crafting a charter that will alienate poor people (e.g. Mandarin immersion, etc...)

[Anonymous]

It may help somewhat to live in an almost suburb.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:That's the dirty little secret behind pretty much all education discussions in high-poverty jurisdictions like DC. Aside from schools like KIPP (where there's a combination of self-selection and aggressive discipline policies) no one knows how to successfully education extremely poor kids. The problem is one of poverty, not one of education.

So the only successful schools are one's that manage to "hack" the system by tweaking the demographics. You either do that via wealthy IB cohort (e.g. JKLM and some Capitol Hill schools), or by carefully crafting a charter that will alienate poor people (e.g. Mandarin immersion, etc...)

A parent from Ross at the ed cmte round table said that there was no achievement gap between poorer and other students in testing at Ross. So it is possible. Perhaps in only limited conditions, but we don't have to be totally absolute about it.

[Anonymous]

I can think of a number of reasons this may the case at Ross.

[Anonymous]

A quick look at Ross makes me curious to find out more.

The entire school has 157 kids

In 2012 32% of the students were FARMS eligible. 27% of those tested were below grade level in math. 35% were below grade level in reading

In 2013 there were 31% of students FARM eligible. 21% below grade level in math. 18% in reading.

The conclusion is that some FARMS students are doing as well as non-FARMS students but not all.

But the progress is good. There is something to be celebrated here.

Perhaps tiny schools with 2/3 middle/upper class students is the secret

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A quick look at Ross makes me curious to find out more.

The entire school has 157 kids

In 2012 32% of the students were FARMS eligible. 27% of those tested were below grade level in math. 35% were below grade level in reading

In 2013 there were 31% of students FARM eligible. 21% below grade level in math. 18% in reading.

The conclusion is that some FARMS students are doing as well as non-FARMS students but not all.

But the progress is good. There is something to be celebrated here.

Perhaps tiny schools with 2/3 middle/upper class students is the secret

That's pretty much exactly what I said above: "If 30-40% of all DCPS students were low-SES and below proficiency, busing would be a workable solution."

Now, if you had a school system where 30% of the kids were FARM eligible, but they were all concentrated in a few schools EOTR, then busing would be a solution. You'd be breaking up 100% FARM schools with the goal of redistributing that poverty around the city so that eventually all schools would be 70/30 non-FARM/FARM. (IOW, like Ross.)

But that's not the situation we're dealing with. In DC, we have a school system where 70-80% of all school kids are FARM eligible. By redistributing that poverty across the school system, all you do is ensure every single school is non-functional.

The only real solutions are a) radically increase welfare spending to bring most of DC's school-age kids out of poverty; or b) wait for gentrification to drive the number of poor school-aged kids below 40-50%

[Anonymous]

I forgot to list a third option: continue to open charters whose school culture alienates poor parents. If you want start a charter that is *guaranteed* to have the highest test scores in the city, open a "Pro-Gay Arabic Immersion PCS". Your FARM eligible student population should be around 1%.

[Anonymous]

Parents of children in failing schools are more desperate than you might think.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Parents of children in failing schools are more desperate than you might think.

Some are. Some aren't. That's part of the problem.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I forgot to list a third option: continue to open charters whose school culture alienates poor parents. If you want start a charter that is *guaranteed* to have the highest test scores in the city, open a "Pro-Gay Arabic Immersion PCS". Your FARM eligible student population should be around 1%.

WTF

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I forgot to list a third option: continue to open charters whose school culture alienates poor parents. If you want start a charter that is *guaranteed* to have the highest test scores in the city, open a "Pro-Gay Arabic Immersion PCS". Your FARM eligible student population should be around 1%.

WTF

Sure, I'll elaborate. The single most important factor in the success of a public charter school is the self-selection process in parents. The lottery is of course open to all, but in order to be picked in the lottery, you need to enroll in the lottery. So the first thing you do is locate your school somewhere that's difficult for poor people to get to. Then you erect cultural barriers to poor people applying.

The optimal "cultural barrier" would be to create a school that combines rationalist (i.e. atheist) teachings, maybe an early ages gay-friendly sex ed curriculum, and then some alienating immersion language component--say arabic immersion. I guarantee that the super-majority of applicants would come from high-SES households.

It's a proven model: http://www.dcpcsb.org/data/images/129-yuying_ap11-12.pdf

[Anonymous]

I get what you're saying, though you're cloaking something politically inappropriate in the language of insanity.

What you mean is, create a school that seems impossibly irrelevant to a typical lower middle class black family looking for high quality version of a meat-and-potatoes elementary/middle education, which is your mainstream DC charter consumer, with the winking knowledge that this irrelevance will allow it to be an educational refuge for high income families.

It's been stated on this board many different ways before. We know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I get what you're saying, though you're cloaking something politically inappropriate in the language of insanity.

What you mean is, create a school that seems impossibly irrelevant to a typical lower middle class black family looking for high quality version of a meat-and-potatoes elementary/middle education, which is your mainstream DC charter consumer, with the winking knowledge that this irrelevance will allow it to be an educational refuge for high income families.

It's been stated on this board many different ways before. We know.

Problem with this logic is that the majority of charter schools in the district are the meat-and-potatoes high quality elementary/middle education programs that you suggest black, middle class families are looking for. The percentage of AA students in charters is much higher than in DCPS. Would you also say that those charters are trying to wink wink not appeal to white families? How about Roots PCS or Thurgood Marshall are they purposefully trying to create a school culture that is meant to EXCLUDE others?

Perhaps these schools cultures and specializations should be looked at more as school cultures and specializations than as a secret wink wink oh so evil way to carve out educational "refuge" unless that refuge happens to be from inadequate DCPS schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I forgot to list a third option: continue to open charters whose school culture alienates poor parents. If you want start a charter that is *guaranteed* to have the highest test scores in the city, open a "Pro-Gay Arabic Immersion PCS". Your FARM eligible student population should be around 1%.

WTF

Sure, I'll elaborate. The single most important factor in the success of a public charter school is the self-selection process in parents. The lottery is of course open to all, but in order to be picked in the lottery, you need to enroll in the lottery. So the first thing you do is locate your school somewhere that's difficult for poor people to get to. Then you erect cultural barriers to poor people applying.

The optimal "cultural barrier" would be to create a school that combines rationalist (i.e. atheist) teachings, maybe an early ages gay-friendly sex ed curriculum, and then some alienating immersion language component--say arabic immersion. I guarantee that the super-majority of applicants would come from high-SES households.

It's a proven model: http://www.dcpcsb.org/data/images/129-yuying_ap11-12.pdf

I appreciate satire as much as the next pseudo intellectual but it's not exactly fair to ding charters for their locations. They have to work with the building stock available. Most charters don't start off with an endowment of several million dollars needed to acquire a suitable parcel of zoned property located near a metro stop and then construct a school from scratch.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I get what you're saying, though you're cloaking something politically inappropriate in the language of insanity.

What you mean is, create a school that seems impossibly irrelevant to a typical lower middle class black family looking for high quality version of a meat-and-potatoes elementary/middle education, which is your mainstream DC charter consumer, with the winking knowledge that this irrelevance will allow it to be an educational refuge for high income families.

It's been stated on this board many different ways before. We know.

so something like Sela...