Current experience at Stuart Hobson?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Is it different at Hardy?

Forget Hardy. It’s still DCPS. Plus now kids are no longer tracking to JR but McArthur. And JR now doesn’t even have honors classes in 9th, 10th. They took it away because of “equity”. That should tell you the direction DCPS is going.

Move to Arlington. It’s actually closer and easier to access downtown if you work there. There is tracking for all subjects, and you get the big added benefit of cheap, great in state colleges which could easily save you over 6 figures.

This is the problem. As parents, we need to be communicating to DCPS that there is a real consequence to this (families leaving the system), and that if they simply had challenging options, families would stay. That's why it's important to talk about the needs of advanced kids, even though if very uncomfortable and cringey.

Does DCPS care about retaining middle class/upper middle class families into the middle and high school grades? I'm not sure they see that as a pathway to success. At the end of the day I think they're more concerned about how to best serve the rest of the socioeconomic spectrum, the group that makes up a majority of students and has less flexibility to leave the system.

Why can't they serve the needs of all the kids? And are the highest-need kids actually being served, if they are being promoted up from grade to grade without learning? We stayed in Title 1 schools long enough to see kids who are basically illiterate being pushed on to the next grade. That's not serving them, either. Is there a way to raise the standards for everyone, instead of continually lowering the standards for everyone?

I don't know. But my point is that if people want to get DCPS on board with advanced coursework/pathways, they need to be making the argument in a way that's compelling to DCPS and DCPS's current priorities.

That's true. I think one argument is that a "remedial" class (don't call it that) may actually be more effective at teaching kids at that level, instead of a mixed-ability class, at the middle and high school level. They have a naming problem, but splitting up kids by ability benefits all of them.

DCI has remedial (support) classes in many subjects. It also has advanced classes in math and foreign language (not English). If DCI can do it the far more resource rich dcps can do it. But they don’t because?

Stuart Hobson also has support classes (as electives) both for remedial purposes and as support to accelerate math.