DCPS Selective HSs: What to know.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These are the winning science Olympiad teams in the city last year:

1 BASIS DC Hubble Washington, DC
2 National Cathedral School Washington, DC
3 Maret School A Washington, DC
4 Field School Washington, DC
5 McKinley Technology H.S. Washington, DC
6 Maret School B Washington, DC
7 BASIS DC Webb Washington, DC
8 Washington International School Washington, DC
9 GWU Online H.S. Washington, DC
10 Columbia Heights Education Campus Washington,
11 McArthur H.S. Washington, DC

What's GWU online high school?

My prediction based on this list is that public school parents with STEMy kids on the eastern side of the city will slowly start ranking McKinley Tech over Walls. Like maybe 10 years from now that will officially swap. I can understand why Deal and Hardy parents won't, because the commute is crazy, but I see slow adoption from the other side of the city.

That’s what they should be doing. McKinley is set up to be a STEM school.

Here is the big problem. You can’t offer advance STEM courses and fill these classes if you don’t have a pipeline of strong STEM offerings coming up the chain and strong STEM kids.

Take for example math. You can’t offer AP calculus in 10th if you don’t offer Algebra 2 by 8th grade. What school in DCPS EOTP offers that? Even having a geometry class in 8th, which is a lower bar isn’t happening in overwhelming majority of schools. As to science classes, well the CAPE scores were so bad, that DCPS no longer even does them. The new science curriculum is not going to help either.

You have to start with stronger offerings in middle school for the students with potential. You have to keep the STEM kids in DCPS and not have them leave for charters, privates, or the burbs.

I don’t have the answer to above but it’s pointless to offer advance classes at the high school level with rigor if you don’t have kids who can handle them.

Yeah it's going to o be slow going because you can't stop STEM kids for taking a BASIS spot if they get one, some subset will already been in a DCI feeder and will stay because they have friends there and the offerings are preferable to McKinley for them, and then some high achieving kids will just want. walls and Banneker based on reputation. So you have this very slowly growing group of other STEM kids who are coming up the pipeline and will choose McKinley.

(And JR families will either stick to with JR or go private, bc it doesn't make sense to commute to a school like McKinley).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These are the winning science Olympiad teams in the city last year:

1 BASIS DC Hubble Washington, DC
2 National Cathedral School Washington, DC
3 Maret School A Washington, DC
4 Field School Washington, DC
5 McKinley Technology H.S. Washington, DC
6 Maret School B Washington, DC
7 BASIS DC Webb Washington, DC
8 Washington International School Washington, DC
9 GWU Online H.S. Washington, DC
10 Columbia Heights Education Campus Washington,
11 McArthur H.S. Washington, DC

What's GWU online high school?

My prediction based on this list is that public school parents with STEMy kids on the eastern side of the city will slowly start ranking McKinley Tech over Walls. Like maybe 10 years from now that will officially swap. I can understand why Deal and Hardy parents won't, because the commute is crazy, but I see slow adoption from the other side of the city.

That’s what they should be doing. McKinley is set up to be a STEM school.

Here is the big problem. You can’t offer advance STEM courses and fill these classes if you don’t have a pipeline of strong STEM offerings coming up the chain and strong STEM kids.

Take for example math. You can’t offer AP calculus in 10th if you don’t offer Algebra 2 by 8th grade. What school in DCPS EOTP offers that? Even having a geometry class in 8th, which is a lower bar isn’t happening in overwhelming majority of schools. As to science classes, well the CAPE scores were so bad, that DCPS no longer even does them. The new science curriculum is not going to help either.

You have to start with stronger offerings in middle school for the students with potential. You have to keep the STEM kids in DCPS and not have them leave for charters, privates, or the burbs.

I don’t have the answer to above but it’s pointless to offer advance classes at the high school level with rigor if you don’t have kids who can handle them.

This.

DCPS does a horrible job with science in ES. (Maybe they think 1-to-1 devices = STEM?)

The new MS curriculum is a travesty, and what they had before was pretty bad.

[Anonymous]

So does BASIS have two teams?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So does BASIS have two teams?

They have a big team so I guess they have enough to split into two teams.

The school is really proud of their Science Olympiad and debate clubs, talk them up and support the teams, and the teams always do well in regional competitions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:These are the winning science Olympiad teams in the city last year:

1 BASIS DC Hubble Washington, DC
2 National Cathedral School Washington, DC
3 Maret School A Washington, DC
4 Field School Washington, DC
5 McKinley Technology H.S. Washington, DC
6 Maret School B Washington, DC
7 BASIS DC Webb Washington, DC
8 Washington International School Washington, DC
9 GWU Online H.S. Washington, DC
10 Columbia Heights Education Campus Washington,
11 McArthur H.S. Washington, DC

What's GWU online high school?

My prediction based on this list is that public school parents with STEMy kids on the eastern side of the city will slowly start ranking McKinley Tech over Walls. Like maybe 10 years from now that will officially swap. I can understand why Deal and Hardy parents won't, because the commute is crazy, but I see slow adoption from the other side of the city.

That’s what they should be doing. McKinley is set up to be a STEM school.

Here is the big problem. You can’t offer advance STEM courses and fill these classes if you don’t have a pipeline of strong STEM offerings coming up the chain and strong STEM kids.

Take for example math. You can’t offer AP calculus in 10th if you don’t offer Algebra 2 by 8th grade. What school in DCPS EOTP offers that? Even having a geometry class in 8th, which is a lower bar isn’t happening in overwhelming majority of schools. As to science classes, well the CAPE scores were so bad, that DCPS no longer even does them. The new science curriculum is not going to help either.

You have to start with stronger offerings in middle school for the students with potential. You have to keep the STEM kids in DCPS and not have them leave for charters, privates, or the burbs.

I don’t have the answer to above but it’s pointless to offer advance classes at the high school level with rigor if you don’t have kids who can handle them.

There's no middle school EOTP with a big enough cohort of kids in need of algebra 2, either, and it's not going to get created just by offering that class. You can see the number of sixth graders getting 4s and 5s in math at Deal compared to any EOTP middle school, both because of composition but also because Deal is huge. You'd have to do a test-in program and commit to differentiation. Which would be great, but DCPS won't even do test-in for high school admissions.