Keys to Thriving or Just Surviving in NW ES--Parents, I need your insights!
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Anonymous
As it happens, I've already put a ton of scheduled open houses into my calendar. I've got three this week, four next week, and a few more the week after. Those will be useful for getting a feel for the school, checking out its facilities, etc. That said, I don't think an open house will be helpful for the questions I've asked here, with the possible exception of the homework question. Schools have a reputation to uphold. I highly doubt anyone running an open house would be honest if the school sucked at managing bullying, or if their academic culture yielded great test scores at the cost of students' mental health, curiosity, or enthusiasm for learning. That's why I'm here asking for your experiences. |
Anonymous
| If you are IB for Oyster and want to go there for K, prioritize Spanish immersion for PK4. Bruce Monroe at Park View is probably one of the easier places to do that. Or look at the community-based options that are done outside of the lottery (but are listed at myschooldc). |
Anonymous
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I don't think you're going to get anything conclusive from stories here. A lot of this stuff comes from within the kid and the family, it's a subjective experience, and people don't have a lot of data. Especially with regards to bullying where schools are limited in what they can disclose. I know at our school (a well-regarded charter), there has been some pretty bad bullying and a lot of parents are completely unaware and would tell you the school is excellent in that regard. People just don't know.
Look, OP-- everyone wants the things you are writing about! Nobody wants a school that doesn't intervene when there's bullying. Everyone wants their kid to have confidence and perseverance. You're not some uniquely thoughtful parent because of this. It's just that it's hard to find in the public system. And it's just too teacher-dependent-- so what if a school has a great 5th grade teacher? That's 6 years from now, they might not even be there. Principals, programs, ideas, Ed trends, teachers all come and go. The focus of DCPS is teaching lots of kids to read and do math. There's some talk about growth mindset, sense of belonging, community, learning self-regulation-- all the same ideas but in different words. But the bottom line is this school system is trying VERY hard to bring kids from below grade level onto grade level, with moderate but inadequate results. DCPS is not very concerned with the squishy abstract stuff you posted about. I know you think it should be-- I know it all sounds lovely-- but that's just not what you're going to get out of a low-performing urban school system. It sounds like you want a progressive private school that caters to this kind of attitude (without necessarily accomplishing it), but you can't afford it, so you think you can scour the public system and find a hidden gem. Doesn't work that way. If you're concerned that your child will avoid their areas of weakness or non-preferred subjects, I would suggest you be very cautious about Montessori schools. Might not be a fit for you. You need to ask yourself VERY honestly if you think your child will have an ASD diagnosis, and consider whether some schools are better for that. I've heard Murch is good. |
Anonymous
NP. Also a social sciences nerd. I want to tell you, as a liberal who is also a pretty pragmatic person, that a lot of SEL is crap. It doesn't matter what you can read about re: the curriculum or what the authorities say is going on at the school. What matters is the classroom teacher's personality and the group dynamics of the children orbiting your DC. You could have the perfect setup and then one disruptive kid terrorizes everyone for months. Your kid could end up with an unwanted shadow or bully that no other kid has. Or everyone could be nice and friendly but the learning/growth is subpar. All things I have seen happen. My non-DMV district has gone so deep into the trauma-informed feelings wheel that we can't have a district committee meeting without spending 10 minutes opening the meeting by 1) describing our current emotional state, 2) talking about 2 good things in our life, and 3) describing/naming the people we think can support us with our reasons for being at the committee meeting. So we spend the first 10% of the meeting on ritual completely unrelated to the meeting purpose. That's what happens when people spend a lot of energy on SEL mantras. |
Anonymous
| You’ll be happy with Oyster. Do whatever for PK4 and start Oyster in K. |
Anonymous
OP, by the nature of your questions and careful redrafting, you have drawn the attention of experienced parents. We have seen some $hit. Surely you know the jokes about how careful people are with the firstborn then laterborn kids are metaphorically allowed to play in and eat the dirt. Basically you can only control some of the things you think you can control by getting the answers you seek. The teacher above made some good points about parents setting the example for young kids. Also, you can check on homework at school but the current trends are anti-homework for equity reasons as well as educational research findings (as I have been told, have not confirmed myself). This appalls certain parents. I believe drilling is more valuable for diligent and/or bright learners than the current mindset acknowledges. I feel my kids' elementary math education was shorted and I let it happen because their grades were on track. Many feel that schools fall short in spelling and math facts/early math techniques. If you believe in drilling and homework at all as an aid to understanding, you the parent will be doing a lot of supplementing at most schools. If you think free time and no homework is better, it's likely you'll be ending up in that situation anyway. |
Anonymous
This is hilarious because it is so true, it's what is most likely to happen, and would require almost no thought or effort from the OP (other than getting some kind of spot fo PK4). So OP, I think you have a lot of choice regarding how much time you want to spend thinking about schools and attending open houses, etc, before your child very likely ends up at Oyster and then JR or an application school. It can be close to 0 hours or thousands of hours, it's up to you. |
Anonymous
OP here. Setting aside the concerning number of sexist remarks in this thread... I specified in my post that I looked at a lot of other school characteristics already, and I see no need to ask for information I've been able to glean from other sources (like the EdTech/screens post someone else already made on this forum, or similar electronics-focused information I got from analyzing DCPS's publicly available budget datasets). That would be a waste of your time and mine. I shouldn't need to give you an exhaustive list of all the things I've considered, all the sources I've read, and all the publicly available data I've crunched for you to consider my questions in earnest. I sincerely hope you're just having a bad day, because it would be deeply discouraging to discover that you regularly treat others with so much contempt. And obviously quality parenting and level of parent involvement can heavily affect the things I've asked about. Yes, crap parenting can undermine the efforts of the best, most nurturing schools. Yes, great parenting can mitigate the negative effects of crappy schools. Obviously these are things that a good parent should stay on top of all the time, both by actively working to reinforce these qualities at home AND by limiting kids' early exposure to people and environments that discourage these qualities. That's a given. So much so that I didn't think I needed to elaborate on it in my main post. It's also irrelevant to the questions I've asked. I asked for parents' insights on specific topics that aren't otherwise covered meaningfully on DCUM forums, school-specific websites, DCPS websites, or publicly available datasets. Truly, good on you for "muscling your way" through 4 years at a school that didn't serve your kids the way you hoped. That's not an easy feat. And good on you for not giving up on your kid; that sounds like the mark of a great parent. Please respect that I'm trying to be a good parent to my kid, too. Don't make a bunch of baseless assumptions about who I am, what I know, or how much work I've put into parenting or research. I'm asking for this information to lower the likelihood that my husband and I will have to "muscle through" like you did. I'm asking about these specific qualities, in part, to lower the likelihood that my kid will have to go through the same kinds of demoralizing experiences that I did in elementary school. Being a good parent is hard enough already....I don't want to make it harder by putting my kid in a school whose influence we'll have to "overcome," so I'll do the extra info gathering up-front if it improves our chances. What would be helpful is if you could share more specifics about the school you had to muscle through. Was it a NW DC elementary school? If so, can you share some of your experiences and the name of the school? |
Anonymous
| where is your kid in PK3? Do you lik it? If so, stay fpr PK4 and then go to Oyster for K. You aren't likely to get into anything nearby and good OOB anyway, with the possible exception of if your kid is Spanish-dominant. |
Anonymous
Please listen to this person, OP. They are entirely correct. You want a school to socialize your kid, have him play with other kids, get teachers who hopefully see him as an individual and appreciate him and have him trained in the teamwork, listening to directions, and play by the rules, no matter how stupid they are. School teaches how to fit into society, essentially. You can teach your kid to read and write and count all by yourself, and easily. Education begins and ends at home and the socio-emotional learning is mostly through osmosis - except if your kid is autistic, and then he will need explicit teaching. IT'S NOT THAT DEEP. Truly. I'm a research scientist with kids who are young adults and teens, and I can guarantee you there is no need to parse any of this so minutely. |
Anonymous
#1: Bullying not a problem. #2: Amount of homework has seemed age appropriate #3-5: these depend mostly on parents, not the school. If you are asking these questions, then your kid will probably be just fine, unless you give them anxiety. |
Anonymous
Lol, yes! in the words of my high school and now college student kids: "it's not that deep bruh." Advice from someone who send 2 kids from DCPS to the Ivy league (youngest is still in high school) and more importantly, seems to have raised social, well-adjusted, kind humans what I would focus on is: -Socialize your kids from an early age. Build a parent community. Create a village. Host a million playdates. No one likes doing this but it will prove to be more valuable for your kid's social development than anything during the 9am-3pm hours at school. -Get parental anxiety under control. It's so destructive and kids can sense it. You need to be the rock in their lives. -Be consistently involved with their academic and social concerns for all 14 years of school. You're never going to be able to fully hand them off to a school, whether that is the best DCPS school or even a top private (we did both at different points in time). Managing closely for this long is relentless and exhausting which is why almost no one does it. Don't check out. |
Anonymous
OP is autistic. They won’t be able to do any of these things very well, PP. OP— I seriously suggest that you send your kids to private school and go back to reading data. I know you like learning about social psych, but you won’t be able to apply it in real life, as can be seen in this very thread. Your child will need someone who can do this, and paying a private school to take care of it will go a long way. |
Anonymous
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OP, my kids have been to good schools and less good schools. At both, some kids are calm self-starters who love learning and some kids are stressed and dysregulated.
Those things are never about the school. It's always about their personality and their parents. There is a good point that keeps coming up from PPs which is that anxiety is contagious (from parent to child) and that anxiety is the one thing that can cause everything you are worried about. Ive seen it so many times -- parents spiraling out and creating problems where there are none. They stress out the teachers, the admins and their own kids. These parents also like to convince other parents that there are problems, so they end up creating stress in other parents-- it's contagious and really counterproductive. |
Anonymous
Your writing sounds manic. Have you been evaluated for bipolar? |