For folks w/ kids that started at new schools... Any big surprises?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So I'm going to try to anonymize this a little, but here goes:
People tend to think of DCPS as heavily African-American outside of Ward 3. That is not the case in a number of schools in Wards 1 and 4 and 5 with large Spanish-speaking populations. Where there are more of these kids, the schools are often heavily ELL.
The demand for early childhood programs among all families in DC means there are proportionally more white and Asian and overall upper income families in all sorts of DCPS than you might expect.
In demand programs have higher shares of upper income families as they take efforts at the margins to get into these programs (usually due to knowledge others do not have).

Historically, these upper income families, white, Asian, black and others who see that the students around their prepared children are not meeting test score expectations start to move them to other schools. (While I dislike this I am laying out a trend.)

This means that overall reporting on the demographics of schools reflect schools that are proportionately less white, Asian, and upper income than what you see in the earliest grades.

Overall, I would say, however, that in many of these schools despite what you NOTICE the actual proportions of white and Asian and other students remains quite small.

I certainly notice the number of white and Asian students in my kids' classes, but they are still 3-4 kids out of classes of 20-25. It's not nothing, but it's no kind of revolution.

Frankly, having a slightly higher proportion of students likely to be at grade level, which usually has to do with parental education level, creates the possibility that teachers can direct a little bit of direct support to a group of kids who are similar in terms of English and math ability and not struggling to reach grade level, rather than have a couple of oddball students every so often they aren't sure what to do with.

So your continued participation in your schools after K, with your fellow classroom families, will mean a lot down the line, even if there aren't many like you 2-3 is better than just one.

I don't know why you anonymize. Just name the schools, it's more helpful.
This is the critical mass theory of change, if only us educated parents band together and keep our kids in our DCPS, it will start to perform better and snowball effect. But, in practice, parents don't keep these promises when they lottery into somewhere already better.
I'd love to see some good studies on this choice making process. We're pitting the easy win for your kid, and a lot of stress alleviation, against the betterment of society/neighborhood argument, which is not fair at all to place on parents. It requires a policy solution.