Outside-the-box guidance for evaluating DC elementary schools?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Hi all, we're moving to DC and will have a child start 1st grade (and a second soon eligible for PK) next Fall. One challenge of a coast=to-coast move has been trying to assess the quality of a DC school beyond the ratings and statistics. Those metrics tell one side of the story but don't give us an idea of trends at the school or parent engagement, school leadership, etc. For instance, Bancroft in Mt. Pleasant has about 50% competency scores and is given the same Great Schools rating of 10 as Janney, which has almost 90% student competency on state tests. Bancroft is racially and economically very different than Janney (in a good way, in our opinion). And then there are a bunch of schools in between. How do we find other resources and info. about various public schools. Neighborhoods in DC we're open to moving to are Petworth, Shepherd Park, Takoma, Brookland and, if we can afford it, the northwest neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park where all the highly rated schools are (Lafayette, Murch, Janney, etc.) Just reaching out here to see if there's a different approach you can recommend or other resources that are available that could help us. Reading some of the prior posts and threads here has been helpful. Thanks so much!

Recommendation - rent in bounds for a year at a school like Janney. Get the "rights" to stay if you want and figure out what neighborhood is the best fit for you.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’ve worked in both a highly rated, well liked on DCUM school and a poorly rated, Title I, rarely mentioned on DCUM school, both DCPS elementaries. I’ve also worked in two other elementary schools in two different states, one a typical upper middle class school and the other a Title I not as bad as DCPS but still low performing. For my own child what would make the difference is the level of joy in the school. The out of state Title I had just as many behavior problems as the Title I one DCPS, but overall the building had a sense of joy for students. We did fun school wide activities, we had celebrations, kids did fun projects as a school or grade. I still have some awesome memories of times with kids. The DCPS Title I the very first thing I noticed was the kids seemed depressed and admin wasn’t interested in making school a joyous place to be. The staff didn’t care either when I tried to organize some celebrations and events.

You can worry about test scores all day, but for a neurotypical child from an ordinary family will do just fine anywhere at the elementary level. But whether your kid loves school will be determined by the joy in the school. And from my years teaching, I see that kids who love school are more engaged and eager to learn.

Now, how do you figure out which schools have that sense of joy? That will be harder to figure out and I can’t really answer that. I would poke around on Facebook pages, PTA/PTO pages, Google them and see what comes up. Look at the kids in the pictures and what they are doing. What kind of events does the school have? Do they invite families into the building? Things like that.

This. My kids were at a MD Title I school that was great and they were learning well. Probably not by DCUM standards (majority black and brown kids) but my half-white/Asian kids did great and loved it, as did our white friends. GreatSchools is overrated and many (white) people judge schools by how many people look like them as being “good.”