I am confused between Stuart Hobson Middle School vs. Deal Middle School

[Anonymous]

Its easier to haul kids across town then actually teaching and helping them. If all of these kids are required to stay in their neighborhood schools and parents spend time on them and schools then things will be much better for everyone. Just close all charters and stop transfer musical chair. They may complain but will benefit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Its easier to haul kids across town then actually teaching and helping them. If all of these kids are required to stay in their neighborhood schools and parents spend time on them and schools then things will be much better for everyone. Just close all charters and stop transfer musical chair. They may complain but will benefit.

There's absolutely something to that. But before charter schools took off, DCPS was failing as well. If charter schools weren't an option, some people would go to their neighborhood schools, but others would go private or move.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Its easier to haul kids across town then actually teaching and helping them. If all of these kids are required to stay in their neighborhood schools and parents spend time on them and schools then things will be much better for everyone. Just close all charters and stop transfer musical chair. They may complain but will benefit.

I do think charters are necessary for people in parts of the city with truly failing schools. I think if you totally remove school choice, you would basically give up on families who are IB for schools that are chronically understaffed and have major behavioral and truancy problems that make these schools terrible places for the kids. Giving families at schools like this an option of going elsewhere, even if it requires a long commute, is worth it if it means giving some of these kids a real chance at a decent education.

I like the move of certain charters to reserve seats for economically disadvantaged kids and would expand that program. Maybe they could do something where lottery preference is given to student's whose IB schools fail to meet certain baseline standards of safety and resources, but most DC schools would fall above that baseline. So you could theoretically lottery out of your IB but only if there were spots leftover at your target schools once all kids at failing DCPS schools had a spot.

Yes, this would push some people into privates because there are a lot of people in DC who absolutely will not send their kids to a DCPS and are only going to public schools because they have the opportunity to send their kid to an immersion or Montessori elementary, or one of the charter MS/HSs that are considered decent (DCI, Latin, BASIS). Oh well -- these are people who by definition have options so I wouldn't stress about it. I'm not really sure of the benefit of getting UMC to send their kids to public school if they exclusively send them to public charters anyway.