Middle Schools for Cap Hill

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't agree. The ed picture just isn't as black and white as you paint it.

City demographics continue to shift, and gentrification remains a powerful force for change. Mayor Bowser won't be in office forever.

The ed landscape you describe may have been accurate a decade back, but I'm not convinced that that DCPS and the city council members no longer give a whit about keeping high SES families in traditional public schools after elementary school. If high SES retention in DCPS middle and high schools was irrelevant politically, DCPS wouldn't be planning to open a 2nd high school in Ward 3 within the next few years, mainly to relieve crowding at Wilson.

Once the new HS opens, some CH families will join Hardy families there, via the OOB lottery.

No DCPS doesn’t care. They have taken honors classes away at Wilson with honors for all and more families from Deal are opting out of Wilson. They have done away with any testing for Walls and United the academic entrance and the admission process is opaque with the city saying they want more kids from other low SES wards other than 3.

The new HS will relieve some crowding at Wilson but don’t expect too much. My money is the primary motive is to draw OOB at risk kids to better schools and I bet anything there is going to be a set aside at risk preference.

. Honors for All st Wilson has been rolled back somewhat this school year. Just not true that many in-boundary families have been abandoning Deal and Wilson. If it were, in-boundary numbers wouldn’t have risen during the pandemic. Private schools cost a bomb and, with college, housing and fuel costs rising, even moderately wealthy families are feeling the squeeze. I’m willing to believe that DCPS doesn’t prioritize high SES\white retention, particularly EotP, but not that they could care less about it.

They do care -- just not in the way DCUM expects. This was all studied years ago, the last time boundaries/feeders were examined. If they allowed one Deal-type middle school to emerge, that would have retained all the white folks. But what those white people wanted was one middle school that contained all the gentrifying schools -- so that the disparity between the gentrified middle school and the other middle schools would have been enormous.

What DCPS wanted was to spread the gentrifiers among all the middle school, so their rising tide would lift all the boats. They figured that not all of them would leave (because not everyone can afford to/afford private), and not everyone would run to a charter, because BASIS, Latin, and 2 Rivers all have their own drawbacks. They are playing the very long game, and I can see it succeeding...maybe 20 years from now.

DCPS could have had six or seven elementary schools feed into on Deal type middle school, a mix of gentrified schools (Brent, Maury, SWS) and gentrifying schools (Ludlow, JO Wilson, Payne, Tyler).

Agree that they're playing a very long game, and very cynical game, that could succeed decades from now.

LOL! You really think all the gentrifiers would agree which schools would be let in, and which left out?? You think the Cluster parents wouldn't be screaming if Brent, Maury, and SWS were all in one school?? Give me a break.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:well, they approved "MacArthur"

Yes — they dealt with Jackson-Reed overcrowding not by limiting the enrollment of out of boundary students (and almost certainly making it even whiter), but by splitting it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't agree. The ed picture just isn't as black and white as you paint it.

City demographics continue to shift, and gentrification remains a powerful force for change. Mayor Bowser won't be in office forever.

The ed landscape you describe may have been accurate a decade back, but I'm not convinced that that DCPS and the city council members no longer give a whit about keeping high SES families in traditional public schools after elementary school. If high SES retention in DCPS middle and high schools was irrelevant politically, DCPS wouldn't be planning to open a 2nd high school in Ward 3 within the next few years, mainly to relieve crowding at Wilson.

Once the new HS opens, some CH families will join Hardy families there, via the OOB lottery.

No DCPS doesn’t care. They have taken honors classes away at Wilson with honors for all and more families from Deal are opting out of Wilson. They have done away with any testing for Walls and United the academic entrance and the admission process is opaque with the city saying they want more kids from other low SES wards other than 3.

The new HS will relieve some crowding at Wilson but don’t expect too much. My money is the primary motive is to draw OOB at risk kids to better schools and I bet anything there is going to be a set aside at risk preference.

. Honors for All st Wilson has been rolled back somewhat this school year. Just not true that many in-boundary families have been abandoning Deal and Wilson. If it were, in-boundary numbers wouldn’t have risen during the pandemic. Private schools cost a bomb and, with college, housing and fuel costs rising, even moderately wealthy families are feeling the squeeze. I’m willing to believe that DCPS doesn’t prioritize high SES\white retention, particularly EotP, but not that they could care less about it.

They do care -- just not in the way DCUM expects. This was all studied years ago, the last time boundaries/feeders were examined. If they allowed one Deal-type middle school to emerge, that would have retained all the white folks. But what those white people wanted was one middle school that contained all the gentrifying schools -- so that the disparity between the gentrified middle school and the other middle schools would have been enormous.

What DCPS wanted was to spread the gentrifiers among all the middle school, so their rising tide would lift all the boats. They figured that not all of them would leave (because not everyone can afford to/afford private), and not everyone would run to a charter, because BASIS, Latin, and 2 Rivers all have their own drawbacks. They are playing the very long game, and I can see it succeeding...maybe 20 years from now.

DCPS could have had six or seven elementary schools feed into on Deal type middle school, a mix of gentrified schools (Brent, Maury, SWS) and gentrifying schools (Ludlow, JO Wilson, Payne, Tyler).

Agree that they're playing a very long game, and very cynical game, that could succeed decades from now.

That's exactly what they did with SH -- it went from just being the Cluster middle school to being the feeder for Watkins, Ludlow, and JO.

[Anonymous]

They are never going to open a MS on the Hill where Brent, Maury, SWS, and LT are feeders and another MS where all the Title 1 schools feed. That obviously would never ever ever happen for many reasons including that it probably would be illegal.

I haven't run the numbers but it seems like if every single ES on the Hill fed into one MS, that would most truly resemble Deal. Deal is absolutely enormous. There is a wide, wide, range of diverse students with varying abilities and because of sheer numbers there is a strong cohort of high-achievers (along with everything else). Deal is not great because every single kid is honors level. It is great (among other reasons) because they have the numbers to support kids at every level, including honors. They also have the numbers to support a robust program of extra-curriculars that are simply unsurpassed elsewhere in DCPS, and probably most other middle schools nationwide. I could conceive of this working on the Hill if they could find the real estate for a Deal-like school, but it seems unlikely that this would happen given current dynamics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't agree. The ed picture just isn't as black and white as you paint it.

City demographics continue to shift, and gentrification remains a powerful force for change. Mayor Bowser won't be in office forever.

The ed landscape you describe may have been accurate a decade back, but I'm not convinced that that DCPS and the city council members no longer give a whit about keeping high SES families in traditional public schools after elementary school. If high SES retention in DCPS middle and high schools was irrelevant politically, DCPS wouldn't be planning to open a 2nd high school in Ward 3 within the next few years, mainly to relieve crowding at Wilson.

Once the new HS opens, some CH families will join Hardy families there, via the OOB lottery.

No DCPS doesn’t care. They have taken honors classes away at Wilson with honors for all and more families from Deal are opting out of Wilson. They have done away with any testing for Walls and United the academic entrance and the admission process is opaque with the city saying they want more kids from other low SES wards other than 3.

The new HS will relieve some crowding at Wilson but don’t expect too much. My money is the primary motive is to draw OOB at risk kids to better schools and I bet anything there is going to be a set aside at risk preference.

. Honors for All st Wilson has been rolled back somewhat this school year. Just not true that many in-boundary families have been abandoning Deal and Wilson. If it were, in-boundary numbers wouldn’t have risen during the pandemic. Private schools cost a bomb and, with college, housing and fuel costs rising, even moderately wealthy families are feeling the squeeze. I’m willing to believe that DCPS doesn’t prioritize high SES\white retention, particularly EotP, but not that they could care less about it.

They do care -- just not in the way DCUM expects. This was all studied years ago, the last time boundaries/feeders were examined. If they allowed one Deal-type middle school to emerge, that would have retained all the white folks. But what those white people wanted was one middle school that contained all the gentrifying schools -- so that the disparity between the gentrified middle school and the other middle schools would have been enormous.

What DCPS wanted was to spread the gentrifiers among all the middle school, so their rising tide would lift all the boats. They figured that not all of them would leave (because not everyone can afford to/afford private), and not everyone would run to a charter, because BASIS, Latin, and 2 Rivers all have their own drawbacks. They are playing the very long game, and I can see it succeeding...maybe 20 years from now.

This experiment has failed.

+1. Also, it's a weird notion that gentrifiers are supposed to educate everyone else's kids. Shouldn't that really be up to DCPS? One 8-year old doesn't owe another kid anything.

You must not have been in DC very long. Who do you think covers most of the extra stuff people expect in schools? The PTA. Who gives all the money to the PTA?? Gentrifiers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't agree. The ed picture just isn't as black and white as you paint it.

City demographics continue to shift, and gentrification remains a powerful force for change. Mayor Bowser won't be in office forever.

The ed landscape you describe may have been accurate a decade back, but I'm not convinced that that DCPS and the city council members no longer give a whit about keeping high SES families in traditional public schools after elementary school. If high SES retention in DCPS middle and high schools was irrelevant politically, DCPS wouldn't be planning to open a 2nd high school in Ward 3 within the next few years, mainly to relieve crowding at Wilson.

Once the new HS opens, some CH families will join Hardy families there, via the OOB lottery.

No DCPS doesn’t care. They have taken honors classes away at Wilson with honors for all and more families from Deal are opting out of Wilson. They have done away with any testing for Walls and United the academic entrance and the admission process is opaque with the city saying they want more kids from other low SES wards other than 3.

The new HS will relieve some crowding at Wilson but don’t expect too much. My money is the primary motive is to draw OOB at risk kids to better schools and I bet anything there is going to be a set aside at risk preference.

. Honors for All st Wilson has been rolled back somewhat this school year. Just not true that many in-boundary families have been abandoning Deal and Wilson. If it were, in-boundary numbers wouldn’t have risen during the pandemic. Private schools cost a bomb and, with college, housing and fuel costs rising, even moderately wealthy families are feeling the squeeze. I’m willing to believe that DCPS doesn’t prioritize high SES\white retention, particularly EotP, but not that they could care less about it.

They do care -- just not in the way DCUM expects. This was all studied years ago, the last time boundaries/feeders were examined. If they allowed one Deal-type middle school to emerge, that would have retained all the white folks. But what those white people wanted was one middle school that contained all the gentrifying schools -- so that the disparity between the gentrified middle school and the other middle schools would have been enormous.

What DCPS wanted was to spread the gentrifiers among all the middle school, so their rising tide would lift all the boats. They figured that not all of them would leave (because not everyone can afford to/afford private), and not everyone would run to a charter, because BASIS, Latin, and 2 Rivers all have their own drawbacks. They are playing the very long game, and I can see it succeeding...maybe 20 years from now.

This experiment has failed.

+1. Also, it's a weird notion that gentrifiers are supposed to educate everyone else's kids. Shouldn't that really be up to DCPS? One 8-year old doesn't owe another kid anything.

You must not have been in DC very long. Who do you think covers most of the extra stuff people expect in schools? The PTA. Who gives all the money to the PTA?? Gentrifiers.

+1. The PTA pays for science education at Maury. If left up to DCPS, science would be barely taught.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Guys, DCPS is never going to approve a middle school that will be de facto segregated. They just will not. Come up with some other ideas.

SH (513) + EH (266) + Jefferson (377) combined (1156) is still substantially smaller than Deal (1463).

If you combined the feeders for all of those schools -- Ludlow/Watkins/JOW + SWS/Maury/Payne/Miner + Brent/Van Ness/Tyler/Amidon-Bowen -- your school would not be segregated at all. It would be diverse with the majority of kids feeding from T1s but with plenty of kids to support actually advanced classes.

The question would be where to put it. Eastern has 735 students and is very close to EH, which is massively under-enrolled, so the most obvious option would be to split the 3 grades between those two facilities and put Eastern at either SH or Jefferson; I'm assuming SH would be the better fit location & size-wise and it's a nice facility. There are obviously other possibilities too.

Agree with this.

I also feel like this strategy could have a much faster "lift all boats" effect because a new school that pulled all these populations together could offer both (1) programs geared toward accelerating kids performing below grade level as well as outreach to high risk populations, and (2) programs to support kids excelling academically who want to pursue higher level courses as they prepare for high school. Like if you combined the budgets and facilities of these schools, you can take advantage of some economies of scale and reach the needs of more kids than are currently being served by these schools.

Just to give you a sense of where I'm coming from, I grew up in a smallish town (10k population, but isolated) and they consolidated schools in this way and it's one of the best things about my education. My highs school was fully half FARMs students but since there were no private options, it's also where the doctors and lawyers and business owners sent their kids. The school had a ton of outreach for kids who needed it -- free meals, after school programs, tutoring, etc. And it also had a decent amount of support for high achievers -- AP classes, tons of clubs and academic groups, etc. I had friends who lived in million dollar homes with pools and vacationed in Europe, and friends who were on welfare and lived in small apartments in single parent families. And lots of people in between. The school had a 90+% graduation rate. I can't remember the college rate but it was well over 50% (maybe somewhere between 60 and 70%) which means lots and lots of FARMS kids were getting some form of college education.

And before you ask, diverse population. Very few black families in town but about 50% non-white Hispanic, plus a significant Native population. Also, a significant percent of the white families were rural and/or poor. So lots of diversity in all directions.

I'm not saying it was perfect, but I've experienced a school that managed to be a lot of things to a lot of kids all at once, with the added benefit to all of us that we learned how to interact within a truly SES diverse community. I feel like the Hill has the opportunity to do this because even though some wealthy families on the Hill will always bail for private, the cost of private in this area makes it prohibitive for most families. So really you are just competing against charters. And if you offered families a chance to send their kids to a large, well-funded, racially and economically diverse school that offered programs designed to meet their needs, why on earth would most of those families choose to bus their kids across town to a charter?

I just feel like people throw up excuses but I truly do not understand why this isn't an obvious solution, and I don't understand why the assumption is that the school will be segregated when the whole problem is that the existing schools are segregated (in that too few white, MC and UMC families send their kids there).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They are never going to open a MS on the Hill where Brent, Maury, SWS, and LT are feeders and another MS where all the Title 1 schools feed. That obviously would never ever ever happen for many reasons including that it probably would be illegal.

I haven't run the numbers but it seems like if every single ES on the Hill fed into one MS, that would most truly resemble Deal. Deal is absolutely enormous. There is a wide, wide, range of diverse students with varying abilities and because of sheer numbers there is a strong cohort of high-achievers (along with everything else). Deal is not great because every single kid is honors level. It is great (among other reasons) because they have the numbers to support kids at every level, including honors. They also have the numbers to support a robust program of extra-curriculars that are simply unsurpassed elsewhere in DCPS, and probably most other middle schools nationwide. I could conceive of this working on the Hill if they could find the real estate for a Deal-like school, but it seems unlikely that this would happen given current dynamics.

Tbh, a lot of the Deal ECs don't impress me much? The non-sports ones aren't anything my kids would really want to stay after school for, and while the sports are nice, I'm guessing with the size of the school, there would have to be cuts? Which means that only the kids with lots of previous experience could get on the team?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Guys, DCPS is never going to approve a middle school that will be de facto segregated. They just will not. Come up with some other ideas.

Just want to pop and and say that the resulting middle school would not be "de facto" segregated. It would be integrated in a way that reflects the city. Hordes of middle and upper class black families would flock to this feeder system if they don't already live in the boundary ( many do --- check the maps ) .

Segregated is really what you have now at schools with only a handful of non-black students. DCPS decisions on this middle school situation has maintained segregation when they could have fostered integration.

[Anonymous]

Save up for private school.

[Anonymous]

+100. Jefferson Academy and Eliot-Hine are highly segregated schools; SH isn't all that much better.

Somewhere along with way, the knee-jerk reverse racists running the District ensured that the best became the enemy of the good.

I don't see a breakthrough in my lifetime, so no longer propose workable solutions that will never see the light of day.

Charles Allen seems to see no farther than the only-acceptable-to-a small-minority status quo.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Save up for private school.

That's what almost all of the middle-class families zoned for Deal did in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. The Hill is not unique in this regard, not historically.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't agree. The ed picture just isn't as black and white as you paint it.

City demographics continue to shift, and gentrification remains a powerful force for change. Mayor Bowser won't be in office forever.

The ed landscape you describe may have been accurate a decade back, but I'm not convinced that that DCPS and the city council members no longer give a whit about keeping high SES families in traditional public schools after elementary school. If high SES retention in DCPS middle and high schools was irrelevant politically, DCPS wouldn't be planning to open a 2nd high school in Ward 3 within the next few years, mainly to relieve crowding at Wilson.

Once the new HS opens, some CH families will join Hardy families there, via the OOB lottery.

No DCPS doesn’t care. They have taken honors classes away at Wilson with honors for all and more families from Deal are opting out of Wilson. They have done away with any testing for Walls and United the academic entrance and the admission process is opaque with the city saying they want more kids from other low SES wards other than 3.

The new HS will relieve some crowding at Wilson but don’t expect too much. My money is the primary motive is to draw OOB at risk kids to better schools and I bet anything there is going to be a set aside at risk preference.

. Honors for All st Wilson has been rolled back somewhat this school year. Just not true that many in-boundary families have been abandoning Deal and Wilson. If it were, in-boundary numbers wouldn’t have risen during the pandemic. Private schools cost a bomb and, with college, housing and fuel costs rising, even moderately wealthy families are feeling the squeeze. I’m willing to believe that DCPS doesn’t prioritize high SES\white retention, particularly EotP, but not that they could care less about it.

They do care -- just not in the way DCUM expects. This was all studied years ago, the last time boundaries/feeders were examined. If they allowed one Deal-type middle school to emerge, that would have retained all the white folks. But what those white people wanted was one middle school that contained all the gentrifying schools -- so that the disparity between the gentrified middle school and the other middle schools would have been enormous.

What DCPS wanted was to spread the gentrifiers among all the middle school, so their rising tide would lift all the boats. They figured that not all of them would leave (because not everyone can afford to/afford private), and not everyone would run to a charter, because BASIS, Latin, and 2 Rivers all have their own drawbacks. They are playing the very long game, and I can see it succeeding...maybe 20 years from now.

DCPS could have had six or seven elementary schools feed into on Deal type middle school, a mix of gentrified schools (Brent, Maury, SWS) and gentrifying schools (Ludlow, JO Wilson, Payne, Tyler).

Agree that they're playing a very long game, and very cynical game, that could succeed decades from now.

That's exactly what they did with SH -- it went from just being the Cluster middle school to being the feeder for Watkins, Ludlow, and JO.

Which, of course, is funny in the sense that only a few years down the road, Ludlow is now the most IB and gentrified of those schools by some distance.

[Anonymous]

Yes, and the great majority of UMC Ludlow 4th graders are either heading to BASIS, one of the Latins, Inspired Teaching, CHM, a private or hoping to get off a public charter school wait list.

Bravo, DCPS!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yes, and the great majority of UMC Ludlow 4th graders are either heading to BASIS, one of the Latins, Inspired Teaching, CHM, a private or hoping to get off a public charter school wait list.

Bravo, DCPS!

There are UMC LT families heading to CHML for middle school??? That does not seem like a good decision. I would go to SH over CHML in a heartbeat.