Hill Middle Schools

[Anonymous]

There’s already a “pan Ward 6” high school called Eastern that hardly any upper-income parents send their kids to.

A ton of money was spent renovating the school, and an International Bachelorette program was started. How did upper-income folks on Capitol Hill respond? By overwhelmingly continuing to decline to send their kids there.

And what rationale do many of them use? That the achievement of students in the International Bachelorette program is low compared with other schools.

Fixing the physical facilities and starting an advanced program wasn’t enough. It seems that many of these folks also wanted the school to miraculously come preloaded with kids as brilliant as their own — but before they sent their own kids there. A Catch-22 situation if I’ve ever seen one.

Given this history, DCPS should be highly skeptical of claims that upper-income Capitol Hill parents would totally embrace their in-bound middle schools if only DCPS would make X, Y, Z changes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There’s already a “pan Ward 6” high school called Eastern that hardly any upper-income parents send their kids to.

A ton of money was spent renovating the school, and an International Bachelorette program was started. How did upper-income folks on Capitol Hill respond? By overwhelmingly continuing to decline to send their kids there.

And what rationale do many of them use? That the achievement of students in the International Bachelorette program is low compared with other schools.

Fixing the physical facilities and starting an advanced program wasn’t enough. It seems that many of these folks also wanted the school to miraculously come preloaded with kids as brilliant as their own — but before they sent their own kids there. A Catch-22 situation if I’ve ever seen one.

Given this history, DCPS should be highly skeptical of claims that upper-income Capitol Hill parents would totally embrace their in-bound middle schools if only DCPS would make X, Y, Z changes.

But it’s not like UMC Ward 6 parents were sending their kids to IB elementary and middle schools and then bowing out of Eastern. The MSs only started gaining traction in the last few years. And there are only a few DCPS elementaries that have had high UMC attendance within the last 10 years. And two of them, Maury and L-T only gained traction VERY recently. Plus Peabody/Watkins used to be higher demand but has lost traction.

UMC parents didn’t reject Eastern. They simply have not been bought into the DCPS ecosystem on the Hill.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I know the conversation is on another issue right now, but I recently had a conversation with another Hill parent about the question of MS consolidation that I think is relevant here.

Basically, they were saying that the argument for consolidating MSs on the Hill seems to be mostly about parents with high achieving kids wanting to consolidate high achievers in order to get more accelerated instruction.

But as a parent of a kid who is academically average, that’s not the goal to me. I want a bigger school because when you consolidate resources, you can offer more programming overall. Yes, more honors math, but also more remedial math. More foreign language. More art and music. With a bigger school, you can hire more specialized teachers full time because you can fill their entire day with classes because you’ll have multiple sections per grade. More and better athletics and clubs. And so on.

Bigger is not always better, but a consolidated Hill MS could offer more of everything to ALL kids. It’s why MSs and HSs in suburbs are often so large. You pool the funds for all those kids and house them in one building, and you just wind up with a bigger, richer, more diverse pie, and everyone gets a slice.

And where would this location be? I get it, it's fun to dream, but we definitely have limitations on space. Jefferson is too far (and was just renovated) to be the "central" location in what is now known as the "Hill"'s eyes. Where the Hine building was (now condos) might have been the best space, but its gone.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There’s already a “pan Ward 6” high school called Eastern that hardly any upper-income parents send their kids to.

A ton of money was spent renovating the school, and an International Bachelorette program was started. How did upper-income folks on Capitol Hill respond? By overwhelmingly continuing to decline to send their kids there.

And what rationale do many of them use? That the achievement of students in the International Bachelorette program is low compared with other schools.

Fixing the physical facilities and starting an advanced program wasn’t enough. It seems that many of these folks also wanted the school to miraculously come preloaded with kids as brilliant as their own — but before they sent their own kids there. A Catch-22 situation if I’ve ever seen one.

Given this history, DCPS should be highly skeptical of claims that upper-income Capitol Hill parents would totally embrace their in-bound middle schools if only DCPS would make X, Y, Z changes.

But it’s not like UMC Ward 6 parents were sending their kids to IB elementary and middle schools and then bowing out of Eastern. The MSs only started gaining traction in the last few years. And there are only a few DCPS elementaries that have had high UMC attendance within the last 10 years. And two of them, Maury and L-T only gained traction VERY recently. Plus Peabody/Watkins used to be higher demand but has lost traction.

UMC parents didn’t reject Eastern. They simply have not been bought into the DCPS ecosystem on the Hill.

Actually, many of them do reject Eastern specifically. In fact, one of the primary reasons I see people citing on here for not choosing their in-bound Ward 6 middle school is the fact that it feeds into Eastern.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There’s already a “pan Ward 6” high school called Eastern that hardly any upper-income parents send their kids to.

A ton of money was spent renovating the school, and an International Bachelorette program was started. How did upper-income folks on Capitol Hill respond? By overwhelmingly continuing to decline to send their kids there.

And what rationale do many of them use? That the achievement of students in the International Bachelorette program is low compared with other schools.

Fixing the physical facilities and starting an advanced program wasn’t enough. It seems that many of these folks also wanted the school to miraculously come preloaded with kids as brilliant as their own — but before they sent their own kids there. A Catch-22 situation if I’ve ever seen one.

Given this history, DCPS should be highly skeptical of claims that upper-income Capitol Hill parents would totally embrace their in-bound middle schools if only DCPS would make X, Y, Z changes.

The Catch-22 situation you present hasn't been fostered by Hill parents in the 15 years since Eastern was renovated during Michelle Rhee's tenure as chancellor. The wholesale rejection of Eastern's IBD program by high SES Hill parents has been both self-created on DCPS' part and eminently predictable. If DCPS leaders want most Hill parents to embrace Eastern within, say, ten years, they need to enter into good faith dialogue with parent leaders of DCPS elementary schools on the Hill on how to make that happen now. Newcomers to the Hill with kids may not know that DCPS leaders have never bothered to give UMC Hill parents a voice in Eastern's development. DCPS has never seen value in soliciting our input in any meaningful form. We've effectively been ordered to collectively embrace Eastern, vs. incentivized to do it, a recipe for colossal failure for Eastern as a true in-boundary high school like J-R.

Upper-income Capitol Hil parents would indeed embrace a pan Ward 6 in-bound MS if one were created with extensive input from the parent leaders of the Hill DCPS elementary schools with strong neighborhood buy-in. Some of us got involved in the trying to shape the boundary review process in 2013-2014 as parent leaders at Brent, Maury and Watkins. We joined hands then and lobbied for a pan Ward 6 MS to serve as a neighborhood bridge to Eastern. Yet our input was ignored by both DCPS and the influential Cluster PTA-dominated CH Public School Parents Organization (now W6PSPO) group. The result was that we've bailed from DCPS to BASIS, the Latins, privates and the burbs en masse for MS in the intervening years.

The tried and tested model some of us backed was that of the handful of stunningly successful MoCo and Arlington test-in HS magnet programs housed in neighborhood high schools that were heavily low-income minority, and failing, as recently as the 1980s. The establishment of the magnets turned things around for our near neighbors in the burbs, resulting in strong and enduring neighborhood buy-in for these programs within just a few years of their establishment. Washington-Liberty's popular IB Diploma program in Arlington operates as a magnet program without the admissions tests MoCo uses, a model we liked. In Arlington, only the highest-performing in-boundary and transfer MS students are permitted to enroll in 9th grade pre-IB classes at W-L after having met an 8th grade GPA cut-off.

If DCPS wanted to see Eastern's IBD program thrive, ed leaders could set a high bar for admission to a magnet program with a city-wide draw and seat set-asides/preferential treatment in admissions for qualified in-boundary students, as in MoCo and Arlington. No other solution is going to work of course and none has. Blaming high SES Hill parents for failing to get onboard with a development plan for Eastern that was imposed on them from the get go may feel good, but serves no purpose.

[Anonymous]

Yes. DCPS could go with a viable model for Eastern’s development as a popular neighborhood school. Bowser would rather squelch upper middle class hill parent voices with the charter luck drip feed. That’s her model. Bless her.

[Anonymous]

Charters, Walls, Banneker, Ellington or nothing for the Hill. Eastern will never do more than limp along without a middle school bridge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There’s already a “pan Ward 6” high school called Eastern that hardly any upper-income parents send their kids to.

A ton of money was spent renovating the school, and an International Bachelorette program was started. How did upper-income folks on Capitol Hill respond? By overwhelmingly continuing to decline to send their kids there.

And what rationale do many of them use? That the achievement of students in the International Bachelorette program is low compared with other schools.

Fixing the physical facilities and starting an advanced program wasn’t enough. It seems that many of these folks also wanted the school to miraculously come preloaded with kids as brilliant as their own — but before they sent their own kids there. A Catch-22 situation if I’ve ever seen one.

Given this history, DCPS should be highly skeptical of claims that upper-income Capitol Hill parents would totally embrace their in-bound middle schools if only DCPS would make X, Y, Z changes.

The Catch-22 situation you present hasn't been fostered by Hill parents in the 15 years since Eastern was renovated during Michelle Rhee's tenure as chancellor. The wholesale rejection of Eastern's IBD program by high SES Hill parents has been both self-created on DCPS' part and eminently predictable. If DCPS leaders want most Hill parents to embrace Eastern within, say, ten years, they need to enter into good faith dialogue with parent leaders of DCPS elementary schools on the Hill on how to make that happen now. Newcomers to the Hill with kids may not know that DCPS leaders have never bothered to give UMC Hill parents a voice in Eastern's development. DCPS has never seen value in soliciting our input in any meaningful form. We've effectively been ordered to collectively embrace Eastern, vs. incentivized to do it, a recipe for colossal failure for Eastern as a true in-boundary high school like J-R.

Upper-income Capitol Hil parents would indeed embrace a pan Ward 6 in-bound MS if one were created with extensive input from the parent leaders of the Hill DCPS elementary schools with strong neighborhood buy-in. Some of us got involved in the trying to shape the boundary review process in 2013-2014 as parent leaders at Brent, Maury and Watkins. We joined hands then and lobbied for a pan Ward 6 MS to serve as a neighborhood bridge to Eastern. Yet our input was ignored by both DCPS and the influential Cluster PTA-dominated CH Public School Parents Organization (now W6PSPO) group. The result was that we've bailed from DCPS to BASIS, the Latins, privates and the burbs en masse for MS in the intervening years.

The tried and tested model some of us backed was that of the handful of stunningly successful MoCo and Arlington test-in HS magnet programs housed in neighborhood high schools that were heavily low-income minority, and failing, as recently as the 1980s. The establishment of the magnets turned things around for our near neighbors in the burbs, resulting in strong and enduring neighborhood buy-in for these programs within just a few years of their establishment. Washington-Liberty's popular IB Diploma program in Arlington operates as a magnet program without the admissions tests MoCo uses, a model we liked. In Arlington, only the highest-performing in-boundary and transfer MS students are permitted to enroll in 9th grade pre-IB classes at W-L after having met an 8th grade GPA cut-off.

If DCPS wanted to see Eastern's IBD program thrive, ed leaders could set a high bar for admission to a magnet program with a city-wide draw and seat set-asides/preferential treatment in admissions for qualified in-boundary students, as in MoCo and Arlington. No other solution is going to work of course and none has. Blaming high SES Hill parents for failing to get onboard with a development plan for Eastern that was imposed on them from the get go may feel good, but serves no purpose.

DCPS could care less for high performing kids. They never did and never will. All they care about is the bottom of the barrel. The writing on the wall is the same as it always has been. One could argue that things are actually going downhill post Covid as academic standards are lowered even further. Prime example is honors for all at JR and the opaque admission standards now at Walls creating lower performing academic cohorts.

This is why families flock to the few acceptable charters to get out of DCPS. Charters are not under the rule of DCPS and independent. That’s a good thing. Or families move or go private.

The endless posts every few weeks/months about the same thing is not going to change anything. Those who face reality without rose color glasses on know this and have an exit plan if the lottery doesn’t work out.

DCPS is and has always been a dysfunctional mess. You might be able to counter to an extent at your local school level in ES and supplement. But it’s a totally different animal in MS and HS and you can’t supplement everything. I haven’t even mentioned the BS ineffective restorative justice and behavior issues that prevents some classes from learning anything. Talk to some Deal parents who have had a kid go thru then and another kid now. Things have definitely gone downhill overall.

[Anonymous]

Agree with PP above overall but you overstate your case. DCPS central office is indeed a mess, and, true, standards are slipping. But there are still fine principals and teachers in the DCPS system at the MS level and, as a result, none of the three Hill DCPS middle schools is terrible. These schools have competent leadership and many old hands teaching who know what they're doing. I don't agree that enrolling at SH, Jefferson or EH is a poor choice for those who strike out in the charter lotteries, or don't care for charters. We have Hill pals of many years with academically advanced students who are making one of the Hill DCPS middle schools work, with some supplementing, yes, but not across the board. Believe it or not, there are kids at these schools working one or two years ahead of the DCPS curriculum in math with strong support from admins and teachers in designated classes for advanced learners.

Yea, Eastern is a lost cause for all but a tiny number of high SES Hill families.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Agree with PP above overall but you overstate your case. DCPS central office is indeed a mess, and, true, standards are slipping. But there are still fine principals and teachers in the DCPS system at the MS level and, as a result, none of the three Hill DCPS middle schools is terrible. These schools have competent leadership and many old hands teaching who know what they're doing. I don't agree that enrolling at SH, Jefferson or EH is a poor choice for those who strike out in the charter lotteries, or don't care for charters. We have Hill pals of many years with academically advanced students who are making one of the Hill DCPS middle schools work, with some supplementing, yes, but not across the board. Believe it or not, there are kids at these schools working one or two years ahead of the DCPS curriculum in math with strong support from admins and teachers in designated classes for advanced learners.

Yea, Eastern is a lost cause for all but a tiny number of high SES Hill families.

I think it’s true that all three have potential to serve a broad range of kids well. I like that the poster says families aren’t necessarily making a bad choice by sending their kids, even (especially?) if it’s just the best fit for the child/family and not some big political statement.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Charters, Walls, Banneker, Ellington or nothing for the Hill. Eastern will never do more than limp along without a middle school bridge.

LOL. Don’t people on here usually say the opposite — that the middle schools won’t be good until they have a good high school path?

Is it both? If so, then it’s yet another Catch-22: the high school won’t be good until the middle schools are, and the middle schools won’t good be until the high school is.

[Anonymous]

We've been on the Hill for 20 years and hardly know any Maury, Brent or SWS familes who seem to go with Hobson, Eliot Hine or Jefferson Academy over BASIS and the Latins. But what you're seeing a more who are willing to give these schools a try as a default position, rather than pay for privates, go for iffy charters or move. Agree that this development is good, far from perfect, but still positive for the neighborhood.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There’s already a “pan Ward 6” high school called Eastern that hardly any upper-income parents send their kids to.

A ton of money was spent renovating the school, and an International Bachelorette program was started. How did upper-income folks on Capitol Hill respond? By overwhelmingly continuing to decline to send their kids there.

And what rationale do many of them use? That the achievement of students in the International Bachelorette program is low compared with other schools.

Fixing the physical facilities and starting an advanced program wasn’t enough. It seems that many of these folks also wanted the school to miraculously come preloaded with kids as brilliant as their own — but before they sent their own kids there. A Catch-22 situation if I’ve ever seen one.

Given this history, DCPS should be highly skeptical of claims that upper-income Capitol Hill parents would totally embrace their in-bound middle schools if only DCPS would make X, Y, Z changes.

The Catch-22 situation you present hasn't been fostered by Hill parents in the 15 years since Eastern was renovated during Michelle Rhee's tenure as chancellor. The wholesale rejection of Eastern's IBD program by high SES Hill parents has been both self-created on DCPS' part and eminently predictable. If DCPS leaders want most Hill parents to embrace Eastern within, say, ten years, they need to enter into good faith dialogue with parent leaders of DCPS elementary schools on the Hill on how to make that happen now. Newcomers to the Hill with kids may not know that DCPS leaders have never bothered to give UMC Hill parents a voice in Eastern's development. DCPS has never seen value in soliciting our input in any meaningful form. We've effectively been ordered to collectively embrace Eastern, vs. incentivized to do it, a recipe for colossal failure for Eastern as a true in-boundary high school like J-R.

Upper-income Capitol Hil parents would indeed embrace a pan Ward 6 in-bound MS if one were created with extensive input from the parent leaders of the Hill DCPS elementary schools with strong neighborhood buy-in. Some of us got involved in the trying to shape the boundary review process in 2013-2014 as parent leaders at Brent, Maury and Watkins. We joined hands then and lobbied for a pan Ward 6 MS to serve as a neighborhood bridge to Eastern. Yet our input was ignored by both DCPS and the influential Cluster PTA-dominated CH Public School Parents Organization (now W6PSPO) group. The result was that we've bailed from DCPS to BASIS, the Latins, privates and the burbs en masse for MS in the intervening years.

The tried and tested model some of us backed was that of the handful of stunningly successful MoCo and Arlington test-in HS magnet programs housed in neighborhood high schools that were heavily low-income minority, and failing, as recently as the 1980s. The establishment of the magnets turned things around for our near neighbors in the burbs, resulting in strong and enduring neighborhood buy-in for these programs within just a few years of their establishment. Washington-Liberty's popular IB Diploma program in Arlington operates as a magnet program without the admissions tests MoCo uses, a model we liked. In Arlington, only the highest-performing in-boundary and transfer MS students are permitted to enroll in 9th grade pre-IB classes at W-L after having met an 8th grade GPA cut-off.

If DCPS wanted to see Eastern's IBD program thrive, ed leaders could set a high bar for admission to a magnet program with a city-wide draw and seat set-asides/preferential treatment in admissions for qualified in-boundary students, as in MoCo and Arlington. No other solution is going to work of course and none has. Blaming high SES Hill parents for failing to get onboard with a development plan for Eastern that was imposed on them from the get go may feel good, but serves no purpose.

DCPS could care less for high performing kids. They never did and never will. All they care about is the bottom of the barrel. The writing on the wall is the same as it always has been. One could argue that things are actually going downhill post Covid as academic standards are lowered even further. Prime example is honors for all at JR and the opaque admission standards now at Walls creating lower performing academic cohorts.

This is why families flock to the few acceptable charters to get out of DCPS. Charters are not under the rule of DCPS and independent. That’s a good thing. Or families move or go private.

The endless posts every few weeks/months about the same thing is not going to change anything. Those who face reality without rose color glasses on know this and have an exit plan if the lottery doesn’t work out.

DCPS is and has always been a dysfunctional mess. You might be able to counter to an extent at your local school level in ES and supplement. But it’s a totally different animal in MS and HS and you can’t supplement everything. I haven’t even mentioned the BS ineffective restorative justice and behavior issues that prevents some classes from learning anything. Talk to some Deal parents who have had a kid go thru then and another kid now. Things have definitely gone downhill overall.

THIS. Every few years, there’s a group of Hill parents who believe they “will be the change”. You won’t. It’s a waste of your energy and resources.

[Anonymous]

To respond to the previous two posts - I agree, there are more families who are attending the neighborhood middle schools, some because they struck out, but a good number because they are choosing to go. It will be interesting in a few years how that translates to enrollment high schools, not just Eastern, but other DCPS high schools (besides SWW). Regarding parents trying to 'be the change', I think there is an additional category of parents that have chosen to stay in their public schools. As somebody who has also lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, there has always been conversation on here, MOTH, or casual conversations about the assumed age after which you had to try to lottery out from various schools/grades. More and more parents I have met have not gone in with a 'change the world' attitude, but a 'my kid is learning/challenged/happy, if it isn't broken don't fix it' mentality, and stayed in their original school longer than anticipated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know the conversation is on another issue right now, but I recently had a conversation with another Hill parent about the question of MS consolidation that I think is relevant here.

Basically, they were saying that the argument for consolidating MSs on the Hill seems to be mostly about parents with high achieving kids wanting to consolidate high achievers in order to get more accelerated instruction.

But as a parent of a kid who is academically average, that’s not the goal to me. I want a bigger school because when you consolidate resources, you can offer more programming overall. Yes, more honors math, but also more remedial math. More foreign language. More art and music. With a bigger school, you can hire more specialized teachers full time because you can fill their entire day with classes because you’ll have multiple sections per grade. More and better athletics and clubs. And so on.

Bigger is not always better, but a consolidated Hill MS could offer more of everything to ALL kids. It’s why MSs and HSs in suburbs are often so large. You pool the funds for all those kids and house them in one building, and you just wind up with a bigger, richer, more diverse pie, and everyone gets a slice.

And where would this location be? I get it, it's fun to dream, but we definitely have limitations on space. Jefferson is too far (and was just renovated) to be the "central" location in what is now known as the "Hill"'s eyes. Where the Hine building was (now condos) might have been the best space, but its gone.

NP. It could be at Eastern. Move Eastern to EH or SH.