Kaya Henderson has Undermined her own Leadership

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Carolyn Reynolds, who’s lived in Crestwood for slightly more than four years, is indignant upon learning that her two children at a nearby charter school won’t be grandfathered into Deal and Wilson under the new policy. “That’s outrageous,” she says. “That’s unacceptable.”

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Really? Congratulations to her for being able to afford to freeride her way into the best feeder pattern, but I'm not feeling sorry for her at all.

Oh, Ms. Reynold's house was free? Lucky her. I am not sure you understand the meaning of "freeride".

If there is one lesson I have learned from the DME process, it is that only fools feel empathy.

You understand perfectly well what it means....her kids don't attend either IB elementary school, they go to a tax payer funded charter. Perfectly fine. But no one wants to hear her crying when she loses the benefit she would have had by sending her kids IB. Get in the OOB lottery like everyone else.

Apparently you are determined to demonstrate that you are the least informed poster on this board. Reynolds would not get a right to Deal by sending her kids to the local inbound school. That school is not a Deal feeder. It is currently a CHEC feeder. Many families living elsewhere who were able to gain entry to charter schools moved to Crestwood in order to have Deal and Wilson options. While buying a house doesn't guarantee rights to a school -- though it generally has in DC for the last 40 years -- it is still understandable that someone would be upset. Calling people who made a major financial investment based on information that has turned out not to be true "freeriders" is pretty ignorant.

Are you saying that if she lives in Crestwood and her child attended, say, West, her child wouldn't have the right to feed into Deal for the foreseeable future?

West is an Educational Campus that serves PK-8th grade.

Most of West's current (former?) bouundaries are (were) in bound for Deal.

[Anonymous]

Letting the DME know that sending kids from high performing schools to failing schools will cause all of the families with options to leave is not about making a making a threat.

It is about trying to open her eyes to a political reality that will derail this effort at social engineering and result in more failing schools, not less.

People like me desperately tried to communicate this because we are committed to our schools and don't want to see them wrecked by clueless attempts to emphasize equality over quality. Equality is easy --- take away parents' certainty about where their kids can go to school, and all of the families with options will leave. Then all schools will be equally bad.

[Anonymous]

I quit going to the DME events because I found so many of the parent insufferable, overly priveledged and unwilling to consider the complexity of the decision making that needed to be addressed. I can only imagine what it felt from the decision-maker side. Kaya Henderson has not really had a roll in any of the this decision making but she will be asked to implement it and take all the gripes when it is not perfect because reality intrudes. Frankly I can't but help that I would also want to say move, it be part of the solution too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Define urgent. You're with DCPS in wanting to wait decades until we have decent neighborhood middle schools? Why should the city wait?

A reasonable question. I think the urgent priorities for DCPS in dealing with high SES areas (they also have urgent issues in improving education for the more at risk, of course) are making Hardy a successful neighborhood school (achieves the same thing that fixing the Hill does, but is almost certainly a lot easier) improving EOTP elementaries, and implementing the proposed new middle schools. At that time (5 years? ten years?) they can seriously reexamine the Hill - by that point they may also have improved EOTR schools enough to make OOB access to the Hill less of a political hot button. Or, maybe, ongoing demographic change will partially solve the problem, and open up new options for solving it.

I'm sure you're right but what's sad about DCPS kissing off the Hill parents of kids already in IB elementary schools is that the leadership is squandering a tremendous opportunity in real time. It is this: the chance to harness the prodigous organizational and fund-raising savvy of the interpid professional parent architects of the Maury, Brent, SWS and Tyler SI success stories.

These terrific parents ask for little, work together well, and are prepared to do yeomans work to help ensure that all boats rise with the tide in local schools. But you can't stack the cards against them at several struggling by-right middle schools and expect the massive investment in Eastern to pay dividends in under 20 years. Under such terms, demographic change cannot solve the Hill middle school problem. It can only improve Stuart Hobson, and only a little.

What bothers me most the Hill MS mess is the appalling lack of honesty from on high. If any pol involved would go on record with your cold-eyed analysis, rather than feeding us BS about bright prospects for our grim MS feeders, we'd be better off, at least psychologically.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I quit going to the DME events because I found so many of the parent insufferable, overly priveledged and unwilling to consider the complexity of the decision making that needed to be addressed. I can only imagine what it felt from the decision-maker side. Kaya Henderson has not really had a roll in any of the this decision making but she will be asked to implement it and take all the gripes when it is not perfect because reality intrudes. Frankly I can't but help that I would also want to say move, it be part of the solution too.

To be honest, I found the decision-makers the ones who were unwilling to consider the complexity of the decision making that needed to be addressed. There was talk of "high quality seats" and of moving high-achieving kids from school to school like a commodity with no understanding whatsoever that the kids in question are people, not seats, and not chips to be pushed around in an attempt to engineer equality. The fact is that policy has consequences, many of them unintended (like parents pulling their kids out of the system and moving). The initial unwillingness of the folks leading the process to recognize that their actions would lead to reactions that they had no control over was fairly insufferable.

So here's a question for you: do you believe that DC schools would be better off without the children of all of those overly privileged parents? Haven't we already tried it that way during the era of white flight? Isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:First, DCPS spends millions of dollars to try to make their schools more physically attractive, to give students and teachers brand new technology, books, etc. It spends millions of dollars trying to pay teachers the highest in the area so that the best ones will stay here. It has shown success compared to other urban jurisdictions on the NAEP "TUDA" which shows growth in DCPS at a higher rate than other US cities. Lastly, enrollment is over 47,000 for the first time in forever and that had a lot to do with the begging (door knocking) that principals did over the summer. So to say that Kaya, et al doesn't care if kids go to DCPS or not is completely incorrect. Kaya could have quit long before now and taken a much more lucrative job in consulting or something if she didn't have her heart in the work.

Could she? or does she have to prove herself here, before any of those more lucrative jobs are offered?

Well it doesn't look like Michelle Rhee who was here only half as long as Henderson has been did too poorly for herself when it comes to $$$.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I quit going to the DME events because I found so many of the parent insufferable, overly priveledged and unwilling to consider the complexity of the decision making that needed to be addressed. I can only imagine what it felt from the decision-maker side. Kaya Henderson has not really had a roll in any of the this decision making but she will be asked to implement it and take all the gripes when it is not perfect because reality intrudes. Frankly I can't but help that I would also want to say move, it be part of the solution too.

To be honest, I found the decision-makers the ones who were unwilling to consider the complexity of the decision making that needed to be addressed. There was talk of "high quality seats" and of moving high-achieving kids from school to school like a commodity with no understanding whatsoever that the kids in question are people, not seats, and not chips to be pushed around in an attempt to engineer equality. The fact is that policy has consequences, many of them unintended (like parents pulling their kids out of the system and moving). The initial unwillingness of the folks leading the process to recognize that their actions would lead to reactions that they had no control over was fairly insufferable.

So here's a question for you: do you believe that DC schools would be better off without the children of all of those overly privileged parents? Haven't we already tried it that way during the era of white flight? Isn't that what got us into this mess in the first place?

No I don't believe DC would be better off, but I think many parents are pulling out because they are unwilling to let their children to go to a school that has more than maybe 20% poor and maybe 50% minority. Afterthat the scores could be incredible but parents would not consider the school. Given the demographic numbers in the city at least half of the schools will me majority (50% or more minority and poor) telling a school to get better is yelling into the wind, it is not possilbe unless well off parents invest. White parents are either part of the solution or the problem, we just don't have a choice as a society.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:First, DCPS spends millions of dollars to try to make their schools more physically attractive, to give students and teachers brand new technology, books, etc. It spends millions of dollars trying to pay teachers the highest in the area so that the best ones will stay here. It has shown success compared to other urban jurisdictions on the NAEP "TUDA" which shows growth in DCPS at a higher rate than other US cities. Lastly, enrollment is over 47,000 for the first time in forever and that had a lot to do with the begging (door knocking) that principals did over the summer. So to say that Kaya, et al doesn't care if kids go to DCPS or not is completely incorrect. Kaya could have quit long before now and taken a much more lucrative job in consulting or something if she didn't have her heart in the work.

Could she? or does she have to prove herself here, before any of those more lucrative jobs are offered?

Well it doesn't look like Michelle Rhee who was here only half as long as Henderson has been did too poorly for herself when it comes to $$$.

Right but Henderson is no Rhee.

[Anonymous]

I'm 13:11. I hear what you're saying --- I attended majority minority schools in the south as a kid, and it used to bug the hell out of me that most of my white friends' parents just assumed that they were horrible, dangerous places.

However, my child's school is 25% white and extremely diverse economically, culturally and linguistically. All of the parents who could (of all races and ethnicities) would have pulled out if the original DME plan for our school were adopted. Not being willing to send your kid to an objectively (by test scores, graduation rate and every other measure) failing school it does not make you a racist, nor does pointing out the fact that parents with options will move if a failing school is their only alternative.

[Anonymous]

Arguments like that remind me of the arguments that went around about blockbusting.

"Look, we didn't create the real estate market, and the way the market is, if these people move into your neighborhood, your home value will go down. That's just the way the real estate market works."

Unless you decide it won't work that way.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Arguments like that remind me of the arguments that went around about blockbusting.

"Look, we didn't create the real estate market, and the way the market is, if these people move into your neighborhood, your home value will go down. That's just the way the real estate market works."

Unless you decide it won't work that way.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Arguments like that remind me of the arguments that went around about blockbusting.

"Look, we didn't create the real estate market, and the way the market is, if these people move into your neighborhood, your home value will go down. That's just the way the real estate market works."

Unless you decide it won't work that way.

what are you trying to say? It isn't clear to me.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:First, DCPS spends millions of dollars to try to make their schools more physically attractive, to give students and teachers brand new technology, books, etc. It spends millions of dollars trying to pay teachers the highest in the area so that the best ones will stay here. It has shown success compared to other urban jurisdictions on the NAEP "TUDA" which shows growth in DCPS at a higher rate than other US cities. Lastly, enrollment is over 47,000 for the first time in forever and that had a lot to do with the begging (door knocking) that principals did over the summer. So to say that Kaya, et al doesn't care if kids go to DCPS or not is completely incorrect. Kaya could have quit long before now and taken a much more lucrative job in consulting or something if she didn't have her heart in the work.

Could she? or does she have to prove herself here, before any of those more lucrative jobs are offered?

Well it doesn't look like Michelle Rhee who was here only half as long as Henderson has been did too poorly for herself when it comes to $$$.

Right but Henderson is no Rhee.

No, she is not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are people who think she needs to be beholden to people whose kids are not at any risk of real difficulties who want to fight over whether their kids get to go to Murch, Hearst, or Janney.

I would want to ignore those people too. And I hope her attention is on those at risk of real problems.

Ah, but she forgets is that what saved DCPS from going almost completely over to charters was that parents were willing to invest their time and hopes in schools like Janney, Mann, Layfayette, Eaton, Key, Deal and Wilson, etc. Wilson and Deal only got renovated through extensive parental involvement and pushing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are people who think she needs to be beholden to people whose kids are not at any risk of real difficulties who want to fight over whether their kids get to go to Murch, Hearst, or Janney.

I would want to ignore those people too. And I hope her attention is on those at risk of real problems.

+1

As an affluent parent of a DCPS student, I find many of my peers to be insufferably privileged. (Hello DCUM!)

In the Barry era, most people WOTP were afraid to speak up for more city services, either resigned to the probability that they would never get them or out of guilt that somehow they didn't deserve them. I'm glad to see in the last 15 years or so that people have come to demand good schools, clean parks, trash that gets picked up on time, cops who have training, etc. DC is no longer the Third World city that it was under Barry, and people should demand good schools and other services for the high taxes that they pay.