Jefferson Academy Kool-Aid

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Her departure is neither here nor there for me. No principal, no matter how strong, can make a middle school with proficiency pass rates in the teens and twenties work for an elementary school population with one of the highest proficiency pass rates in the city (and rising as high SES lower grades families steadily replace low SES higher grades families) without a full menu of at grade-level classes already in place. Things are going to have to get worse at Jefferson before the school could be reinvented to serve Brent, a lot worse.

you do realize the school does not exist on the glimmer of hope that Brent students will save it? They serve the students who enroll.

They serve the students who enroll.

Or they don't, as in the case of DCPS who despite the highest per pupil spending in the country, can not figure out how to educate the majority of poor children to achieve at grade level. Instead, they engage in social promotion and continue the cycle of poverty, underemployment and functional illiteracy.

you may disagree on effectiveness of educating students at Jefferson or scores of other schools but the focus is on educating the students they have not the hypothetical students they do not.

The cycle of poverty drives the poor outcomes. The schools do not create or perpetuate poverty

[Anonymous]

you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there. Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc. Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up. The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES. Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html

[Anonymous]

I have been looking for data on this and cannot find it. I would be very curious to see whether and how the DC-CAS proficiency scores for economically disadvantaged students at Brent changed from 2006-2014, the years during which the CAS was administered.

https://www.dcactionforchildren.org/sites/default/files/DCACTION_Trendsin3rdgrdReading_FINAL.pdf notes that in DC as a whole, 3rd grade reading scores for economically disadvantaged children actually declined from 2007-14. It's true that scores for this subset were higher in more economically diverse schools, but the study did not attempt to separate out the effect of poor families who send their kids to rich schools being different from poor families who did not.

[Anonymous]

There is a lot to provoke thought along these lines in the following This American Life episode:

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there. Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc. Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up. The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES. Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html

and yet even at the higher performing schools with " pesky upper middle-class parents" an astonishing achievement gap still exists. The overall results only look better as a whole because the struggling students comprise a smaller percentage of the school population.

[Anonymous]

I can't wait to see how many Brent parents are on the panel to select the new Jefferson principal . . . . and I think there will be many

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there. Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc. Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up. The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES. Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html

That's why when Rhee started rewarding schools with high test scores it made no sense, encourage cheating, and did not nothing to want to make teachers work at schools EOTP that also had economically disadvantaged kids and low test scores.

and yet even at the higher performing schools with " pesky upper middle-class parents" an astonishing achievement gap still exists. The overall results only look better as a whole because the struggling students comprise a smaller percentage of the school population.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there. Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc. Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up. The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES. Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html

How many upper middle-class parents do you need in a school community to make all of the bolded take place? I am an upper middle-class parent, and I don't do any of the above, other than donate money. I know a small number of parents who do the above, but most I know do not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there. Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc. Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up. The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES. Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html

That's why when Rhee started rewarding schools with high test scores it made no sense, encourage cheating, and did not nothing to want to make teachers work at schools EOTP that also had economically disadvantaged kids and low test scores.

and yet even at the higher performing schools with " pesky upper middle-class parents" an astonishing achievement gap still exists. The overall results only look better as a whole because the struggling students comprise a smaller percentage of the school population.

Aside from being 5 years out of date (an enormous chunk of time in the short history of charter schools), the quoted article is unreliable on its face. Asking that source about KIPP (or any charter school, for that matter) is like asking the Redskins organization about the Cowboys, or Salon.com about Capitalism.

It's impossible to get any straight information from them whatsoever. Their hostility to change and defense of the status quo is like the doctors who refused to condemn smoking and claimed it had no proven causal effect on cancer.

[Anonymous]

This is some of the most compelling evidence I've seen that poor kids benefit from middle-class/upper-class schools: https://tcf.org/content/commentary/housing-policy-is-school-policy/

This is methodologically-sound research, which found:

"over a period of five to seven years, children in public housing who attended the school district’s most-advantaged schools (as measured by either subsidized lunch status or the district’s own criteria) far outperformed in math and reading those children in public housing who attended the district’s least-advantaged elementary schools."

[Anonymous]

But that's not what we are talking about with Jefferson AT ALL. We are talking about a small group of well-prepared, middle/upper SES students joining a disadvantaged school--disadvantaged in many ways--students arriving ill-prepared in a still-dysfunctional school system where funding and facilities for basic programs are always in question.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there. Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc. Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up. The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES. Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html

How many upper middle-class parents do you need in a school community to make all of the bolded take place? I am an upper middle-class parent, and I don't do any of the above, other than donate money. I know a small number of parents who do the above, but most I know do not.

+1 the pp describes more accurately the kind of parent activity at elementary schools, which often have students attending for 7 years, give or take. Middle school is a fast three years and the last one is spent looking or and applying to high schools, unless you have a good feed, which Jefferson does not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there. Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc. Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up. The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES. Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea. http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html

I agree with you that those "pesky" parents can and do make a difference with schools, but is it also because those same "pesky" parents stay highly involved in their kid's academics and extracurricular activities; in other words, as they are being a pain in the butt toward the school (in the best possible way of course) or they being equally involved with their kids? IMHO, I think so. At least this is my observation with higher SES families, especially among Asian minorities.

[Anonymous]

Are there any current Jefferson parents on this forum? If so, how are the misbehavior's/bullying incidents if any addressed at the school - definitely considering the school for my daughter who is a current Brent 4th grader.