DCPS Lottery Consultant?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My issue with EV Downey is that she has done Ludlow-Taylor a huge, huge disservice over the past 5 years -- even more so than this forum. She is a hater and has used her soapbox to bring down the school's reputation in the neighborhood. So Principal Cobbs isn't that great at PR, warm-fuzzies, whatever -- everyone knows that. But in countless talks with neighborhood families,sDowney has consistently discounted any good experience other parents have had at the school, based strictly on her SN son's negative experience with the principal quite a few years ago. I have a dog in this fight because my kids go to LT, and because we are an IB family trying to make our neighborhood school work for us -- and so far, we've been wonderfully repaid for our commitment. But I have had at least a half-dozen parents look at me with shock when I say that we are happy at LT, and more often than not it's because EV Downey (who I have never laid eyes on inside the school until the recent principal selection meeting) has warned them off the school. To me, this is letting personal experience cloud objective reality, and I think to become a really useful consultant she needs to get past those biases -- and not just when it comes to LT.

She also bad mouthed BASIS after her DS spent a few days in a summer program before school had even opened.

[Anonymous]

I don't know EV but I know lots of consultants. They are paid for their expertise and their inside knowledge - not for being perfect. Consultants get a following of people who they work well with - people who like them -- not just for their info, but for their personality. 2 different people can have two very different experiences with the same consultant.

From what I've read here, she sounds pretty good -- not right for everyone, but who is?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My family has worked with EV twice. The first time was when our child was born and we were considering where to buy a home. The second time was when we were applying to preschool, after we had attended about 20 open houses, identified schools that we were interested in, and just needed a sounding board for ranking the schools.

We were one of many OOB families W/O sibling who put Brent as #1 on our list because we believed that we should rank schools ONLY according to preference. We did not consider admissions data from previous years that showed the number of IB families (even with sibling) who had been shut out of Brent preschool. EV informed me that if we kept Brent as our #1 choice, we would be essentially throwing out the slot (and possibly reducing our chances at another school, which someone else listed as #1 if they had a better lottery number). I listened to EV and removed Brent altogether, moving Inspired Teaching (initially our second choice) to #1. We are now at Inspired Teaching and very, very, very glad for the advice that we received.

For us, the small fee paid for the mini-session to help with the order of the schools was money well spent.

This advice is confusinge if Brent was your top choice. At worst, you would have been waitlisted at Brent and accepted into IT. Unless there were younger siblings to take into account (you dont mention any), it seems to me you should have left your rankings as they were.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My family has worked with EV twice. The first time was when our child was born and we were considering where to buy a home. The second time was when we were applying to preschool, after we had attended about 20 open houses, identified schools that we were interested in, and just needed a sounding board for ranking the schools.

We were one of many OOB families W/O sibling who put Brent as #1 on our list because we believed that we should rank schools ONLY according to preference. We did not consider admissions data from previous years that showed the number of IB families (even with sibling) who had been shut out of Brent preschool. EV informed me that if we kept Brent as our #1 choice, we would be essentially throwing out the slot (and possibly reducing our chances at another school, which someone else listed as #1 if they had a better lottery number). I listened to EV and removed Brent altogether, moving Inspired Teaching (initially our second choice) to #1. We are now at Inspired Teaching and very, very, very glad for the advice that we received.

For us, the small fee paid for the mini-session to help with the order of the schools was money well spent.

This advice is confusinge if Brent was your top choice. At worst, you would have been waitlisted at Brent and accepted into IT. Unless there were younger siblings to take into account (you dont mention any), it seems to me you should have left your rankings as they were.

Yeah, it sounds like she told PP that if she put Brent as #1 she would decrease her chance of getting into IT, which is patently false. Sounds like she potentially have bad advice or PP didn't understand it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My family has worked with EV twice. The first time was when our child was born and we were considering where to buy a home. The second time was when we were applying to preschool, after we had attended about 20 open houses, identified schools that we were interested in, and just needed a sounding board for ranking the schools.

We were one of many OOB families W/O sibling who put Brent as #1 on our list because we believed that we should rank schools ONLY according to preference. We did not consider admissions data from previous years that showed the number of IB families (even with sibling) who had been shut out of Brent preschool. EV informed me that if we kept Brent as our #1 choice, we would be essentially throwing out the slot (and possibly reducing our chances at another school, which someone else listed as #1 if they had a better lottery number). I listened to EV and removed Brent altogether, moving Inspired Teaching (initially our second choice) to #1. We are now at Inspired Teaching and very, very, very glad for the advice that we received.

For us, the small fee paid for the mini-session to help with the order of the schools was money well spent.

FYI, if you had put Brent as #1 and IT as #2 on your lottery submission then the result would have been exactly the same: admission at IT. Her advice, as you understood it, had zero impact on your admission to IT.

The part in bold is a misunderstanding of the lottery algorithm. If someone else has a better lottery draw than you then they will beat you 10 times out of 10 for any school for which you both choose, assuming neither has a preference such as IB, sibling etc. You can rank IT #1 and they rank IT #12 and they will beat you, because of their luckier draw. You can still get into IT, if there is still a spot left for you after they and everyone else with better draw or better preference who chose IT as one of their 12 gets in, or they get into somewhere that they ranked higher, freeing up the spot for you.

If you don't understand this then you should indeed be hiring someone to walk you through this, but it should be me. Incredible how much lottery misinformation exists on DCUM.

Congrats though, heard IT is a great school and you sound happy there. That's the most important thing.

And you were right about not having any kind of shot at Brent OOB. Although ranking Brent #1 would not have affected any of your other 11 choices, it would have uselessly consumed a spot that you could have used for a safety school, at #12. Make sense? No? You can send me $500 in advance and I will explain it to you in person

[Anonymous]

^^What is disturbing is that she DID hire someone, and it sounds like she got some bad info.

[Anonymous]

I think that if someone with a higher lottery number ranked IT as their #1 and we ranked it #2 the person who ranked it #1 would have a better chance of getting matched. We were actually not sure which school we preferred (brent location is easier, but ITS approach is more in line with our preferences), and I am certain that we made the correct choice for our family. Information from EV was helpful in making that decision, along with actual visits to the schools and extensive independent research.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think that if someone with a higher lottery number ranked IT as their #1 and we ranked it #2 the person who ranked it #1 would have a better chance of getting matched. We were actually not sure which school we preferred (brent location is easier, but ITS approach is more in line with our preferences), and I am certain that we made the correct choice for our family. Information from EV was helpful in making that decision, along with actual visits to the schools and extensive independent research.

Nope, you are wrong; that is exactly what EV's initial misunderstanding was about too. She subsequently clarified it after the my school DC people alerted her to the problem. You would have gotten wait listed at Brent and into IT, since the order in which you rank has no impact on your probability of getting in.

[jsteele]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My family has worked with EV twice. The first time was when our child was born and we were considering where to buy a home. The second time was when we were applying to preschool, after we had attended about 20 open houses, identified schools that we were interested in, and just needed a sounding board for ranking the schools.

We were one of many OOB families W/O sibling who put Brent as #1 on our list because we believed that we should rank schools ONLY according to preference. We did not consider admissions data from previous years that showed the number of IB families (even with sibling) who had been shut out of Brent preschool. EV informed me that if we kept Brent as our #1 choice, we would be essentially throwing out the slot (and possibly reducing our chances at another school, which someone else listed as #1 if they had a better lottery number). I listened to EV and removed Brent altogether, moving Inspired Teaching (initially our second choice) to #1. We are now at Inspired Teaching and very, very, very glad for the advice that we received.

For us, the small fee paid for the mini-session to help with the order of the schools was money well spent.

FYI, if you had put Brent as #1 and IT as #2 on your lottery submission then the result would have been exactly the same: admission at IT. Her advice, as you understood it, had zero impact on your admission to IT.

The part in bold is a misunderstanding of the lottery algorithm. If someone else has a better lottery draw than you then they will beat you 10 times out of 10 for any school for which you both choose, assuming neither has a preference such as IB, sibling etc. You can rank IT #1 and they rank IT #12 and they will beat you, because of their luckier draw. You can still get into IT, if there is still a spot left for you after they and everyone else with better draw or better preference who chose IT as one of their 12 gets in, or they get into somewhere that they ranked higher, freeing up the spot for you.

If you don't understand this then you should indeed be hiring someone to walk you through this, but it should be me. Incredible how much lottery misinformation exists on DCUM.

Congrats though, heard IT is a great school and you sound happy there. That's the most important thing.

And you were right about not having any kind of shot at Brent OOB. Although ranking Brent #1 would not have affected any of your other 11 choices, it would have uselessly consumed a spot that you could have used for a safety school, at #12. Make sense? No? You can send me $500 in advance and I will explain it to you in person

If I understand all of this correctly, the poster took the correct action -- removing Brent -- regardless of whether the reasoning was correct. In the end it didn't make a difference. But, had her lottery pick been higher, she might have been glad to have had that 12th slot rather than wasting one on Brent.

So, again if I am correct, EV's advice turned out to be good, if based on a wrong assumption.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My family has worked with EV twice. The first time was when our child was born and we were considering where to buy a home. The second time was when we were applying to preschool, after we had attended about 20 open houses, identified schools that we were interested in, and just needed a sounding board for ranking the schools.

We were one of many OOB families W/O sibling who put Brent as #1 on our list because we believed that we should rank schools ONLY according to preference. We did not consider admissions data from previous years that showed the number of IB families (even with sibling) who had been shut out of Brent preschool. EV informed me that if we kept Brent as our #1 choice, we would be essentially throwing out the slot (and possibly reducing our chances at another school, which someone else listed as #1 if they had a better lottery number). I listened to EV and removed Brent altogether, moving Inspired Teaching (initially our second choice) to #1. We are now at Inspired Teaching and very, very, very glad for the advice that we received.

For us, the small fee paid for the mini-session to help with the order of the schools was money well spent.

FYI, if you had put Brent as #1 and IT as #2 on your lottery submission then the result would have been exactly the same: admission at IT. Her advice, as you understood it, had zero impact on your admission to IT.

The part in bold is a misunderstanding of the lottery algorithm. If someone else has a better lottery draw than you then they will beat you 10 times out of 10 for any school for which you both choose, assuming neither has a preference such as IB, sibling etc. You can rank IT #1 and they rank IT #12 and they will beat you, because of their luckier draw. You can still get into IT, if there is still a spot left for you after they and everyone else with better draw or better preference who chose IT as one of their 12 gets in, or they get into somewhere that they ranked higher, freeing up the spot for you.

If you don't understand this then you should indeed be hiring someone to walk you through this, but it should be me. Incredible how much lottery misinformation exists on DCUM.

Congrats though, heard IT is a great school and you sound happy there. That's the most important thing.

And you were right about not having any kind of shot at Brent OOB. Although ranking Brent #1 would not have affected any of your other 11 choices, it would have uselessly consumed a spot that you could have used for a safety school, at #12. Make sense? No? You can send me $500 in advance and I will explain it to you in person

If I understand all of this correctly, the poster took the correct action -- removing Brent -- regardless of whether the reasoning was correct. In the end it didn't make a difference. But, had her lottery pick been higher, she might have been glad to have had that 12th slot rather than wasting one on Brent.

So, again if I am correct, EV's advice turned out to be good, if based on a wrong assumption.

The person you quoted is correct in how the lottery worked. Also the original poster never mentioned if she added a "safety" school in the 12th slot (if she even picked 12 schools to begin with) after removing Brent.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My family has worked with EV twice. The first time was when our child was born and we were considering where to buy a home. The second time was when we were applying to preschool, after we had attended about 20 open houses, identified schools that we were interested in, and just needed a sounding board for ranking the schools.

We were one of many OOB families W/O sibling who put Brent as #1 on our list because we believed that we should rank schools ONLY according to preference. We did not consider admissions data from previous years that showed the number of IB families (even with sibling) who had been shut out of Brent preschool. EV informed me that if we kept Brent as our #1 choice, we would be essentially throwing out the slot (and possibly reducing our chances at another school, which someone else listed as #1 if they had a better lottery number). I listened to EV and removed Brent altogether, moving Inspired Teaching (initially our second choice) to #1. We are now at Inspired Teaching and very, very, very glad for the advice that we received.

For us, the small fee paid for the mini-session to help with the order of the schools was money well spent.

FYI, if you had put Brent as #1 and IT as #2 on your lottery submission then the result would have been exactly the same: admission at IT. Her advice, as you understood it, had zero impact on your admission to IT.

The part in bold is a misunderstanding of the lottery algorithm. If someone else has a better lottery draw than you then they will beat you 10 times out of 10 for any school for which you both choose, assuming neither has a preference such as IB, sibling etc. You can rank IT #1 and they rank IT #12 and they will beat you, because of their luckier draw. You can still get into IT, if there is still a spot left for you after they and everyone else with better draw or better preference who chose IT as one of their 12 gets in, or they get into somewhere that they ranked higher, freeing up the spot for you.

If you don't understand this then you should indeed be hiring someone to walk you through this, but it should be me. Incredible how much lottery misinformation exists on DCUM.

Congrats though, heard IT is a great school and you sound happy there. That's the most important thing.

And you were right about not having any kind of shot at Brent OOB. Although ranking Brent #1 would not have affected any of your other 11 choices, it would have uselessly consumed a spot that you could have used for a safety school, at #12. Make sense? No? You can send me $500 in advance and I will explain it to you in person

If I understand all of this correctly, the poster took the correct action -- removing Brent -- regardless of whether the reasoning was correct. In the end it didn't make a difference. But, had her lottery pick been higher, she might have been glad to have had that 12th slot rather than wasting one on Brent.

So, again if I am correct, EV's advice turned out to be good, if based on a wrong assumption.

I think it's fair to assume that PP misunderstood EV's advice. The advice would have been not to waste your pick on somewhere that you have less than zero chance of getting into, rather than not putting it #1 because it will impact your other choices. PP still had an amazing amount of luck.

[Anonymous]

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My family has worked with EV twice. The first time was when our child was born and we were considering where to buy a home. The second time was when we were applying to preschool, after we had attended about 20 open houses, identified schools that we were interested in, and just needed a sounding board for ranking the schools.

We were one of many OOB families W/O sibling who put Brent as #1 on our list because we believed that we should rank schools ONLY according to preference. We did not consider admissions data from previous years that showed the number of IB families (even with sibling) who had been shut out of Brent preschool. EV informed me that if we kept Brent as our #1 choice, we would be essentially throwing out the slot (and possibly reducing our chances at another school, which someone else listed as #1 if they had a better lottery number). I listened to EV and removed Brent altogether, moving Inspired Teaching (initially our second choice) to #1. We are now at Inspired Teaching and very, very, very glad for the advice that we received.

For us, the small fee paid for the mini-session to help with the order of the schools was money well spent.

FYI, if you had put Brent as #1 and IT as #2 on your lottery submission then the result would have been exactly the same: admission at IT. Her advice, as you understood it, had zero impact on your admission to IT.

The part in bold is a misunderstanding of the lottery algorithm. If someone else has a better lottery draw than you then they will beat you 10 times out of 10 for any school for which you both choose, assuming neither has a preference such as IB, sibling etc. You can rank IT #1 and they rank IT #12 and they will beat you, because of their luckier draw. You can still get into IT, if there is still a spot left for you after they and everyone else with better draw or better preference who chose IT as one of their 12 gets in, or they get into somewhere that they ranked higher, freeing up the spot for you.

If you don't understand this then you should indeed be hiring someone to walk you through this, but it should be me. Incredible how much lottery misinformation exists on DCUM.

Congrats though, heard IT is a great school and you sound happy there. That's the most important thing.

And you were right about not having any kind of shot at Brent OOB. Although ranking Brent #1 would not have affected any of your other 11 choices, it would have uselessly consumed a spot that you could have used for a safety school, at #12. Make sense? No? You can send me $500 in advance and I will explain it to you in person

If I understand all of this correctly, the poster took the correct action -- removing Brent -- regardless of whether the reasoning was correct. In the end it didn't make a difference. But, had her lottery pick been higher, she might have been glad to have had that 12th slot rather than wasting one on Brent.

So, again if I am correct, EV's advice turned out to be good, if based on a wrong assumption.

I am PP to whom you are responding. Yes, you are correct that the action taken was good, regardless of reasoning. And there was no harm done here, clearly, the PP has a kid at IT now.

But fundamental misunderstanding of the school lottery algorithm should preclude someone from offering advice to others about the lottery, especially paid advice. Hopefully it was PP who misunderstood or misreported the advice, and not the consultant who misunderstood. I am giving the consultant the benefit of the doubt because this is far from clear based on reading this thread. This could be DCUM broken telephone.

This consultant sounds like a great person and a helpful consultant and I am not trying to disparage anyone or hurt anyone's livelihood. One just has to be careful when giving advice because the lottery is high stakes for some people, and unlike your tax return, you can't just re-file when your accountant discovers a mistake.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My issue with EV Downey is that she has done Ludlow-Taylor a huge, huge disservice over the past 5 years -- even more so than this forum. She is a hater and has used her soapbox to bring down the school's reputation in the neighborhood. So Principal Cobbs isn't that great at PR, warm-fuzzies, whatever -- everyone knows that. But in countless talks with neighborhood families,sDowney has consistently discounted any good experience other parents have had at the school, based strictly on her SN son's negative experience with the principal quite a few years ago. I have a dog in this fight because my kids go to LT, and because we are an IB family trying to make our neighborhood school work for us -- and so far, we've been wonderfully repaid for our commitment. But I have had at least a half-dozen parents look at me with shock when I say that we are happy at LT, and more often than not it's because EV Downey (who I have never laid eyes on inside the school until the recent principal selection meeting) has warned them off the school. To me, this is letting personal experience cloud objective reality, and I think to become a really useful consultant she needs to get past those biases -- and not just when it comes to LT.

No dog in the LT fight as we are not in-bounds for it, but I have friends who are and I've heard stories from them about the unwelcoming environment in the school, which they did not pick from any EV Downey comments but from their dealings with Principal Cobb and visits in the school.

Most people do not hire EV Downey or any other consultant. So the fact that most of the LT neighborhood avoided that school like a plague is unlikely to have anything to do with her and everything with the school itself.

Funny, Ludlow-Taylor doesn't seem to have too many of these IB dissenters comment on the fact the LT had better DC-CAS scores than any other elementary school on the Hill. Yeah, what a terrible environment THAT must be. If you haven't been inside the school or observed a classroom in the last four years you don't know what you're talking about.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You know what, having gone through this process three times now and familiarized myself with many of the charter schools and the DCPS website/schools, I feel that I'm qualified to offer the same services.

I certainly seem to know more than any of my kid's teachers or others who work in these schools. (Which is frustrating and annoying, in itself.)

But, you know what, so do most of the people who read this board. You have to know and understand the system inside out.

Is there some magic tip that Ms. Downey knows that I don't?

No. I think she is only useful for those who know nothing.

I'm going to disagree. Full disclosure, E.V. is a long-time friend, and I am not her promise nor am I her other colleague. I did tell her about this thread so she may respond. I've only ever consulted with her on special ed issues and don't have the experience with her DCPS/DCPCS lottery sessions.

I will tell you that E.V. does visit all the schools she can to find out first-hand information, compares data and distills it to manageable categories for people. It may shock you but not that many people actually know about DCUM, and many are wary of info. from parents in 1 or 2 schools as it may not be complete or be biased.

She is Hill-based, no doubt. From what she has told me, she really thought her main business would be about private/special needs placements. The DCPS/DCPCS demand kind of took her by surprise. She does have the big sessions that I think are only like $10 if you want to test her out.

Give me a break. She hits a school's open house and maybe talks to a couple of parents. I've heard her trash talk the fact that Ludlow-Taylor outscored Maury and Brent in the most recent DC-CAS testing scores by saying that Ludlow-Taylor is either "cheating" or that it teaches to the test. This is in 2014! This assessment lets me know that she has no idea what's going on in the school, but has no problem distributing her crappy, outdated opinion around the Hill like so much fertilizer.

[Anonymous]

I was also totally unimpressed by her at the session I attended 2 yrs ago. Her info was outdated and she had a lot of personal axes to grind with several schools.