OOB for Wilson feeders: What is your neighborhood school missing?
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Anonymous
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I'm reading about the efforts of DCPS to develop academic programming and other elements to attract students from the overcrowded Wilson feeder network to other DCPS schools. It sounds like DCPS has been entirely unsuccessful in these efforts so far. So that leads to a question for the parents of OOB students who are in the Wilson/Deal feeder network. What factors cause you to reject your neighborhood schools and instead go OOB? When you made the decision to apply OOB in the lottery, what was wrong with your neighborhood schools?
Maybe these answers will help show DCPS what it needs to do to make schools in other neighborhoods more attractive, or at least good enough that people won't reject them. What were your reasons? What thought process did you go through in choosing? |
Anonymous
The notes I read said that DCPS's experience is that families don't follow programming -- that approach has been tried and failed. But I want my children to be in a school with mostly high-performing peers, as gauged by test scores, and am willing to travel for that. |
Anonymous
| At this point, I have no idea what our IB school is missing since we have attended our OOB school for seven years. It's the only school my child has ever known and it IS our school and our community. But seven years ago the scores at our IB were abysmal, it was (and still is) Title 1, there was very little diversity (only AA and Latino) and there was no viable middle school path (Ward 4). |
Anonymous
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The curriculum is largely the same, and the after care is cheaper at my IB school.
We pay a lot - in time, effort and money for enrichment and aftercare to go OOB. If we couldn't we'd be in a charter or the suburbs. |
Anonymous
OP is asking why. |
Anonymous
My IB school is in Ward 4. It's mostly OOB students too, so we're not giving up neighborhood friends to go OOB. We do it to have our kids around students who are more academically successful. There's no way for DCPS to solve this conundrum so long as just half of their students are proficient or advanced in ELA and one-third are proficient and advanced in Math. |
Anonymous
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School is missing:
Quality feeder rights to middle and high school Foreign language above the bare minimum Competent principal and AP Competent math teachers Quality aftercare Adequate support staff to deal with large proportion of students with behavior or poverty issues. Good test scores I realize these things are expensive, but without at least some of them, how can it succees? DCPS and the city council need to face facts. |
Anonymous
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OP here. Responses so far are interesting and helpful. Please keep them coming. The most common reason listed so far seems to be low test scores at the neighborhood schools, or some variant on that.
If people are comfortable posting this info, would you mind identifying the neighborhood school you rejected? I'd like to get a sense of how the test scores compare. Many thanks for the thoughtful responses so far. |
Anonymous
| I'm 17:15. Our IB is Takoma EC. |
Anonymous
But it isn't just the test scores, at least not in the younger grades. I would be fine assuming our IB would gentrify as DD grew up and the test scores would track along with that. But the principal is on leave for slapping a kid. Not a test score issue and nobody is going to put up with that even for the world's best test scores. If (and what a joke it is that this is an "if") they fire her, the new principal will likely be bad as well, because most of them seem to be pretty underwhelming. |
Anonymous
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Looked away from Brightwood years ago due to very low numbers of kids testing proficient on whatever the test was back then
Also, I hate the PreK-8 model. It doesn't allow for decent math differentiation, subject specialist teachers in upper grades, or enough of a critical mass for sports teams, drama, band etc |
Anonymous
+1. OP, please grasp that it is not just about test scores. If a school had a good principal, good teachers, a strong program in anything (language, arts, STEM...) and my child liked it and had 5 or 6 classmates at or above her academic level, then it would be fine even with bad test scores. I am not a huge believer in testing and I know DCPS has a challenging population. But as it is, the principal is weird, the front desk staff are morons, the aftercare aides play on their phones, they watch Disney movies in music class, and DD's classroom teacher is meh. No good test scores could compensate for those problems. Also there are mice and bugs. |
Anonymous
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Our IB is missing
* adequate support for kids with disabilities or who have been through traumatic situations. If each class had 12-15 kids in it, or full-time aides, that would help a lot. But 20+ kids, many of whom come and go throughout the year, is hard for even the best teacher * a peer group of high achievers * a large group of educated, literate, non-abusive, non-traumatized parents. Some of the parents have been so failed throughout their lives and have so much stress that I can't even begin to imagine the services required to help them parent in a calm and responsive way. And families like that aren't a few of the kids. That is the majority of the kids. |
Anonymous
+1. The EC model is just not enough kids. Small middle schools can be great if theu don't have to juggle such a big range of abilities and culturea. It can never work in a comprehensive DCPS. |
Anonymous
| Op again. No need to convince me to grasp anything. I know what caused me to arrange for other school options, but I am completely agnostic about what drove each of you reject your neighborhood school in favor of an OOB Wilson feeder. So tell me. If it was bad test scores plus something else, then say so. If it was something entirely unrelated to test scores, say that. I am not trying to herd the conversation in any direction. |