Greater Greater Washington story on school enrollment growth
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Anonymous
Why should the risk of a "not good school" be borne entirely by poor kids? Why shouldn't your kid, and my kid, shoulder some of that risk too? Besides, if our kids are as good as we think they are, they will get into a test-in school (which, under this hypothetical plan, would be expanded). |
Anonymous
Lol at you thinking tour house would still rent for $5.5k if this scenario plays out. |
Anonymous
An all lottery school wide system will send UMC families to the burbs likes its the 1990s. I was here then and I remember. DCPS needs to get rid of all feeder rights for OOB kids. A kid who gets into Janney OOB has to play lottery again for OOB placement into Deal. Bancroft and Oyster feed to MacFarland. Create a true test in academy at Brookland which is less than 50% capacity, to lure more UMC families from around NW to attend. But DCPS will never learn. You have to offer real rigor, tracked classes at most middle schools or the best parents won't bother. |
Anonymous
Because people will leave for the suburbs and then it'll be a much worse school system overall. |
Anonymous
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Fine. So ~600 white families now IB Wilson might leave ... but everyone else in the city is already doing this.
Wilson is NOT propping up DC schools. In report after report it is under performing. SWW, Banneker, BASIS, Latin, Ellington are all producing successful students. Wilson is not the crown jewel in the system unless you are talking about the baseball or lacrosse teams. It has been more than 50 years since Brown v Board of Education. Your address should not determine whether you get to go to a good school. The status quo IS not working. |
Anonymous
Nick here. I really don't know enough about San Francisco to comment on it. To be clear, I'm not advocating going to all-lottery. I feel DC should be working harder to strengthen its by-right school system. It's important that there be a lottery system to offer an outlet for families who are failed by the traditional system but in my mind the fact that 75% of DC kids are going through the lottery is a sign of failure. |
Anonymous
In an all-lottery system, no school will be a ‘good’ school. |
Anonymous
There would still be application schools in an all-lottery system and with the already planned expansions there would be even more good seats. If you want a big traditional high school with all the sports - you can have it. And if DCPS consolidated the number down from today they would not all be bad. |
Anonymous
There are not enough on-grade-level students to make a school good if they are equally distributed among them, particularly when the many of the capable students are at the application high schools. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
This isn't what Brown held, but thank you anyway. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Are you in sixth grade? Or possibly you just graduated from college and moved here for an internship? It is sweet that you believe "we" could actually "fix" "the poverty, unemployment and trauma" that is multi, multi-generational in the District. No, of course schools can't do this alone. In fact, no entity in the District is going to accomplish this. Typing this makes me sad. — old person who's lived here for decades |
Anonymous
Nick here. In the past few months I've spoken with councilmembers, people in the mayor's office, people in the DME's office, people from DCPS. They've all expressed versions of the same story: the enrollment surge that is coming can be handled with a combination of boundary changes and some revisions to student assignment policies. Nobody has talked about going to all-lottery, but no one has expressed any doubt about the ability to meet the demand by a few simple tweaks to the status quo. It was definitely conveyed to me that building new schools is just not going to happen. This article had its origins when I started trying to make a map that would show where some of those boundary changes might go. I quickly got frustrated, because it seemed impossible. Then I added up the projected enrollment and projected capacity of all the elementary schools, and I got that the city is going to be 886 seats short. No amount of moving boundaries or changing assignment policies creates seats. So I said, OK, assume you can put two new elementary schools anywhere you want, with 900 seats, and try again. It still didn't work. All of the schools that needed to shed students were concentrated in the same parts of the city. My own local elementary, Key, for example, is going to be about 150 kids over. The closest elementary that is projected to have space is Walker-Jones, in Shaw (and my old in-boundary school when I used to live over there). Walker-Jones is coincidentally projected to have about 150 seats. But between Key and Walker-Jones are nine other schools, and all nine of those also need to reduce their student count. In fact, the two closest schools to Walker-Jones, Seaton and Thomson, are going to need to move about 190 students between them, and could take all the capacity at Walker-Jones just by themselves. I started seeing scenarios like Key sends 150 students to Mann. Mann is projected to be 125 over, and if you just added 150 now it's 275 over. So it needs to send 275 to it's closest neighbor, Stoddert. Stoddert sends 340 to Hyde, Hyde sends 350 to Francis-Stevens, Francis-Stevens sends 520 to Thomson, and so on. These aren't boundary adjustments, these are wholesale turnovers. Look at the map, every school in the city would have to change its boundaries to get all the kids to fit.
This is an important point and I'm sorry that I didn't make it more eloquently. DCPS has 64 elementary schools right now. We're going to need two more no matter what, so let's assume 66 in eight years. There are an infinite number of ways you could divide the city into 66 zones, each with the appropriate number of kids for one of the elementary schools. However, if you add the constraints that the zone physically contains the school, and is continuous, and is reasonably compact, it may not be possible at all. The reason for this is that the schools that are going to be crowded are concentrated, and the schools that are going to have seats are concentrated. There is a mismatch between the schools that the city has and the schools that it needs. The city is going to face a choice: build new schools where they are needed; have ridiculously gerrymandered boundaries where families often drive past several other schools to get to their assigned school, or go all-lottery. |
Anonymous
Wilson is the only general high school WOTP, and it is the largest and most crowded. That is the one you'd close????? |