DC Begins School Boundary Study

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Leaving Lafayette in its current feeder pattern and just moving Shepherd makes sense in that it would give Deal and Wells equal number of feeder schools, and not require Lafayette kids to cross the park. But I think it's politically infeasible to remove only Bancroft and Shepherd from the Deal/JR feeder patterns because those schools have the highest populations of Black and Hispanic students.

Two things that would make the boundary reassignments more palatable would be a commitment to working with DDOT and WMATA on the buses required to get kids where they need to go, and a promise to offer honors English and math...the 6th grade classes would be for kids who score 4s and 5s on the 5th grade PARCC, and 7th and 8th would be based on the previous year's performance and teacher recommendations.

Kids have been crossing west across the park to attend Deal/JR for decades. Why can't Lafayette kids cross it east (apart from the unsaid reasons)?

They definitely can and I would suggest the committee recommend that. The pushback I anticipate is that it leaves Deal underenrolled and Wells overenrolled. But that's fixable: the former by opening up OOB spots, which Lafayette kids would be free to lottery for, and the latter by shifting a middle school grade into the Coolidge building. People may also complain that shifting Lafayette will increase traffic. It would help to offer a bus like the current "Deal bus" that crosses the park and takes kids to and from Wells.

Part of this process is figuring out what makes sense. The other, and maybe bigger, part is figuring out which groups will organize and complain about changes that make sense overall but are seen as harming them (largely by moving their kids or their homes into feeder patterns that have more poor kids). Those groups won't come out and say they don't want their kids going to school with poor kids or that their property values will drop. They will talk about reducing overcrowding, maximizing building capacity, traffic, feeder pattern cohesion, curriculum, how bad it will be for Title I schools to lose that designation, safe street crossings, extracurricular offerings, historical neighborhood boundaries, and literally anything else... but somehow their concerns will always lead to them advocating for their kids going to a richer rather than a poorer school.

Actually, I would go on the record as opposing my kid being moved to a school with mostly poor-performing students that is 2x the distance from my front door. Sleep research and all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
They should absolutely get rid of OOB feeder rights. There's no reason lottering into a school in K should give you an automatic path to that school's feeders till 12th.


I disagree. The bonds formed in cohorts and communities are valuable and it would be harmful to pull a child out of their cohort and community once established. If feeder rights were removed, there would be mass exodus from DCPS.

and there is a faction of DCPS who would not mind that. DCPS only cares about "equity" and "achievement gaps". They do not care about creating and sustaining a school system that is used by the vast majority of the school age population of the District of Columbia like in Arlington, Fairfax or Montgomery County. Their version of "let them eat cake" is "let them pay for private". Close to 50% of the DCPS population is "at risk" while less than 25% of school age children in the District are. That statistic means that there is extremely large number of families (and not all of them wealthy, or white) who do not believe that DCPS will do a good job educating their children. The first priority in boundary/feeder patters should be to try to create another feeder pattern that is deemed rigorous enough by middle class families. The best way to do that would be to have all the Hill ES feed to one middle school, and to install a principal at Eastern who is dedicated to creating another JR in the eastern end of the city.

It it not like JR is that great but it will take more than a new principal to turn Eastern into a JR.

Just look at the PARCC results. These are the proficiency percentages:

Eastern:

ELA 14.96%
Math 2.79%

JR:

ELA 54.43%
Math 18.37%

For comparison, here are the same results for 9-12th grade at BASIS and Latin:

BASIS:

ELA 85.34%
Math 59.63%

Latin:

ELA 57.87%
Math 29.00%

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Leaving Lafayette in its current feeder pattern and just moving Shepherd makes sense in that it would give Deal and Wells equal number of feeder schools, and not require Lafayette kids to cross the park. But I think it's politically infeasible to remove only Bancroft and Shepherd from the Deal/JR feeder patterns because those schools have the highest populations of Black and Hispanic students.

Two things that would make the boundary reassignments more palatable would be a commitment to working with DDOT and WMATA on the buses required to get kids where they need to go, and a promise to offer honors English and math...the 6th grade classes would be for kids who score 4s and 5s on the 5th grade PARCC, and 7th and 8th would be based on the previous year's performance and teacher recommendations.

Kids have been crossing west across the park to attend Deal/JR for decades. Why can't Lafayette kids cross it east (apart from the unsaid reasons)?

Because the homes inbound for Shepherd and inbound for Bancroft are closer to Wells than the homes inbound for Lafayette. Remember: bussing emphatically did not work in the 1970s. It's not going to work now (with free WMATA busses) no matter what the In This House We Believe yard signs say. They'll move to MoCo, to safe Deal homes, or reconsider 2nd-tier private and parochial schools that don't appeal to them today or five years ago. See, e.g., Bullis and SJC and WES.

Bancroft is closer to Wells?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Leaving Lafayette in its current feeder pattern and just moving Shepherd makes sense in that it would give Deal and Wells equal number of feeder schools, and not require Lafayette kids to cross the park. But I think it's politically infeasible to remove only Bancroft and Shepherd from the Deal/JR feeder patterns because those schools have the highest populations of Black and Hispanic students.

Two things that would make the boundary reassignments more palatable would be a commitment to working with DDOT and WMATA on the buses required to get kids where they need to go, and a promise to offer honors English and math...the 6th grade classes would be for kids who score 4s and 5s on the 5th grade PARCC, and 7th and 8th would be based on the previous year's performance and teacher recommendations.

Kids have been crossing west across the park to attend Deal/JR for decades. Why can't Lafayette kids cross it east (apart from the unsaid reasons)?

Because the homes inbound for Shepherd and inbound for Bancroft are closer to Wells than the homes inbound for Lafayette. Remember: bussing emphatically did not work in the 1970s. It's not going to work now (with free WMATA busses) no matter what the In This House We Believe yard signs say. They'll move to MoCo, to safe Deal homes, or reconsider 2nd-tier private and parochial schools that don't appeal to them today or five years ago. See, e.g., Bullis and SJC and WES.

Bancroft is closer to Wells?

No but it's closer to MacFarland, which is where the proposal earlier in this thread would send them (Deal 3.3 miles, MacFarland 1.3 miles). And Shepherd is closer to Wells than Deal: 2 miles vs 4.1 miles.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
They should absolutely get rid of OOB feeder rights. There's no reason lottering into a school in K should give you an automatic path to that school's feeders till 12th.


I disagree. The bonds formed in cohorts and communities are valuable and it would be harmful to pull a child out of their cohort and community once established. If feeder rights were removed, there would be mass exodus from DCPS.

and there is a faction of DCPS who would not mind that. DCPS only cares about "equity" and "achievement gaps". They do not care about creating and sustaining a school system that is used by the vast majority of the school age population of the District of Columbia like in Arlington, Fairfax or Montgomery County. Their version of "let them eat cake" is "let them pay for private". Close to 50% of the DCPS population is "at risk" while less than 25% of school age children in the District are. That statistic means that there is extremely large number of families (and not all of them wealthy, or white) who do not believe that DCPS will do a good job educating their children. The first priority in boundary/feeder patters should be to try to create another feeder pattern that is deemed rigorous enough by middle class families. The best way to do that would be to have all the Hill ES feed to one middle school, and to install a principal at Eastern who is dedicated to creating another JR in the eastern end of the city.

This.

Where do you locate a single middle school that is big enough to serve all the Eastern feeders? What do you do with the other two middle school buildings? How do you keep this middle school (which would likely have far more students than Deal, with a lot more economic and racial diversity and range of academic skills) functioning? How do you avoid the problem Deal has of having too many students for certain sports teams and other extracurriculars?

NP. I’ll bite. You put the middle school in the Eastern building. Feed Brent, Maury, JO, SWS, Ludlow, Watkins, etc. into one middle school and you would immediately have IB buy-in. Move Eastern to one of the middle school buildings.

The Hill has a huge number of high performing middle school students. They’re just mostly at charter schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
They should absolutely get rid of OOB feeder rights. There's no reason lottering into a school in K should give you an automatic path to that school's feeders till 12th.


I disagree. The bonds formed in cohorts and communities are valuable and it would be harmful to pull a child out of their cohort and community once established. If feeder rights were removed, there would be mass exodus from DCPS.

and there is a faction of DCPS who would not mind that. DCPS only cares about "equity" and "achievement gaps". They do not care about creating and sustaining a school system that is used by the vast majority of the school age population of the District of Columbia like in Arlington, Fairfax or Montgomery County. Their version of "let them eat cake" is "let them pay for private". Close to 50% of the DCPS population is "at risk" while less than 25% of school age children in the District are. That statistic means that there is extremely large number of families (and not all of them wealthy, or white) who do not believe that DCPS will do a good job educating their children. The first priority in boundary/feeder patters should be to try to create another feeder pattern that is deemed rigorous enough by middle class families. The best way to do that would be to have all the Hill ES feed to one middle school, and to install a principal at Eastern who is dedicated to creating another JR in the eastern end of the city.

This.

Where do you locate a single middle school that is big enough to serve all the Eastern feeders? What do you do with the other two middle school buildings? How do you keep this middle school (which would likely have far more students than Deal, with a lot more economic and racial diversity and range of academic skills) functioning? How do you avoid the problem Deal has of having too many students for certain sports teams and other extracurriculars?

NP. I’ll bite. You put the middle school in the Eastern building. Feed Brent, Maury, JO, SWS, Ludlow, Watkins, etc. into one middle school and you would immediately have IB buy-in. Move Eastern to one of the middle school buildings.

The Hill has a huge number of high performing middle school students. They’re just mostly at charter schools.

Totally agree that if politics, etc weren’t issues, Eastern is the obvious answer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
They should absolutely get rid of OOB feeder rights. There's no reason lottering into a school in K should give you an automatic path to that school's feeders till 12th.


I disagree. The bonds formed in cohorts and communities are valuable and it would be harmful to pull a child out of their cohort and community once established. If feeder rights were removed, there would be mass exodus from DCPS.

and there is a faction of DCPS who would not mind that. DCPS only cares about "equity" and "achievement gaps". They do not care about creating and sustaining a school system that is used by the vast majority of the school age population of the District of Columbia like in Arlington, Fairfax or Montgomery County. Their version of "let them eat cake" is "let them pay for private". Close to 50% of the DCPS population is "at risk" while less than 25% of school age children in the District are. That statistic means that there is extremely large number of families (and not all of them wealthy, or white) who do not believe that DCPS will do a good job educating their children. The first priority in boundary/feeder patters should be to try to create another feeder pattern that is deemed rigorous enough by middle class families. The best way to do that would be to have all the Hill ES feed to one middle school, and to install a principal at Eastern who is dedicated to creating another JR in the eastern end of the city.

It it not like JR is that great but it will take more than a new principal to turn Eastern into a JR.

Just look at the PARCC results. These are the proficiency percentages:

Eastern:

ELA 14.96%
Math 2.79%

JR:

ELA 54.43%
Math 18.37%

Wow.

At Eastern, 85% of kids are below grade level in reading and writing and 97% are below grade level in math.

At JR, 45% of kids are below grade level in reading and writing and 81% are below grade level in math.

JR isn't that low in math; the scores exclude the many Hardy/Deal students who took higher level math in middle school. Back of the envelope is more like 40% below grade.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
They should absolutely get rid of OOB feeder rights. There's no reason lottering into a school in K should give you an automatic path to that school's feeders till 12th.


I disagree. The bonds formed in cohorts and communities are valuable and it would be harmful to pull a child out of their cohort and community once established. If feeder rights were removed, there would be mass exodus from DCPS.

and there is a faction of DCPS who would not mind that. DCPS only cares about "equity" and "achievement gaps". They do not care about creating and sustaining a school system that is used by the vast majority of the school age population of the District of Columbia like in Arlington, Fairfax or Montgomery County. Their version of "let them eat cake" is "let them pay for private". Close to 50% of the DCPS population is "at risk" while less than 25% of school age children in the District are. That statistic means that there is extremely large number of families (and not all of them wealthy, or white) who do not believe that DCPS will do a good job educating their children. The first priority in boundary/feeder patters should be to try to create another feeder pattern that is deemed rigorous enough by middle class families. The best way to do that would be to have all the Hill ES feed to one middle school, and to install a principal at Eastern who is dedicated to creating another JR in the eastern end of the city.

It it not like JR is that great but it will take more than a new principal to turn Eastern into a JR.

Just look at the PARCC results. These are the proficiency percentages:

Eastern:

ELA 14.96%
Math 2.79%

JR:

ELA 54.43%
Math 18.37%

For comparison, here are the same results for 9-12th grade at BASIS and Latin:

BASIS:

ELA 85.34%
Math 59.63%

Latin:

ELA 57.87%
Math 29.00%

WTG Basis on counseling out all the at risk kids. Public School and all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
They should absolutely get rid of OOB feeder rights. There's no reason lottering into a school in K should give you an automatic path to that school's feeders till 12th.


I disagree. The bonds formed in cohorts and communities are valuable and it would be harmful to pull a child out of their cohort and community once established. If feeder rights were removed, there would be mass exodus from DCPS.

and there is a faction of DCPS who would not mind that. DCPS only cares about "equity" and "achievement gaps". They do not care about creating and sustaining a school system that is used by the vast majority of the school age population of the District of Columbia like in Arlington, Fairfax or Montgomery County. Their version of "let them eat cake" is "let them pay for private". Close to 50% of the DCPS population is "at risk" while less than 25% of school age children in the District are. That statistic means that there is extremely large number of families (and not all of them wealthy, or white) who do not believe that DCPS will do a good job educating their children. The first priority in boundary/feeder patters should be to try to create another feeder pattern that is deemed rigorous enough by middle class families. The best way to do that would be to have all the Hill ES feed to one middle school, and to install a principal at Eastern who is dedicated to creating another JR in the eastern end of the city.

It it not like JR is that great but it will take more than a new principal to turn Eastern into a JR.

Just look at the PARCC results. These are the proficiency percentages:

Eastern:

ELA 14.96%
Math 2.79%

JR:

ELA 54.43%
Math 18.37%

For comparison, here are the same results for 9-12th grade at BASIS and Latin:

BASIS:

ELA 85.34%
Math 59.63%

Latin:

ELA 57.87%
Math 29.00%

WTG Basis on counseling out all the at risk kids. Public School and all.

If scores are low, that's bad.
If scores are too high, that's also bad?

Tell me, PP, what's the right level of mediocrity to check your faux equity boxes?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
They should absolutely get rid of OOB feeder rights. There's no reason lottering into a school in K should give you an automatic path to that school's feeders till 12th.


I disagree. The bonds formed in cohorts and communities are valuable and it would be harmful to pull a child out of their cohort and community once established. If feeder rights were removed, there would be mass exodus from DCPS.

and there is a faction of DCPS who would not mind that. DCPS only cares about "equity" and "achievement gaps". They do not care about creating and sustaining a school system that is used by the vast majority of the school age population of the District of Columbia like in Arlington, Fairfax or Montgomery County. Their version of "let them eat cake" is "let them pay for private". Close to 50% of the DCPS population is "at risk" while less than 25% of school age children in the District are. That statistic means that there is extremely large number of families (and not all of them wealthy, or white) who do not believe that DCPS will do a good job educating their children. The first priority in boundary/feeder patters should be to try to create another feeder pattern that is deemed rigorous enough by middle class families. The best way to do that would be to have all the Hill ES feed to one middle school, and to install a principal at Eastern who is dedicated to creating another JR in the eastern end of the city.

It it not like JR is that great but it will take more than a new principal to turn Eastern into a JR.

Just look at the PARCC results. These are the proficiency percentages:

Eastern:

ELA 14.96%
Math 2.79%

JR:

ELA 54.43%
Math 18.37%

For comparison, here are the same results for 9-12th grade at BASIS and Latin:

BASIS:

ELA 85.34%
Math 59.63%

Latin:

ELA 57.87%
Math 29.00%

WTG Basis on counseling out all the at risk kids. Public School and all.

If scores are low, that's bad.
If scores are too high, that's also bad?

Tell me, PP, what's the right level of mediocrity to check your faux equity boxes?

The previous previous PP posted BASIS scores and said “by comparison.” But it’s apples to oranges. You can’t compare a DCPS that takes all comers every year at any time to BASIS which doesn’t.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
They should absolutely get rid of OOB feeder rights. There's no reason lottering into a school in K should give you an automatic path to that school's feeders till 12th.


I disagree. The bonds formed in cohorts and communities are valuable and it would be harmful to pull a child out of their cohort and community once established. If feeder rights were removed, there would be mass exodus from DCPS.

and there is a faction of DCPS who would not mind that. DCPS only cares about "equity" and "achievement gaps". They do not care about creating and sustaining a school system that is used by the vast majority of the school age population of the District of Columbia like in Arlington, Fairfax or Montgomery County. Their version of "let them eat cake" is "let them pay for private". Close to 50% of the DCPS population is "at risk" while less than 25% of school age children in the District are. That statistic means that there is extremely large number of families (and not all of them wealthy, or white) who do not believe that DCPS will do a good job educating their children. The first priority in boundary/feeder patters should be to try to create another feeder pattern that is deemed rigorous enough by middle class families. The best way to do that would be to have all the Hill ES feed to one middle school, and to install a principal at Eastern who is dedicated to creating another JR in the eastern end of the city.

It it not like JR is that great but it will take more than a new principal to turn Eastern into a JR.

Just look at the PARCC results. These are the proficiency percentages:

Eastern:

ELA 14.96%
Math 2.79%

JR:

ELA 54.43%
Math 18.37%

For comparison, here are the same results for 9-12th grade at BASIS and Latin:

BASIS:

ELA 85.34%
Math 59.63%

Latin:

ELA 57.87%
Math 29.00%

WTG Basis on counseling out all the at risk kids. Public School and all.

If scores are low, that's bad.
If scores are too high, that's also bad?

Tell me, PP, what's the right level of mediocrity to check your faux equity boxes?

The previous previous PP posted BASIS scores and said “by comparison.” But it’s apples to oranges. You can’t compare a DCPS that takes all comers every year at any time to BASIS which doesn’t.

Ok. But you can by heartened your kids are in a school with a cohort at grade level.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Leaving Lafayette in its current feeder pattern and just moving Shepherd makes sense in that it would give Deal and Wells equal number of feeder schools, and not require Lafayette kids to cross the park. But I think it's politically infeasible to remove only Bancroft and Shepherd from the Deal/JR feeder patterns because those schools have the highest populations of Black and Hispanic students.

Two things that would make the boundary reassignments more palatable would be a commitment to working with DDOT and WMATA on the buses required to get kids where they need to go, and a promise to offer honors English and math...the 6th grade classes would be for kids who score 4s and 5s on the 5th grade PARCC, and 7th and 8th would be based on the previous year's performance and teacher recommendations.

Kids have been crossing west across the park to attend Deal/JR for decades. Why can't Lafayette kids cross it east (apart from the unsaid reasons)?

Because the homes inbound for Shepherd and inbound for Bancroft are closer to Wells than the homes inbound for Lafayette. Remember: bussing emphatically did not work in the 1970s. It's not going to work now (with free WMATA busses) no matter what the In This House We Believe yard signs say. They'll move to MoCo, to safe Deal homes, or reconsider 2nd-tier private and parochial schools that don't appeal to them today or five years ago. See, e.g., Bullis and SJC and WES.

They can - they are racist/classists, etc. I couldn't get into the camp in Takoma and at had to commute to Chevy Chase DPR - it took me ten minutes during rush hour.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Leaving Lafayette in its current feeder pattern and just moving Shepherd makes sense in that it would give Deal and Wells equal number of feeder schools, and not require Lafayette kids to cross the park. But I think it's politically infeasible to remove only Bancroft and Shepherd from the Deal/JR feeder patterns because those schools have the highest populations of Black and Hispanic students.

Two things that would make the boundary reassignments more palatable would be a commitment to working with DDOT and WMATA on the buses required to get kids where they need to go, and a promise to offer honors English and math...the 6th grade classes would be for kids who score 4s and 5s on the 5th grade PARCC, and 7th and 8th would be based on the previous year's performance and teacher recommendations.

Kids have been crossing west across the park to attend Deal/JR for decades. Why can't Lafayette kids cross it east (apart from the unsaid reasons)?

They definitely can and I would suggest the committee recommend that. The pushback I anticipate is that it leaves Deal underenrolled and Wells overenrolled. But that's fixable: the former by opening up OOB spots, which Lafayette kids would be free to lottery for, and the latter by shifting a middle school grade into the Coolidge building. People may also complain that shifting Lafayette will increase traffic. It would help to offer a bus like the current "Deal bus" that crosses the park and takes kids to and from Wells.

Part of this process is figuring out what makes sense. The other, and maybe bigger, part is figuring out which groups will organize and complain about changes that make sense overall but are seen as harming them (largely by moving their kids or their homes into feeder patterns that have more poor kids). Those groups won't come out and say they don't want their kids going to school with poor kids or that their property values will drop. They will talk about reducing overcrowding, maximizing building capacity, traffic, feeder pattern cohesion, curriculum, how bad it will be for Title I schools to lose that designation, safe street crossings, extracurricular offerings, historical neighborhood boundaries, and literally anything else... but somehow their concerns will always lead to them advocating for their kids going to a richer rather than a poorer school.

Actually, I would go on the record as opposing my kid being moved to a school with mostly poor-performing students that is 2x the distance from my front door. Sleep research and all.

Hahhahha. You don't care about sleep research. You just don't want your kids slumming with kids in Takoma - which is largely MC. You think your kids are lighter and brighter because you live in Chase Chase. Your commute would be under 20 minutes - just like your commute to J/R or the new high school in Palisades. Give it up.

[Anonymous]

I’m always amused by y’all trying to kick Shepherd out in the name of overcrowding. Shepherd is such a tiny school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’m always amused by y’all trying to kick Shepherd out in the name of overcrowding. Shepherd is such a tiny school.

Shepherd + 1/2 Lafayette would create a stronger cohort at Wells/Coolidge. I am always amused by the entitled Chevy Chase and Shepherd Park families who think it's too challenging to take Military/Piney Branch in the morning, and then want to restrict equity access at OOB at Deal/J-R. We see you.