Rhee feared Hardy principal was weeding out poor kids

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[Post New]03/22/2011 22:29
Anonymous
Ken, I read your foolish article over at GGW, and chose not to respond. My sense is GGW likes to post ignorant, inflamatory articles as comment bait, and I got tired of playing their game a long time ago.

I am sorry you are now puffing this lame article of yours here and elsewhere. It was a very weak effort, and fails all the basic tests of logic and common sense.

You "did some research" but did not manage to talk to any parents who'd been through the Hardy application process? My DS went through the application process. It was rigorous, but kind of transparent in its purpose. The application process was a way of telling kids and their parents, "No foolishness allowed here. If you get in, we will be all over you to do your work every day." It was a semi-permeable shield--kids and parents who took umbrage at the open house, interview and application process excused themselves from Hardy. I doubt anyone who really, really wanted in was denied by the application process.

(In the end, the DS chose his in-bound option, Stuart-Hobson. Good choice!)

You've been duped by Rhee's hagiographist.
[Post New]03/23/2011 09:25
Anonymous
As a former Hardy parent, I can tell you that I believed that the application process did control the makeup of the OOB population. My husband, who was on the PTA at the time, believed it too. However, I believe that if Pope was interested in controlling who matriculated at Hardy it was to ensure that disruptive students were kept out.

Which is not so different from the policy towards OOB students post-lottery. No OOB student has an absolute right to go to an OOB school and can be removed from that school for something as simple as chronic tardiness. One can argue that every student should have an equal chance to attend a school like Hardy OOB. That's fair. However, it's also true that no one is owed a spot regardless of their behavior.


Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but doesn't posting from a Hardy parent support the column's premise (perhaps without the racial/socioeconomic overtones)? I don't know much about the DCPS OOB process - my child is in a charter - but I thought that while some magnet and specialty programs can use applications in the admissions process, Hardy is not one of these schools. It's a neighborhood school, and as such admissions are controlled by geography (in bounds) and the lottery (OOB). Is that correct?

And the application is far more than the passive deterrent or informational piece that some claim it is. It requires an interview, an essay on why art and music are important, at least one letter of recommendation, copies of report cards, and other optional pieces. There’s no reason to ask for that information unless you’re going to use it in the admissions process. In any event, whether the application is used as a passive deterrent or for the more sinister purpose of manipulating the waitlist, any attempt to control admissions outside the OOB waitlist is, in my view, completely improper (assuming, of course, that I understand the procedure correctly).
[Post New]03/23/2011 10:23
archerovi
Member Offline
A line of critique that I am getting here and on GGW is that the data I've provided doesn't absolutely prove the claim that Pope used the admissions process to control which waitlisted OOB students were admitted.

There are 2 problems with this critique, however.

First, those making the critique are raising the bar so high that the claim becomes impossible to prove one way or another. They say Hardy is incomparable to any other school. They say Pope should be asked (principals can't speak on the record about any but benign topics without going through DCPS). They say DCPS should see where the Hardy waitlisted kids ultimately ended up (kids often get added to the waitlist after the lottery without DCPS's knowledge, and there's no way for DCPS to know if a waitlisted kid wasn't accepted because Pope skipped them or because they were accepted at Deal or a charter and told Hardy to remove their name from the waitlist).

Second, and more important, is that the claim is being confirmed by former Hardy parents in the comments here and at GGW.

"As a former Hardy parent, I can tell you that I believed that the application process did control the makeup of the OOB population. My husband, who was on the PTA at the time, believed it too. However, I believe that if Pope was interested in controlling who matriculated at Hardy it was to ensure that disruptive students were kept out." (DC Urban Moms)

"The uncommitted students and families were eliminated through a rigorous but welcomed process.... There was a family type environment where you felt confident and secure that you child would be educated and safe while there, this is no longer true." (GGW)

I'm not saying that Pope was a sinister Mr Scrooge gleefully crossing off the names of poor kids from the waitlist.

I'm saying that Pope used admissions data as the primary factor in selecting OOB students, and the unintended effect was to make students with greater needs the burden of other principals and other teachers.

Pope's supporters aren't just calling for his reinstatement, they are calling for the reinstatement of this unjust admissions process. Rhee announced the end of this admissions process the same night she announced Pope's reassignment (I was there).

It's my contention that this request on the part of Pope's supporters that should be rejected.
[Post New]03/23/2011 10:37
Anonymous

I'm saying that Pope used admissions data as the primary factor in selecting OOB students, and the unintended effect was to make students with greater needs the burden of other principals and other teachers.


---------

So what? If you are trying to get in a school that is out of your boundry, then you should have to play by the rules of that school. If you don't want to go through the application process or whatever, then just go to your own school. don't like your school? move somewhere else or do what it takes to improve your school. The entitled of folks in DC is shocking! At least in DC you have the option of looking at OOB schools-- in most places in the country you are just stuck with your in-boundry school.
[Post New]03/23/2011 11:03
jsteele
Site Admin Offline
archerovi wrote:there's no way for DCPS to know if a waitlisted kid wasn't accepted because Pope skipped them or because they were accepted at Deal or a charter and told Hardy to remove their name from the waitlist).


Ken:

I'm absolutely not buying this. Rhee hardly opened her mouth without talking about data. Now you expect us to believe that she suddenly didn't have data? It absolutely should have been possible for someone at DCPS to pick up a phone and call people who were at the front of the waitlist but not offered spots at Hardy and ask what happened. It would be the height of incompetence to remove a popular principal based on an unproven "concern" without taking even minimal steps to prove the concern.

[Post New]03/23/2011 11:11
Anonymous
archerovi wrote:A line of critique that I am getting here and on GGW is that the data I've provided doesn't absolutely prove the claim that Pope used the admissions process to control which waitlisted OOB students were admitted.

There are 2 problems with this critique, however.

First, those making the critique are raising the bar so high that the claim becomes impossible to prove one way or another. They say Hardy is incomparable to any other school. They say Pope should be asked (principals can't speak on the record about any but benign topics without going through DCPS). They say DCPS should see where the Hardy waitlisted kids ultimately ended up (kids often get added to the waitlist after the lottery without DCPS's knowledge, and there's no way for DCPS to know if a waitlisted kid wasn't accepted because Pope skipped them or because they were accepted at Deal or a charter and told Hardy to remove their name from the waitlist).

Second, and more important, is that the claim is being confirmed by former Hardy parents in the comments here and at GGW.

"As a former Hardy parent, I can tell you that I believed that the application process did control the makeup of the OOB population. My husband, who was on the PTA at the time, believed it too. However, I believe that if Pope was interested in controlling who matriculated at Hardy it was to ensure that disruptive students were kept out." (DC Urban Moms)

"The uncommitted students and families were eliminated through a rigorous but welcomed process.... There was a family type environment where you felt confident and secure that you child would be educated and safe while there, this is no longer true." (GGW)

I'm not saying that Pope was a sinister Mr Scrooge gleefully crossing off the names of poor kids from the waitlist.

I'm saying that Pope used admissions data as the primary factor in selecting OOB students, and the unintended effect was to make students with greater needs the burden of other principals and other teachers.

Pope's supporters aren't just calling for his reinstatement, they are calling for the reinstatement of this unjust admissions process. Rhee announced the end of this admissions process the same night she announced Pope's reassignment (I was there).

It's my contention that this request on the part of Pope's supporters that should be rejected.


Former Hardy parent here again. Okay, I've had a chance to think about your article and I realize now that I made certain assumptions about your data which are incorrect. I realize now that your bar chart reflects total African-American student population and total free/reduced price lunch population, not the percentage of the OOB population which are in those categories. You don't know how many of the African-American students and free/reduced price lunch students are from in-boundaries which is of course why the comparison with the other schools besides Deal is ridiculous. But it also raises serious questions about the comparison with Deal because Deal's enrollment boundaries cross over the park into African-American neighborhoods while Hardy's enrollment boundaries do not. (And btw my child attended Hardy OOB and we are white) Your bar chart is meaningless unless you can break it out for OOB students only and then do a statistical analysis as to whether the differences are statistically significant.

Yes, as I stated earlier, I believed that the application process was used to keep disruptive kids out. You are making assumptions that the goal of keeping disruptive kids out means that poor kids will be kept out -- so you are assuming that poor kids will be disruptive. You need to present actual figures to back that up. And even if there is a correlation between the two, a correlation does not prove causality or that Pope kept disruptive kids out with the intention of keeping poor kids out - which you acknowledge but then why would the unnamed Central Office people be upset with Pope (since the application process probably has the same effect at Wilson) unless they thought he deliberately kept poor kids out. (Or perhaps it was a convenient way of justifying Rhee's decision after the fact.)

BTW I was at that December 2009 meeting too and what the most of the parents there believed was that Hardy was a magnet school and had never been a neighborhood school. They were misinformed (Hardy has always been a neighborhood school) but they were responding the way they did because they were afraid their kids would be forced out.

And as for raising the bar so high that the claim becomes impossible to prove one way or another, this is how we do rigorous research. You're not allowed to use sketchy data and make claims that you have proved something. I know because I have a PhD in social science and I do research for a living. If I sent an article like yours to a serious journal, it would be rejected out of hand and wouldn't even make it to the review stage.

Go back and get the break downs for OOB students and then let's see what you find and let's have a real discussion. But throwing around bar charts and percentages and innuendo from an unnamed central office source, well, that's not real research.
[Post New]03/23/2011 11:17
archerovi
Member Offline
jsteele wrote:I'm absolutely not buying this. Rhee hardly opened her mouth without talking about data. Now you expect us to believe that she suddenly didn't have data? It absolutely should have been possible for someone at DCPS to pick up a phone and call people who were at the front of the waitlist but not offered spots at Hardy and ask what happened. It would be the height of incompetence to remove a popular principal based on an unproven "concern" without taking even minimal steps to prove the concern.


Jeff,

I probably wasn't clear about this. Pope's application told kids to not go through the lottery, because the Hardy application would automatically put them on Pope's waitlist. (http://www.hardyms.org/quicklinkfiles/ArtsProgramApplication_Grade6_11-09.pdf) That means DCPS didn't have any data on who had applied for Hardy.

Ken Archer
[Post New]03/23/2011 11:35
archerovi
Member Offline
Anonymous wrote:Go back and get the break downs for OOB students and then let's see what you find and let's have a real discussion.


I did provide this breakdown for OOB students at Hardy and Deal, and it further supports the claim. It's in one of my comments on my GGW article; you can read it here - http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9728/rhee-feared-hardy-principal-was-weeding-out-poor-kids/#comment-92953.

Ken Archer
[Post New]03/23/2011 12:47
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
NOTHING prevented IB families from attending Hardy. IB parents who expressed confusion over the application process were full of sh**. No IB families were ever turned away.


I think if you were to talk to some actual in-boundary parents you would get quite a different story. I went to a number of meetings between Pope and my local school's PTA and he made it abundantly clear that he didn't want our kids. Parents who went through the application process reported that they were discouraged and even lied to about the process. Families who attended reported a climate of hostility and harassment -- from the teachers and administration! Who would want to put their kids into that?
[Post New]03/23/2011 14:49
Anonymous
archerovi wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Go back and get the break downs for OOB students and then let's see what you find and let's have a real discussion.


I did provide this breakdown for OOB students at Hardy and Deal, and it further supports the claim. It's in one of my comments on my GGW article; you can read it here - http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/9728/rhee-feared-hardy-principal-was-weeding-out-poor-kids/#comment-92953.

Ken Archer

Listen to me. You provided the percentage of students who are OOB. You didn't provide what percentage of OOB students are African-American and what percentage of OOB students get free/reduced price lunches. You are making a false equivalency of being OOB and being African-American. This is particularly important because you compare Hardy to schools like Kelly Miller and Ron Brown that have nearly all or 100% students who are African-American. Are they all OOB students? I think not. But what is implied in your analysis of Hardy is that all the African-American students are OOB and all the OOB students are African-American - which we know to not be true. And here's why it is even more important vis a vis Deal - because Deal has a distribution closer to that of Hardy but since Deal has boundaries that reach into African-American neighborhoods (whereas Hardy doesn't), it is even harder to say anything about OOB students by pointing to percentages of African-American students and free/reduced price lunch students. It is most likely that a percentage of that bar you present for Deal is made up of in-boundary students.

I hate to put it like this but you leave me no choice. You don't know what you're doing when it comes to research. You may be on the right track but you haven't provided any data that prove it and it makes it look like you're only trying after the fact to give false credibility to a rumor you heard at the Central Office.

This is what we need to see for Deal and Hardy before we can make a comparison. We need to know 1) the numbers of the in-boundary students for both schools who are both African-American and receive free/reduced price lunches; 2) the numbers of in-boundary students who are both African-American and don't receive free/reduced price lunches; 3) the numbers of OOB students who are both African American and receive free/reduced price lunches; 4) the numbers of OOB students who are both African-American and don't receive free/reduced price lunches; 5) the numbers of overall students at the school. Then we can do a statistical analysis which will suggest whether the differences (if there are any) are likely to be random or are in fact likely to be related to the difference in the schools - which at that point would suggest that we should investigate further whether the application is a factor, because it could have an effect or it could still be something else such as the location vis-a-vis metro, for example, or some combination of the two.

Really, ask a professional. They might not set it up exactly the way I would but they will tell you that you're way off base in thinking you've proved anything.
[Post New]03/23/2011 15:09
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:This is what we need to see for Deal and Hardy before we can make a comparison. We need to know 1) the numbers of the in-boundary students for both schools who are both African-American and receive free/reduced price lunches; 2) the numbers of in-boundary students who are both African-American and don't receive free/reduced price lunches; 3) the numbers of OOB students who are both African American and receive free/reduced price lunches; 4) the numbers of OOB students who are both African-American and don't receive free/reduced price lunches; 5) the numbers of overall students at the school. Then we can do a statistical analysis which will suggest whether the differences (if there are any) are likely to be random or are in fact likely to be related to the difference in the schools - which at that point would suggest that we should investigate further whether the application is a factor, because it could have an effect or it could still be something else such as the location vis-a-vis metro, for example, or some combination of the two.



Where would you propose getting that information? Ken worked with what was available, which is what DCPS puts on the website in the school profiles and report cards. He did what he could with what he was given.
[Post New]03/23/2011 15:20
Anonymous
PP, I'm sure you do have a PhD in social science. You sure didn't spend any time developing social graces. I am a frequent critic of Ken on GGW, but your condescending rant seems a bit absurd to me. So Ken didn't use a statistical method sufficient to submit to a scholarly journal - so what? He never said he proved anything - in fact, here's a quote from the piece"

"Perhaps the unique demographics of Hardy were not the result of any specific intent to make poor students another principal's problem. Perhaps they were the unintended effect of using an application process to select students off of the Hardy waitlist with the best essays and in-person interviews."

I understand this is what you do for a living (zzzzzzz), but really, calm down,
[Post New]03/23/2011 15:21
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:PP, I'm sure you do have a PhD in social science. You sure didn't spend any time developing social graces. I am a frequent critic of Ken on GGW, but your condescending rant seems a bit absurd to me. So Ken didn't use a statistical method sufficient to submit to a scholarly journal - so what? He never said he proved anything - in fact, here's a quote from the piece"

"Perhaps the unique demographics of Hardy were not the result of any specific intent to make poor students another principal's problem. Perhaps they were the unintended effect of using an application process to select students off of the Hardy waitlist with the best essays and in-person interviews."

I understand this is what you do for a living (zzzzzzz), but really, calm down,


In case it wasn't obvious, this was directed at 14:49.
[Post New]03/23/2011 15:31
Anonymous
What this debate shows is that there are a lot more complex debates going on within DCPS about more than race and that is class. One can't ride the circulator around 3:30 and not cringe at some of the behavior of some Hardy kids. I have been on that bus when a black woman stood up and yelled at those kids and told them as far as she was concerned they had no home training and no one in the nieghborhood wanted them there and if they could not represent their race well they should stay in the hood and get shot. I kid you not, I am still in shock from her lecture and it has been a month. But the tensions I have seen within the AA community over what has happened at Hardy are very real. I have very little doubt that even if you can't prove it in real numbers there was a movtive and still is to remove a certain cadre of kids.
[Post New]03/23/2011 16:09
jsteele
Site Admin Offline
Anonymous wrote:
Where would you propose getting that information? Ken worked with what was available, which is what DCPS puts on the website in the school profiles and report cards. He did what he could with what he was given.


So, what you are saying is "garbage in, garbage out" and that's good enough for you?

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