Anonymous wrote:The neighborhood around E-H is fine. I've lives two blocks from the school for the past 8 years. I think my kid would be safer walking to E-H than sitting on a bus to an from Latin for an hour a day.

The "p" in DCPS stands for public and not poor. So the discussion about the poor being the down fall for all DCPS ill-fates. Then the notion that the rich and educated will be our salvation, is quite insulting. I'll say this there are not enough Capitol Hill parents with children to make any Ward 6 school gold mine. If the theory of having those with the same mind-set of having money and education being the winning ticket. Then we wouldn't be in dire straights as the old-adage of money talks and bullshit walks.

Anonymous wrote:

The "p" in DCPS stands for public and not poor. So the discussion about the poor being the down fall for all DCPS ill-fates. Then the notion that the rich and educated will be our salvation, is quite insulting. I'll say this there are not enough Capitol Hill parents with children to make any Ward 6 school gold mine. If the theory of having those with the same mind-set of having money and education being the winning ticket. Then we wouldn't be in dire straights as the old-adage of money talks and bullshit walks.

Questions about quality at E-H are not first and foremost questions about poor kids--at least, not wanting to send your kid to a school with poor kids, or wanting to take opportunities away from poor kids.

But the bottom line is, in order for a school to be successful, it needs to be economically diverse. Okay, to skip the euphemism: you need lots of middle-class kids. Here's a question: how many successful non-charter schools are there in DCPS that have a student low-income population above, say, 70%? 60%? 50%? What's the highest poverty load a school can cope with before "how to educate the student body" stops being the foremost concern?

Same with charters. As an outlier, KIPP has a reputation for getting decent outcomes out of uniformly poor student bodies, though I'm not sure if turning all of DC's schools over to KIPP is the answer.

At the end of the day, you fix the schools by making their student bodies less poor. You do that by getting more middle-class kids into the system by any means. The central strategy for improving DCPS should be to grow the middle-class population of DC--building market-rate housing. That means more money, and more prepared/motivated/supported peers for the poor kids.

The question that DCPS has been asking itself for decades has been "How do we make these schools work with 85%+ low-income student bodies?" And the answer is, you don't. It's not possible. These schools all went into the toilet over the period of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, which is the period when the black middle class emigrated to the suburbs (following the white middle-class, who left in the two decades previous). They're not going to be coming back as some sort of returning wave.

You need to get middle-class parents to buy back into the schools. By and large, those students are going to look like America--they won't be uniformly African American. They'll be white, black, asian, hispanic, etc... And that's a good thing.

Anonymous wrote:

The "p" in DCPS stands for public and not poor. So the discussion about the poor being the down fall for all DCPS ill-fates. Then the notion that the rich and educated will be our salvation, is quite insulting. I'll say this there are not enough Capitol Hill parents with children to make any Ward 6 school gold mine. If the theory of having those with the same mind-set of having money and education being the winning ticket. Then we wouldn't be in dire straights as the old-adage of money talks and bullshit walks.

Questions about quality at E-H are not first and foremost questions about poor kids--at least, not wanting to send your kid to a school with poor kids, or wanting to take opportunities away from poor kids.

But the bottom line is, in order for a school to be successful, it needs to be economically diverse. Okay, to skip the euphemism: you need lots of middle-class kids. Here's a question: how many successful non-charter schools are there in DCPS that have a student low-income population above, say, 70%? 60%? 50%? What's the highest poverty load a school can cope with before "how to educate the student body" stops being the foremost concern?

Same with charters. As an outlier, KIPP has a reputation for getting decent outcomes out of uniformly poor student bodies, though I'm not sure if turning all of DC's schools over to KIPP is the answer.

At the end of the day, you fix the schools by making their student bodies less poor. You do that by getting more middle-class kids into the system by any means. The central strategy for improving DCPS should be to grow the middle-class population of DC--building market-rate housing. That means more money, and more prepared/motivated/supported peers for the poor kids.

The question that DCPS has been asking itself for decades has been "How do we make these schools work with 85%+ low-income student bodies?" And the answer is, you don't. It's not possible. These schools all went into the toilet over the period of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, which is the period when the black middle class emigrated to the suburbs (following the white middle-class, who left in the two decades previous). They're not going to be coming back as some sort of returning wave.

You need to get middle-class parents to buy back into the schools. By and large, those students are going to look like America--they won't be uniformly African American. They'll be white, black, asian, hispanic, etc... And that's a good thing.

Anonymous wrote:There is a scholarly measure of concentrated poverty where even non-poor children suffer within a community. That percentage is 30%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty

I know that when we were at our previuos school it was 70% and just overwhelmed the learning atmosphere and we had to leave. Unfortunately I think there are a lot of schools in DC that have well over 30%.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is a scholarly measure of concentrated poverty where even non-poor children suffer within a community. That percentage is 30%

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_poverty

I know that when we were at our previuos school it was 70% and just overwhelmed the learning atmosphere and we had to leave. Unfortunately I think there are a lot of schools in DC that have well over 30%.

I hear you. But before now everyone turns their back on schools that are above that threshold please be sure you recognize that the poverty rate is not computed using the same data. I presume you're looking at "% free and reduced lunch" as a measure of how many children are poor in a DC public school. That's not the same measure used to compute poverty density in neighborhoods as discussed by the link you provide. Maybe if one were to consider just "free lunch" that would be more comparable but that data is not available on school profiles.

Anonymous wrote:

The neighborhood around E-H is fine. I've lives two blocks from the school for the past 8 years. I think my kid would be safer walking to E-H than sitting on a bus to an from Latin for an hour a day.

yup. it's not the neighborhood, it's the stigma. i have a PK kid in E-H feeder school. i hope we go to E-H. it will really just depend on how many of our cohorts/schoolmates are there. it is indeed discouraging to hear someone question our motives if we do go to OUR inbound public school. what on earth could the motive be, other than to make the school great? isn't that a win-win?? i agree with a previous poster. there has to be algebra 1 in middle school, or we'll suck it up and look for a charter (cringe).

Anonymous wrote:22:01, I truly hope we are not just accepting bullying as an episode of acceptance. You felt reassured that she talked about it. But yet a parent that has child who's a victim is not satisfied. So, where does the problem lie, is it because you heard the conversation and felt comfortable but is it the parent who's the victim and doesn't see any action?

Anonymous wrote:I can't claim to be very familiar with area (except that a few years back I would charitably describe the walk back from RFK as dicey), but I would think it similar to H Street.