Reply to Lottery for all middle and high schools -- what are people really proposing?

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Reply to "Lottery for all middle and high schools -- what are people really proposing?"

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[quote=Anonymous]I have been to one of the focus groups, talke to friends and other parents, and read a number of posts here and in other places.  I sense two "big picture" solutions on school boundaries.

One model is keeping neighborhood schools but either shifting the boundaries to remove certain schools from Deal/Wilson or to change the feeder pattern for OOB students.  That vision seems to be coupled with a "let's make the other schools better" so the folks who lose out have some better alternative.  People have proposed new middle or high schools clustered in certain neighborhoods or test-in schools.  This solution doesn't strike me as a one where the folks who get cut out of Deal or Wilson are happy with the outcome, but it offers hope and the prospects of improvement, which is something.

On the other hand, the other model seems to be let's get rid of all boundaries and have folks lottery in for all high schools and maybe all middle schools as well.  The premise, at least as I have heard it, is we cannot make the schools any better and lotteries or some other general allocation mechanism are a fairer way to distribute seats to the best schools.  Let's set aside two related arguments -- the "all the upper NW folks will leave town or go private" and the "if you lottery Deal or Wilson, they will cease to be desirable schools" arguments -- for a second.  I am curious about two things:

First, how do the folks envision that this open lottery process would work?  Are trying to give DCPS schools certain characters (the arts school, the tech school, the languages school) to distinguish themselves?  Or are some schools test-in and some lottery?

Second, and related, what is the "hook" that tries to make the neighborhood schools crowd feel a little better with this plan?  Or is there not one?

Finally, I realize that this forum is an extremely imperfect one to have this sort of conversation.  Many of the post will just rant or whatever, or accuse me of being a troll.  But frankly, the city doesn't have a lot of general fora for this kind of discussion on school boundaries, so as imperfect as DCUM is, it is what we have.    [/quote]

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