Reply to Tell me about Alexandria and South Arlington Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, you will see on this board any number of highly negative comments re the Alexandria schools (ACPS typically refers to Alexandria, and APS to Arlington).  We're ACPS parents and we believe the comments are generally malicious nonsense; we like ACPS a great deal.  Pls specify the grade level(s) and people can offer thoughts about particular schools.  
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Except the numbers don't lie.

ACPS schools for a number of years have been some of the worst performing schools in the state. There are a handful of elementary schools that are OK (but pale in comparison to Arlington and Fairfax when it comes to most metrics, including many beyond testing). The middle schools were unaccredited for many years. And TC Williams was literally the second-worst school in Virginia just a few years ago and received the Persistent Least Achieving School tag. These are just facts. And when you talk to policymakers in Alexandria, they will acknowledge it and blame the high levels of poverty in the schools. And, yes, the presence of poverty is highly correlated with underachievement and other problems such as discipline, students with no parental support, high levels of foreign language and teaching to the least common denominator. You also see a heavily bifurcated system where the upper middle class white families that "tough it out" have a very different experience than others, hence the "Yale or Jail" tag on TC Williams. You also have staunch defenders, although many of them have literally known no other school system, so they don't have anything to compare.

The big question now is what trajectory is ACPS on? Are the schools improving? Perhaps -- I'm hearing encouraging things about GW Middle School and TC, for example. But given the system's recent history of unsubstantiated bluster about improvements, it's hard to tell whether it's true. I think it is -- but I also think perceptions are lagging.

South Arlington schools have similar issues. On the plus side, there's a lot diversity. I was in Randolph recently and counted students from 12 countries depicted on a wall of "About me" projects written in Spanish (for a FLES class, I assume).  They included Ethiopia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Eritrea, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Jordan, Iraq, India, Bangladesh and several others. There were 7 children out of about 50 on the wall that hailed from the United States. That was fascinating to me. I think language issues are probably more prominent in some of the South Arlington schools as poverty.

Arlington in general also has better enrichment programming than some Alexandria schools. School plays and robust music programs, for example. FLES in elementary schools, as I mentioned. Fairfax has the AAP program -- Alexandria's gifted program seems like it's always mired in controversy over racial representation, and Arlington just doesn't really give a crap about gifted since its students by and large perform at a really high level. Arlington has more facilities than Alexandria -- more fields, more pools, more libraries, etc. etc. So, all things to think about.

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