Reply to “We need to preserve diversity and mitigate the projected whitening of the feeder pattern”

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Reply to "“We need to preserve diversity and mitigate the projected whitening of the feeder pattern”"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If DC concentrated on making other MSes and HSes not TERRIBLE, then it wouldn't have this problem. Upper SES people can afford housing in UNW. Upper SES people can make a one hour commute for a year or two work, so they can get their kid into a Deal feeder -- any Deal feeder -- for 1-2 years. In DC, Upper SES is very white relative to the city's population, so the Wilson feed is white -- and getting whiter -- and the OOBers are actually white and getting whiter. The problem is not how to best shoehorn non-white people into Wilson, it's how to make ANY OTHER IB DCPS MS or HS as attractive TO ANYONE as Deal and Wilson. Concentrate on that DCPS.

And I say this as an Upper SES W6 resident who could get my kid into Deal/Wilson one way or the other if I wanted to, but would MUCH prefer to remain where I am and attend diverse, non-terrible local schools. S-H may work for us; Eastern will not. Eastern is terrible.[/quote]

I combined your comments PP, to make it easier to respond.

I am a Ward 5 parent and very much agree. One thing that DCUM has taught me is that for a significant portion of the high SES population DC, there simply is no DCPS outside of the Deal/Wilson triangle. As someone whose kid attends a Title 2 DCPS in Ward 5, this is exhausting to me and has so little to do with my experience with the city's schools as to be laughable. You might as well be talking about MoCo or Fairfax schools. It just has nothing to do with my experience.

But to the PP, yes, we are a family with the resources to get our kid into Deal/Wilson if it's what we really wanted. It's just not want we want, at all. Why would I want my child to go to a school on the other side of town? That sounds miserable. I want my kid to go to schools in the perfectly great neighborhood where we currently live. I've always been anti charter but as a Ward 5 parent it feels like the city has all but said "just send your kid to a charter" because we have a billion charters here and all the IB DCPS schools are struggling, especially in the upper grades. It feels like we have been abandoned to the charter schools and enough parents are game for that because they are persuaded by the promise of bilingual or Montessori education that they roll with it. Until MS.

It is the same pattern over and over. Parents of young kids say "well I just need to make the right choice for our family." They choose charters or OOB schools as the lottery allows. Then they complain about declining performance in the upper grades and MS options. They try the "competitive" charter MSs but usually find them to be a poor fit for their kids, and then they move or go private for HS. The end. Or they are fine with their MS (like S-H) and then move for HS or their kid gets a spot at one of the application HSs. Over and over. That's what you witness as a parent outside the Deal/Wilson system. It is very defeating.

We need a system that does not simply encourage parents to make the right "choice" for their family. We need a functional school system. I'm not an education expert and I don't know how that is best accomplished. I just know that as things stand, the best "choice" for my kid is currently to move out of DC to somewhere that it's possible for them to get a perfectly middle-of-the-road education from a public school where homes do not cost upwards of a million dollars to start. That's not my preference, but it's probably my "choice".[/quote]

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