Reply to Hardy Middle School -- 5th grade in feeder school -- who's considering Hardy for 6th?

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Reply to "Hardy Middle School -- 5th grade in feeder school -- who's considering Hardy for 6th?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here is my question on testing.  Deal does it in the feeder schools but then also does a shuffle the first month based on a retest, how long does Hardy wait?  It can't really be done the first two weeks of school without some significant disruption.

What I would like to see is some standardized test that could be offered across the city for the advanced classes, or maybe on a Saturday for those using the lottery.

One can only expect so much out of one school, people can only do so many things at one time. If this is really an issue, then DCPS should be figuring out how to manage this better. [/quote]

The Hardy testing process was never explained to 6th grade parents.

I get it: testing needs to be done during the first couple of weeks of the school year. If you test at the end of 5th grade or during the summer, you do not catch the student's potential and ability, you catch a noisy indicator that represents his/her abilities developed by the previous school. So at 50% you test how good his/her previous school was. As the Hardy Math Department has made clear in several public open meeting (I attended one last year in the school library open to parents from feeder schools) , the honors classes are meant not only for kids who have a stronger math background, but also for those who show a predisposition and a drive to do well. The latter two are variables that can be hardly tested, but can be detected in the classroom by teachers' expert eyes...

I get it.  This has brought disruption and delayed start of the academics. However the disruptions would have had a lesser impact had we received advanced notice of the School's plans for testing. Disruptions had not been anticipated and explained to us. We were left wondering.... Kids were confused....I did not even know that the final schedules would have been distributed by the beginning of the third week of school... No notice on the website, no paper communication, no robocalls... This has been a big communication failure by the school.

All is ok now. But the initial 2 weeks of school, in the absence of clear communications by the School administration, have been hard on many of us and on some of the kids.

This is my point of view. Sorry for iphone typos.[/quote]

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