Reply to I am confused between Stuart Hobson Middle School vs. Deal Middle School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The reality is that the commute from the Hill to MacArthur is a real drag during rush hour.  The future campus is nowhere near near a Metro stop or a bus route that goes from the Hill.  I live near Union Station but used to work near the future campus, where free parking was available to me.  Many mornings, it took me nearly an hour to get to work through traffic.  Also, Walls is not the safe bet for strong Hill students it once was, now that the entrance exam and PARCC scores have both been dropped in the admissions process. Think twice about a DCPS middle school EotP.  Might be better to move.[/quote]

When was Walls ever a safe bet with waitlist of 100+ kids?[/quote]

Pre Covid, Walls was quite a safe bet for the strongest 8th graders EotP, coming out of both public and private schools. Before Bowser began pressuring DCPS to admit more low-SES minority students from over the River, and to ditch the entrance exam and standardized test scores requirements (DC-CAS, then PARCC or PSAT or SAT score) the academically able would get in.  I've lived on the Hill for 30 years and saw this phenomenon play out over and over, particularly for teens who were very good at math, regardless of race.  The Walls entrance exams emphasized fairly tough algebra and geometry.  No longer.  Admission to Walls has essentially become a lottery in the last several years.[/quote]

This is correct. Walls cleared the waitlist (ie, made offers to 100% of students deemed eligible) as recently as 2017. In 2020, the last pre-COVID year, they made offers to 236 eligible students (145 on count day and 91 waitlist offers by October) and left only 10 on the waitlist. That’s a pretty safe bet.

But I’d push back on the idea that the change is just because they eliminated the test. The fact is the number of highly-qualified 8th graders in DC is rising, rapidly, and enrollment at Walls cannot increase. If they’d kept the test, they would have had to keep raising the cut score. And that also would have excluded kids who reliably would have been admitted just a few years ago.[/quote]

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