Reply to New to looking at Capitol Hill DCPS. Any majority high SES schools?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This impresssion that the Cluster Parents don't want Brent and Maury to feed into SH is not quite right.  The problem is that just before Brent and Maury started surging forward as neighborhood schools, Stuart Hobson added JO Wilson and Ludlow Taylor as additional feeder schools. Why?  Because they both had relatively high test scores ( in the 70% range ).  Later, thesetest scores were correlated at both schools with high erasure rates ( cheating ) and plunged in.the following years.

But, Stuart Hobson was stuck with them as feeders, and worse, no longer had any space to add Brent or Maury who began posting legitimately decent test scores.

It was strategically disasterous for the Cluster and they can't get out of the space crunch now.[/quote]

I'm fairly new to CH, with a kid in 1st grade at Brent IB and one in PreK.  So do I take that the SH feeder elementary schools situation virtually ensures that this middle school will be a fairly  low-performing one (half the kids not testing proficient, vs. 15% at Deal) for another decade?   Even if the test scores from the feeders were better than average, the kids are obviously mostly low SES AA, nothing like the predominant Brent demographic below 4th grade.  So why is the Brent PTA still interested in a feed to SH?  Because it would beat EH, particularly if SH ever went for honors classes?   Is it really going to be lottery into Basis, Latin or nothing for the likes of us..???  Tommy Wells will get away with no neighborhood middle schools for the gentrifiers indefinitely??  Seriously folks.[/quote]

Not exactly, and here, in my opinion, is the nut of the problem.  Stuart Hobson is a middle class school full of kids whose parents actually make the effort to send them to schools other than their inbound school.  Many of those students came up through preschool and elementary school at Peabody and Watkins. With those factors, Stuart Hobson should be excellent. And it is not.  It is ok.  Your kid will do fine there and get into a good high school. The fact that it hasn't become great in all these years causes me to wonder more about the leadership, the dcps curriculum, the physical building there being an issue more than the student body.

I think with the renovation and some way to unite graduates from Watkins, Brent and Maury PLUS a dynamic leader ( ala Melissa Kim at Deal ), we could have a great middle school smack in the middle of Capitol Hill, giving hope to Eastern.

The question is if we can get all those factors to come together. This is where we need some political leadership. Tommy? Anyone?

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