Reply to HARDY MIDDLE SCHOOL: Record numbers from feeder schools for 2014-2015

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The truth is that Principals and admin. officers of nearby private school are freaking out in front of a rising Hardy, as this it is already turning into lower enrollment starting from this year, as it happened for Deal and Wilson.

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what school could you possibly be talking about?  private schools are overenrolled in almost all cases, they have their choice of 6th graders to accept.[/quote]

How naive!! Lobbying by the powerful NW private school establishment is everywhere.

Look at the legacy of M. Rhee's tenure (read more about her at the bottom of my post): just to make an example, the introduction of the "feeder school rights" (a total nonsense if you ask education scientists: you basically inject randomly - based on a random lottery - a cohort of OB kids into an out-of-boundary pipeline of schools, isolating them from any spill-over effects that they might generate into their IB schools) while this is not generating any measurable positive outcomes if you consider the system as a whole,  for sure it is forcing a measurable hundreds of kids from Ward 3-South/West  away from Deal and feeding into neighborhood private schools (as Hardy, until this year, was not considered a viable option by most. This year, thanks also to the advent of Principal Pride, things have changed). Previously, before Rhee, once the IB quota was filled, all OBs including kids from Ward 3 South/West - Palisades, Foxhall, Wesley Heights, Spring Valley West , etc as well as Georgetown -   had chances through the lottery. We are talking about some 300 slots a year. Now lottery spots at Deal are not opened, as the school is now 30% OBs from feeder schools. If you assume that 25% of these 300 slots would be instead assigned by lottery to kids who turn to private instead, you would easily see that we are talking about $2 million equivalent in private school fees. Do the numbers yourself.

The same can be said for Wilson. Wilson huge size and rising standards are fucking scary for the private schools, as the rate of substitution private/public is very elastic and as public school performance goes up, IB families are delighted to save on the 35K+/year  per kid. The most obvious solution for Wilson overcrowding , i.e. introduce limits to the OB feeder school "rights",  is being rejected . The official excuse is the racial/social integration (you pursue social integration by shipping thousand of kids through town every morning and evening.. Huh?? ). The real reason is that limiting OB feeder rights would turn , in just one year, into a drain of hundreds of applications from private HSs.

The recently debated proposal of opening a new DCPS HS on Foxhall, to ease pressure from Wilson, goes along the same line: pretending they do not know how the parents of that neighborhood would go once their access to Wilson was blocked and turned to this new/old creature (IB enrollment in the first few years would be near zero, it would generate a decade or more of "Hardy-type" situation), the end result, fully foreseeable, is a solid and guarantee rent for the private HSs for no less than 10 years!! Again, run the number to realize how huge the stakes are.

The truth is that if "feeder rights" where eliminated from this year, and lottery was re-introduced at each step for access to middle and high schools, this would translate immediately into a significant reduced number of applications to the neighborhood private schools.

Look at what Catania is saying: vertical educational systems (i.e. feeder rights) are the future. Of course, he is an ex-Republican. His dogmatic statement, presented in the name of enhance opportunities, hides an agenda of support to the NW powerful private school establishment.

Please note that this is not fantasy, this is already happening: St Ann Academy in Tenleytown has just announced that it will shut down in June after 150 years due to the decreased enrollment  (St Ann is in Tenleytown...please connect the dots...). If you were not aware of this, please read it here: http://www.currentnewspapers.com/admin/uploadfiles/NW%2003-12-2014.pdf .

To know more, see also coverage in the Washington Post on the powerful dynamics in support of private education, and look who's there , Michelle Rhee (by the way, I was a huge supporter of her, until I looked more deeply into her outcomes, beyond the propaganda and the short term):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/03/11/how-billionaire-funded-ed-reform-groups-push-charters-vouchers/?tid=up_next

Seen from the other city  quadrant, the truth is also that the migration to the NW schools of the "best families"  and kids, is determining what will soon become the Great Missed Opportunity by neighborhood communities to demand and pursue change for the local schools. Longer term residents would have now a unique opportunity to join forces with the "newcomers" (from the "gentrification" process) to achieve improvements. Instead, all are shipping kids to NW. A magnificent school such as the Takoma Educational Campus (huge facilities, sport camps, football, baseball, pool, tennis courts..) in a thriving and rising neighborhood... What a missed opportunity seeing all those families and kids at 8:00 am embarking on their twice-a-day commute to west of the Park.. I am saying this because , while this posting is more about the powerful lobbies of the NW private schools and the fact that the vertical feeder rights so dear to Rhee (and I recently heard to the ex-Republican Catania too) are being a generous gift to the NW private schools, a robbery to the middle-class South/West Ward 3 families, I am truly convinced that the worse outcome is being paid by the disadvantaged communities. This will be for another posting.
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