Reply to Are charters keeping you in DC - or are they holding back your neighborhood DCPS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Here's the thing. I think that charters kept a lot of high SES families who did not want to or were not able to move to upper NW in the city when their children reached school age. The charters also provided a way for them to avoid the low SES people who live in their neighborhoods and other parts of the city who do send their kids to the neighborhood schools.

At this point, I think that for the high SES people who bought houses in Columbia Heights and Petworth and Brookland,[b] the myth of charters-as-escape-hatch is what is keeping them in DC[/b]. They say, "We can play the lottery" and then they say "Our IB school is fine for PK or K, but then we'll see." For the families who are engaging in that kind of thinking, at least in my experience, their kids are kindergarten age. None of them (us, really - my kid is in K) have had to face the realities of the middle school situation. It is hard hearing from the hardened lifers about how they tried, failed, and moved to Arlington because we still think that maybe this time it'll work for us.

Will it? Or are we Charlie Brown with the football? My DD goes to our not-well-regarded IB school, where we are happy, but I'm still concerned for the future.[/quote]

Thing is it isn't/wasn't a "myth" to our family. Ward 4 charter family - IB for Takoma and Coolidge high school.

Kids went to LAMB (starting in 2004 when it was new and unproven) and attend a charter middle and a charter high school. Younger may try to go to an application high school when the time comes.

We looked at our IB for PK/K and it was filled with kids who lived no where near our neighborhood and commuted there every day via the Metro. For us it was a city-wide charter over a city-wide DCPS, which is what our IB was at the time.

Without question we would have left DC if charters didn't exist.[/quote]

I said "at this point" and then mentioned that the kids of the people for whom is it not a viable back up plan are in kindergarten or below. Your children being in middle schools puts you solidly in the camp of people for whom it wasn't a myth. There are not as many seats in charter schools as there were when you were entering the system, and your younger kids get sibling preference now anyway.

I'm talking about people who moved into those areas and had their first child in 2009/2010 or later and bought in those areas thinking that the neighborhood school would be fine at first and then there's charters. I know a lot of people that applies to, and many of them did not seem to consider what would happen if there were NOT charters. [/quote]

I agree but there are also quite a few more charter schools than when we started out. [/quote]

There are, but there are very limited spaces in those charters for non-siblings. How many non-siblings did LAMB admit last year? And how many on the waiting list?[/quote]

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