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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I really hate that we're talking about "shitty" schools. I really don't know that the test scores reflect how good or bad a school is in DC. Rather it reflects the social and economic capital of the families that send their children there. Median Growth Percentile has been suggested to do a much better job at reflecting the performance of a school. Jefferson's scores there are a little better than Brent's, although by this metric, all our kids should go to DC Prep Edgewood's middle school.

I wish people would stop talking about not sending their kids to bad schools when what they should be saying is they don't want to send their kids to schools with a lot of poor kids who aren't performing at grade level. Which is fair enough.[/quote]

Ah yes, the beloved you must hate the poor kids card.  That coupled with the nonsense about MGP being evidence that Jefferson is somehow doing a better job than Brent, and the defense of Councilman Wells, who fought tooth-and-nail to keep Eastern in Ward 6, but fecklessly ran from the debates around the Ward 6 Middle School Plan, is too much of the Tropical Punch flavor of the day.  There are plenty of poor kids capable of performing in grade level.  Attack the issue at the elementary school level with novel approaches, or even those more tried and true ones at Kipp and DC Prep.  But don't insult us by pretending everything's okie-dokie at Jefferson just because a few parents are saying they might send their kids there a couple of years from now.  I've heard the same thing now for the past seven years.  DCPS and dilettantes like Grosso and Allen are counting on parents to gentrify schools so that they can ignore the bigger issues.  Hell, Grosso can't remember whether modernizing Jefferson is a priority or not.[/quote]

Hmmm... This is quite an unsubstantiated rant. I don't at all think it's a great thing that kids aren't performing at grade level. But I just don't think the school is necessarily to blame. What metric would you suggest we use to compare schools that factors in where they're starting from coming in? If your issue is you don't want your kid(s) among kids who aren't performing at grade level, say so. But stop pinning it on the school without providing evidence. Brent sure hasn't solved the performance gap issue either.[/quote]

As you seem to be familiar with the acievement gap at Brent you must have heard that the gap correlates with students admitted to Brent at First Grade and above.  Brent can't remediate its way out of a situation where students admitted to fill seats via the lottery find themselves unprepared by the schools they left.  [/quote]

While I generally agree with your caveat, you pick the exact wrong example. A school can absolutely be expected to "add value" to a student's trajectory between 1st and 5th grade; between 4th and 5th not so much.

But good point you just raised about middle schools. Those have at best 3 years to make up for sub-optimal instruction, support, or other factors, to the extent a student's instruction is indeed what drives his/her performance. As we all know there is a lot more to that, much of it cannot be "remediated" by schools. Nonsense, schools aren't "shitty" for that fact. And that's precisely why kids who come in with all the right foundations do very well. I would go as far as saying - and have heard notable principals say as much - that schools with bigger challenges are much better equipped to also serve the highest achievers than schools who can coast and comfortably serve all of the laureates without ever going out of their way. [/quote]

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