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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The advantage of everyone sticking together is to pool resources and improve the school making things better for all involved.  If everyone works in their own self-interest, Elliot Hine is likely to remain the same under-enrolled, under-performing school it has been for a while.  If children on the hill who are well-prepared for middle school thanks to their highly performing elementary schools decide as a group to attend Elliot Hine, there will be a bigger cohort of high performing students.  The larger mass of students peforming at or above grade level will allow the school to offer more advanced offerings at earlier grades.  The existing population that already chooses Elliot Hine would not be displaced as the school is currently well below capacity.  Additionally, they would also have more opportunites and a stronger academic peer group which, according to existing research would help their education outcomes..[/quote]

In theory, I completely agree.  And if you were starting from scratch, it would be easier, but as it stands, you need guinea pigs---alot of them.  You need people who are ok traveling into an area where the prospect of crime is probably much higher than where they live, just a few blocks away.  You need white people who are ok with their child going to a school that completely lacks diversity.  I can't imagine it would be easy being white in an all-black DC middle school, especially when you likely come from a privileged background.  (A few bad apples, etc., obviously, but it was by no means uncommon for me to see kids from the former Hine harrassing (white) passers-by.)  My point is simply that people of all races are more likely to feel comfortable when they see people who look like them.  You also need people to invest in improving a school even though it won't truly be a neighborhood school to them.  People talk about Brent as an example of how quickly a school can change when you have committed parents, but it is much easier to commit when the school is in your backyard.

This is obviously not an option, but I would think a better approach would be to feed Brent, Logan, SWS, etc. into a new school (Van Ness, maybe) and then over time add the underperforming kids from EH and/or Jefferson.[/quote]

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