Reply to I am confused between Stuart Hobson Middle School vs. Deal Middle School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The reality is that the commute from the Hill to MacArthur is a real drag during rush hour.  The future campus is nowhere near near a Metro stop or a bus route that goes from the Hill.  I live near Union Station but used to work near the future campus, where free parking was available to me.  Many mornings, it took me nearly an hour to get to work through traffic.  Also, Walls is not the safe bet for strong Hill students it once was, now that the entrance exam and PARCC scores have both been dropped in the admissions process. Think twice about a DCPS middle school EotP.  Might be better to move.[/quote]

When was Walls ever a safe bet with waitlist of 100+ kids?[/quote]

Pre Covid, Walls [b]was quite a safe bet for the strongest 8th graders EotP, coming out of both public and private schools. Before Bowser began pressuring DCPS to admit more low-SES minority students from over the River, and to ditch the entrance exam and standardized test scores requirements[/b] (DC-CAS, then PARCC or PSAT or SAT score) the academically able would get in.  I've lived on the Hill for 30 years and saw this phenomenon play out over and over, particularly for teens who were very good at math, regardless of race.  The Walls entrance exams emphasized fairly tough algebra and geometry.  No longer.  Admission to Walls has essentially become a lottery in the last several years.[/quote]

That's a false assumption.  There may have been intent to attract more diverse students to Walls, including from EotP, but the school remains overwhelmingly white and/or higher SES and enrolls an extremely small number of students from EotP.  Dropping the entrance exam had no impact on the demographics[/quote]

Exactly, at the end of the day SWW is just difficult to get to from parts of the city. Maintaining a GPA requires a level of consistency and is a better indicator of the caliber of student than test scores. This is even true with all the grade inflation everywhere. None of it is perfect but the thought process seems to be that "my kid is a great test taker" so they deserve to be at Walls. [/quote]

I don't agree with statement.  An applicant who's a B student in 8th grade at BASIS or a top private is generally going to be much better prepared than an A student from a DCPS middle school program.  The Walls tests, along with the requirement that an applicant submitted a standardized test score, really helped Walls separate the sheep from the goats academically in the admissions process.

"None of it is perfect" is a euphemism for "Hey, this isn't NYC, Chicago or Boston folks.  DC no longer bothers to make a serious effort to its best public-school students to its HS academic magnet programs.  We care far more about equity than serving our best and brightest.  Take it or leave it, our public schools just aren't competitive.  Public school parents EotP, run to BASIS or the Latins while you can."[/quote]

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