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][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]

Dropping the entrance exam has in fact had a small impact on demographics and a larger impact on rigor.  Now Walls admits plenty of white kids who are B students, along with those of other races. Sad. [/quote]

This is anecdotally true from where I sit. I also don't think this helps with the city's goal of equity in the end. The new rules make SWW look more like one of the "HRCS" -- a school that doesn't necessarily offer a better education but will ensure your kid is mostly attending classes with more UMC kids than they would at their IB. If you assume that the key to a good education is going to school with other students from UMC families who have educated parents, you will be satisfied with that.

But what set SWW apart previously was that it was actually based on merit. Yes, as is always the case, well-resourced kids had an edge because their parents were more likely to be able to get them a higher quality elementary and MS education, supplement when needed, and provide a home environment that nurtured academics more. That is always true. But at the end of the day, if you could do well on the entrance exam and other standardized tests, you could earn a spot no matter what. That's not true anymore. Other than a fairly low floor to weed out a lot of kids who were unlikely to be interested in SWW (or any applications school) in the first place, it's just a lottery against lots of students with a wide variety of academic backgrounds.

I do think it's a shame for the truly academically exceptional kids of all backgrounds who previously would have benefitted from attending college with "the best of the best." It make SWW somewhat indistinguishable from a lottery-based program like Latin or regular DCPS like Wilson.[b] It used to offer something unique[/b].[/quote]

This. Now it just offers a UMC cohort and is not any better academically than comparable JR cohort. It may never have been much better than the top 1/3 of JR students anyway.  It's the same pool of students[/quote]

Well I guess applications should be down going forward. [/quote]

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