Reply to Are we fools not to play lottery for our 3 y o?

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[quote=Anonymous]Hi PP - listen. I'm the 'stressed' poster and it's true that I AM stressed over this. I'm also tired. Maybe that is why I'm having a struggle reading your posts and following. I've had a long week. I really don't get everything you're saying and I'm not trying to be a dick. I think we might agree on more than we disagree on. So since you tried to really explain yourself well i just want to tell you why I'm not trying to refute every point you're making. I can't really tell where we disagree except on whether or not there should be an effort made to provide flexibility for families who don't enter at PS3 or PK4. That is all I want. I am not advocating a hard restart at K. I don't think that's fair to the kids who already dealt with this shit. PP who was advocating for that, however, has some interesting ideas. Maybe it is possible that current families could be grandfathered in.

My loose idea was simply some kind of system where there was some diversity in an entry points. Yes, a new charter could be opened up that starts at K, but this doesn't really do it. As you say, there aren't really that many parents who WANT to start at K. Maybe you could lottery for K a few years ahead, but I accept that this means you still have to pretty much try and guess what school system your child will fit into, which is rough at three (especially when you're dealing with magnet type schools and not something that would probably work for most kids).

I think what I keep responding to is perhaps another poster, who keeps saying that it's not fair to disadvantage the at risk kids by changing the system. I just don't embrace that changing the system disadvantages these kids. Even if the majority of students in DCPS and charters are low income kids, that doesn't mean that every low income kid gets the spot he needs. My challenge to you is to tell me how this system is serving the kids across the river? My position is that the charter school "out" is doing the opposite. When you provide kids of a higher SES multiple options for schools, they will not choose the school that could benefit from their enrollment. And yeah, yeah, yeah, I don't want to force kids into underperforming schools, but you're still forcing the poor kids into underperforming schools. AND, you then make it an "other people's problem" kind of thing, because the happy parents in OOB schools or lotteried into top charters are no longer (generally speaking, there are exceptions) fighting with the same energy they might have otherwise put into fixing the in-bounds. It reduces the city-wide appetite to improve all schools.

Really, what I'm "anti" here is not parents who have already lotteried in. Not at all. I see them as having to play the same system. It works really well for some of them, and they lucked out. But I don't think its fundamentally more FAIR to make me start my kid at 3, any more than I think it is fundamentally FAIR to make someone lottery twice. Both are unfair and should be rejected. But just because one is unfair does not make the other fair by default. Life does not exist in neat rows of point and counterpoint. IMO, both options would be unfair. So it's time to start thinking of something else.

With all of the great thinkers on these boards, I bet we could come up with ways that the system work afford more flexibility while protecting those kids whose parents have already endured the grueling aspect of the lotteries. [/quote]

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