Reply to Expectations for Future MS Differentiation EOTP

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[quote=Anonymous]The person who writes "just consider Basis, Latin, or DC" in response to your question never took the time to look more closely. That is understandable, if the goal is to place your bets on something that, on average, produces well educated and rounded kids, mostly because that's already who they have in the building. I recommend to go with what the first respondent said, namely to take a close look at the PARCC scores (not the averages but the details, advanced and how many and who) and then take those numbers and - blind as a bat - visit with schools to ask questions that are specific to your child, not arrogantly but factually ("what if a child"). Let them lay out to you how your child may progress through middle school making the best of it and how the methods they are using to differentiate in the classroom will be applied to your specific child.
Our child is at a Title I DCPS middle school, where only a few others are above level. After 3 weeks, based on baseline tests, the school called us and said, our child tested out of the math class and proposed to find a solution, just as they called the kids at the other end of the spectrum to put support in place. That's the kind of middle school you should look for. Note, we did not call and pester everyone, they called us. They did so based on test, metrics and data, not based on us telling them what a whip-smart kid we have. They found a solution that is working very well.

The lesson here is that you may be better off at a school with wide-ranging abilities than one that serves a more homogeneous body of students. The poster who says "look for private" may well have experienced that. This lazily teaching to the middle is more common in NW schools as well as in "popular" charter schools. Title I schools are just about never homogeneous, certainly not in middle school but they aren't all as good at differentiating as what we're experiencing, hence the importance of asking for details, from the principal, the instructional coaches, teachers.[/quote]

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