Reply to Why is the overcrowding issue so complex?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's complex because OOB families want feeder rights. And there are a lot of OOB families, all over the city, pushing their councilmembers to preserve feeder rights. Whereas the people who want to end feeder rights are clustered in Ward 3, meaning 7 other ward reps can ignore them and the at-large councilmembers can win an election without their support.

I think feeder rights should end: if you get into an ES OOB, you have a right to stay there through 5th. That would also help many EOTP schools where people are happy but leave for a better MS feed, and it would be good for people who move to DC when their kids are a little older. As a compromise, students from feeder schools could get a lottery preference if they want to go to their destination school. Better would be if it were an at-risk feeder preference and then a non-at-risk.  They could also phase out the preference over time: kids in grades 3-8 and when the rules change have feeder rights, kids in PK3-2 have feeder preference, kids not yet at an OOB school have no right or preference and their parents can lottery accordingly.

And yes, on top of this route Bancroft to MacFarland and Roosevelt. Either send Adams to Roosevelt too, or make Oyster-Adams a PK3-5 school across two campuses (like Peabody and Watkins) and send the middle schoolers to MacFarland too. All the dual language schools should have the same feeder pattern. This would also allow for more seats in bilingual programs and more PK classrooms WOTP where there are long waitlists now.[/quote]

make all high schools lottery and eliminate the concept of inbounds- there, crowding at the high school level gets alleviated and Wilson becomes more diverse [/quote]

This is BRILLIANT and will never happen. Especially because so many NW parents will only accept Wilson or SWW as an acceptable high school, and they view Wilson as their right for [being able to afford to] live IB for Wilson.

Of course, if we made all DCPS high schools lottery only and eliminated IB preference or feeders, we'd just wind up with other problems. Parents would lobby to make more application only schools and then game the application system to benefit wealthy, mostly white applicants. I mean, look at the mess around TJ in VA. Plus it wouldn't solve the problem of so many struggling schools in poorer parts of the city, which means by middle school and high school, there is already such a stark disparity in outcomes. But I still love the idea of just saying "hey, HS kids can metro and take the bus on their own, let's let the algorithm figure it out and actually mix these kids together in a way they never have before.

The truth is that most wealthy white parents in the District want public [read: "free"] schools that serve their kids, but do not actually care about the rest of the city at all. They aren't worried about non-white students at all, and they also don't care about non-wealthy white kids at all. They feel they won buy buying into what they view as the only good schools in the city, and they pity everyone else but don't really care to do anything about it. Their feeling is, if you want to send your kids to quality schools, you should have done what we did and moved to Ward 3. The end. Look at the comment just above that wants to eliminate feeder preference for kids who lottery in. They just do not care. They got theirs, your kid's education is no longer their problem.[/quote]

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