Reply to What the heck is happening to DCPS?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, how old is your kid?  Upper elementary grades?  We're equally fed up in 5th grade, 8 years into our DCPS journey.  This fall, we've been hiring a math tutor twice a week, hiring a writing tutor twice a week, teaching social studies at home.  Music, science and PE good in a DCPS program with 5% poor kids, that's about it.  Kid's pandemic learning loss was worse than we understood before having them tested privately. At least kid has been happy at school since in-person learning resumed. Moving on to parochial middle school.[/quote]

OP here.  Thanks for allowing me a midnight vent and for sharing your experience.  I feel much the same.  We do a lot to enrich and supplement at home (which is how I even came to discover that DC didn’t know geography).  We have decided that this is what we will do until DC goes to MS.  I think some of the things the schools are trying to do to help with mental health are well-intentioned.  I’m just not sure how effective it has been in the execution (First, Do No Harm).  Are people at the schools qualified to discuss student mental health and big emotions at the young ages?  Do they even want to?  I would be afraid to open that can of worms without the requisite training.  It seems teachers already have a lot on their plate.   Anyway, thanks again for listening and sharing.  Helps to know that it’s not just me.

To answer some of the others, I’m not a troll.  Just a concerned parent who was up too late last night.  We are in Ward 3 public, DC is in 5th grade.[/quote]

Ignore the smartasses on here.  There are always a few.  I think we all intend to make DCPS better, and it's frustrating.  We moved from another country for first grade and were appalled at how behind the pace of learning is/was.  We are pretty involved and have spoken to all of the teachers about it and they share the same frustration.  It's a vicious cycle - over-reliance on assessment (which, ironically, many marry themselves to here).  We found out gifted and talented had flaws b/c of bias and misidentification... the problem is, we threw out the whole baby with the bathwater.  Schools are stuck on a curriculum design from central offices and worse.. have gaslighted parents into believing it's efficacious (e.g., the over-reliance on teaching phonics too long instead of reading practice and comprehension more).  If you have 10 students in a class, with 5 who are advanced, 3 average, and two who are chronically behind.  The two kids that are behind will punish the school's outward rating more (which we shouldn't hurt schools for working with students who have more challenges).  But until this changes, we can expect teachers to HAVE TO teach to the middle.

I'm concerned with a far more basic issue-- school maintenance.  In Ward 4 at least, we are engaged parents and over half of our time has been wasted on advocacy for new building and plumbing issues vs. bringing other assets to the school.[/quote]

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