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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You might like living in the petworth neighborhood too as a NYer, as the pp mentioned upthread.  However the school mentioned, Powell, is 99% poor children and only 45% of the kids can read [b](while 55% cannot).[/b]   Same for Bancroft -- Brooklyn-looking neighborhood, and a school that is 77% poor students who really really struggle to do math or read at grade level (42% can read; the rest couldn't pass a simple standardized test).  [/quote]

Yeah, I love the people who talk down about Powell but talk up Bancroft.  Powell has better test scores with poorer students.  Which does a better job teaching, objectively, in that case?

Anyway, the basics are as follows, if you want English and Spanish bilingual:

1. Oyster is probably the most tried-and-true.  Move inbounds if you want your child in.  It is in the expensive, high-density Woodley Park area and a little bit of Adams Morgan.

2. LAMB (Brightwood), Mundo Verde (Truxton Circle?), and Stokes (Brookland) are pretty well-regarded but you only get in by an increasingly insane lottery.  Due to demand, you can't count on getting your kid in at all.  It would just be a stroke of luck.  Mundo Verde sounds most like what you described as your children's current school, but it is oversubscribed, period.

3. DC Bilingual in Columbia Heights gets no respect here but good test scores, relatively speaking.

4. Bancroft has had a corps of middle class families in addition to the 3/4 of poorer families but this has not translated into any kind of test score improvement or anything people can use objectively to say that Bancroft does a good job.

5. The DCPS schools in neighborhood with Spanish speakers/dual language programs.  Cleveland is in Shaw and in an area that is gentrifying but still drawing from a large poor population.   Somehow it has done the perceived-impossible of having a very high poor student population and some of the very best test scores in the city.  It is hard to get into under the lottery now, and some families still leave.
Powell is likely on the way up and has better scores than Bancroft even now, but its neighbors have looked down on it for a long, long time.  It is in the growing northern Columbia Heights/southern 16th Street Heights/western Petworth area.  
Bruce-Monroe is east of the growing Columbia Heights area in Park View and has a new facility but middle class parents are only now tentatively moving toward interest in Bruce-Monroe.  
Marie Reed in Adams-Morgan has a Spanish program and is in a nice Adams Morgan neighborhood but seems to not do that well at attracting and keeping middle class families, and it lives under the shadow of Oyster, which has overlapping boundaries.  
6. Tyler on Capitol Hill has a Spanish program.  The Hill is already post-gentrification and will be expensive and there won’t be any real no-English-at-home Spanish speakers in the school.

As of now, you get your 6 DCPS lottery picks, rank-ordered, with getting into one knocking off all lower-ranked choices entirely.
For charters, they are still aligning applications, but you apply to each one, and it is relatively easy once you pick where you want to apply.  Be warned about two: Yu Ying (the Chinese language charter) has a tiny lottery and a long wait list, and they order their waitlist by time of application, meaning that the only people with a shot at entry via wait list apply at the first moment application is possible.  
Stokes, which has both Spanish-English and French-English tracks, has a website where you apply the same way, with a tiny lottery and long waitlist, and only those who apply within the first moments of application get a reasonable spot on the waitlist.  Their application website crashed last year in the first minutes of application because everyone knew this was the only way to get a reasonable spot.

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