Reply to Another outsider who thinks Controlled-choice zones are what DC needs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=jsteele]Just to clear up a couple of misconceptions posted above. First, Ken Archer is not really an "outsider" as the thread topic would have it. He lives in DC and has been active on education issues for some time. I don't always agree with him, but I respect his knowledge of the topic. While he doesn't currently have a child enrolled in DCPS, that is only because his child is too young. I believe that will change next year.

Also, contrary to the post that says controlled choice plans are not being proposed for Wards 3 and 8, Archer's proposal does exactly that. It's notable that given where he lives, strict neighborhood school boundaries would be personally advantageous to him. [b]So, the fact that he proposes controlled-choice even for his own neighborhood shows a certain willingness to make his own sacrifice.[/b]
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That's quite a leap.  Moving or going private are on the menu for lots of residents of Georgetown with kids. Sacrifice, heh.   I thought it was supposed to be a gift to wealthy parents to be able to "choose" a socio-economically diverse school.  [/quote]

I'm sorry, so it would apply to Ward 3 as well?  So whether you fed into Deal or Hardy would then be the product of a lottery?

And more importantly, in every zone they would be trying to create, many families buy houses walking distance from the school they are supposed to send their kids to eventually.  And for some people with multiple small children, only one car, a kid with life threatening asthma you NEVER want someone to be too far away from to beat an ambulance that will take him to a bad hospital, you pick the problem, they would no longer have that certainty?  You would in Montgomery County, and we would not have bought our house (when we got here, we had 1 child who was not yet two, now we have several who have all been or are in the ES we CHOSE for numerous reasons, proximity being a gigantic one)  We chose the ES and then bought the house.  That was the order in which the decisions were made when we moved to DC.

I don't know how large these other proposed zones are, but I assume everyone would have the same problems that I have just listed.  I don't know for how many these problems would be more significant than the stupid social engineering and school quality issues, because there are schools that are improving and schools that are getting worse, but not all schools in Ward 3 are the same, either.  No school is the same as any other.  Janney is better academically, but it is large even if they could just fill it to capacity instead of having the overcrowding.  Mann is small. That alone could make a big difference in a family's decision about where to live.

It seems that is what they are trying to do - to make all the schools within any zone the same, but there are SO many reasons that have crap to do with academics why parents choose a particular school.  And for many parents who KNOW from the outset that they plan to have more kids than they can afford to send to private school, I bet they made their decision on where to buy their house the same way we did.

This would be pure destruction and insanity in my opinion, in ANY zone - even one that just had a toss up between Mann and Janney.  I'm sorry to use them because I know how many people think once you are in Ward 3 nothing else matters but those are the only 2 ES I am really familiar with because a friend of a child went all the way through the other.  They are not the same.  We chose one over the other before we bought our house, with one child who had 3 years to go before entering, without knowing how many other children we would have.  We have grown out of our house, but are waiting until all our kids have aged out of the school to move.

I really don't think we would have moved into DC if that was the system.  We would have lived in Montgomery County.[/quote]

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