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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]The "p" in DCPS stands for public and not poor. So the discussion about the poor being the down fall for all DCPS ill-fates. Then the notion that the rich and educated will be our salvation, is quite insulting. I'll say this there are not enough Capitol Hill parents with children to make any Ward 6 school gold mine. If the theory of having those with the same mind-set of having money and education being the winning ticket. Then we wouldn't be in dire straights as the old-adage of money talks and bullshit walks. [/quote]

Questions about quality at E-H are not first and foremost questions about poor kids--at least, not wanting to send your kid to a school with poor kids, or wanting to take opportunities away from poor kids.

But the bottom line is, in order for a school to be successful, it needs to be economically diverse. Okay, to skip the euphemism: you need lots of middle-class kids.  Here's a question: how many successful non-charter schools are there in DCPS that have a student low-income population above, say, 70%? 60%? 50%? What's the highest poverty load a school can cope with before "how to educate the student body" stops being the foremost concern?

Same with charters. As an outlier, KIPP has a reputation for getting decent outcomes out of uniformly poor student bodies, though I'm not sure if turning all of DC's schools over to KIPP is the answer.

At the end of the day, you fix the schools by making their student bodies less poor. You do that by getting more middle-class kids into the system by any means. The central strategy for improving DCPS should be to grow the middle-class population of DC--building market-rate housing. That means more money, and more prepared/motivated/supported peers for the poor kids.

The question that DCPS has been asking itself for decades has been "How do we make these schools work with 85%+ low-income student bodies?" And the answer is, you don't. It's not possible. These schools all went into the toilet over the period of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, which is the period when the black middle class emigrated to the suburbs (following the white middle-class, who left in the two decades previous). They're not going to be coming back as some sort of returning wave.

You need to get middle-class parents to buy back into the schools. By and large, those students are going to look like America--they won't be uniformly African American. They'll be white, black, asian, hispanic, etc... And that's a good thing.[/quote]
Great post.[/quote]

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