Reply to I am confused between Stuart Hobson Middle School vs. Deal Middle School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The reality is that the commute from the Hill to MacArthur is a real drag during rush hour.  The future campus is nowhere near near a Metro stop or a bus route that goes from the Hill.  I live near Union Station but used to work near the future campus, where free parking was available to me.  Many mornings, it took me nearly an hour to get to work through traffic.  Also, Walls is not the safe bet for strong Hill students it once was, now that the entrance exam and PARCC scores have both been dropped in the admissions process. Think twice about a DCPS middle school EotP.  Might be better to move.[/quote]

When was Walls ever a safe bet with waitlist of 100+ kids?[/quote]

Pre Covid, Walls [b]was quite a safe bet for the strongest 8th graders EotP, coming out of both public and private schools. Before Bowser began pressuring DCPS to admit more low-SES minority students from over the River, and to ditch the entrance exam and standardized test scores requirements[/b] (DC-CAS, then PARCC or PSAT or SAT score) the academically able would get in.  I've lived on the Hill for 30 years and saw this phenomenon play out over and over, particularly for teens who were very good at math, regardless of race.  The Walls entrance exams emphasized fairly tough algebra and geometry.  No longer.  Admission to Walls has essentially become a lottery in the last several years.[/quote]

That's a false assumption.  There may have been intent to attract more diverse students to Walls, including from EotP, but the school remains overwhelmingly white and/or higher SES and enrolls an extremely small number of students from EotP.  Dropping the entrance exam had no impact on the demographics[/quote]

Exactly, at the end of the day SWW is just difficult to get to from parts of the city. Maintaining a GPA requires a level of consistency and is a better indicator of the caliber of student than test scores. This is even true with all the grade inflation everywhere. None of it is perfect but the thought process seems to be that "my kid is a great test taker" so they deserve to be at Walls. [/quote]

The really messed up, ugly thing is that when Walls had the entrance test, it wasn't that it admitted the "strongest" students in the city.  It admitted the students who were both serious AND attended a middle school that even offered the level of math course they needed to have been exposed to to even place on the Walls test.  Guess how many middle schools in DCPS even offered those courses?  TWO.  Deal and Stuart Hobson.

So the absolute farce is that a student had to a) live in those boundaries $ b) go to a private school $$ c) pay tutors $$$$ or d) come from a charter school--luck, invested parent.   So no.  That test was not finding the smartest, most deserving students.  DCPS, by limiting its math curriculum at most middle schools, and certainly those EOTR, was absolutely limiting the pool of applicants.  Whoever got in there in the past--my kid included---got in on the absolute inequity of the DC Public School system.  The test was flawed, the current free for all is flawed. So what now?[/quote]

I think it would be great if all DCPS middle schools committed to giving their students the math options available at Deal, but in the absence of that, I'd much rather teach my kids more advanced math, see how they're doing, and be able to plan for whether they're likely to get in or not rather than have it be essentially random, where whether they get in has no relationship to their performance. There are lots of parents EOTR who can manage to connect their kid with a math curriculum beyond what's in school.[/quote]

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