Reply to Whose happy with Jackson Reed this year. Considering new Macarthur school.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]FWIIW, DS graduated from Walls a few years ago, went to a selective SLAC and was completely unprepared his first semester. DCPS across the board does not prepare (most) kids for college very well. DS learned his lessons and did much better in subsequent semesters, now has a great (and meaningful) job he loves. So maybe it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. [/quote]

That problem is unique to your son.  I know well over a dozen Walls graduates.  Zero have reported being unprepared for the highly selective colleges they attend/ed.[/quote]

Please.  Kids coming from the DC publics, no matter if Walls or Wilson (now JR), don’t know how to write at all. They are completely unprepared to write at the college level.  It’s truly pathetic. They may not admit they are struggling as compared to peers who went to hs that actually taught their students how to write a paper, but they are. [/quote]

Once again, speak only for yourself/your son.  That is not the experience of the Walls graduates that I know personally.

Stop trying to make your son’s struggle universal.[/quote]

Can you share some about writing instruction at Walls?  Do they write research papers?  How long are their biggest assignments?  How many papers do they typically write in a year?  Having some more facts would be useful to this conversation.[/quote]

I can't speak to Walls, but my Wilson grad did a fair amount of writing.  He had weekly 3-5 page essays in Spanish for AP Spanish and AP Spanish Lit, plus one longer paper in Spanish for Spanish Lit.  He had multiple 3-5 page essays per week in English for other classes (APUSH, APES, AP World, AP English Lit, etc.) and IIRC at least one longer paper each semester.  He seemed to be doing at least one 3-5 page essay daily during junior year.

He's now a (non-legacy, unhooked, white, non-athlete) sophomore at a LAC with a sub-15% acceptance rate and classmates mostly from private schools.  His GPA is about 3.9, and his writing has been recognized as outstanding by at least two professors.  One hired him as a research assistant based on a paper. Another tried to talk him into turning an essay into a literary journal article.  My kid is a good writer, but many of his friends at Wilson were better writers in high school (particularly kids who wrote for the Beacon), and many were better students.  His friends are attending schools like Barnard, Oberlin, Miami, Stanford, NYU, UCSB, Bates, UW Madison, Occidental, and Emory.

I'm not sure where PPs are getting the idea that Wilson/JR kids aren't doing well at selective colleges.  This is definitely not the case for DS or his friends.

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