Reply to DC Begins School Boundary Study

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’m always amused by y’all trying to kick Shepherd out in the name of overcrowding. Shepherd is such a tiny school. [/quote]

Shepherd + 1/2 Lafayette would create a stronger cohort at Wells/Coolidge. I am always amused by the entitled Chevy Chase and Shepherd Park families who think it's too challenging to take Military/Piney Branch in the morning, and then want to restrict equity access at OOB at Deal/J-R. We see you. [/quote]

UMC Takoma Elem family here.  I support Shepard being zoned to Wells because I thing it makes sense geographically but I hate the narrative that we need students from other schools to come to Well’s to save us.  I have been paying close attention to Wells and am looking forward to send my kid there without any new boundaries needed.  I’m far more curious to see how many kids wind up in the new Walter reed developments and where they wind up.[/quote]

Cool story. Not sending my (non-white, minority religion) DD to Wells unless the number of IB students goes up. Have toured school, met principal (seems great), but MS is fairly universally the worst time in a kid's life, and unless we improve Coolidge (which has been bad for 20+ years and where a kid was stabbed last week) you will not get IB participation in large numbers for Wells. Ward 4 is the most diverse ward in the city - so increasing IB buy-in will keep the school diverse by most metrics - but getting a critical cohort of Lafayette/Shepherd families is going to save Coolidge which will ensure Well's future. [/quote]

There are plenty of UMC families IB for Wells/Coolidge who could probably contribute to the improvement of the school if they actually chose to send their kids there. They don’t though. Why would additional UMC families from Lafayette and Shepherd be different? [/quote]

You...need....a....critical....mass.[/quote]

Tracking students gets a bad rap, but it does allow for the acquisition of a critical mass. I mean look at Hardy Middle; getting that mass took some time, but now it pretty much is Deal MS south and getting whiter and richer every year. Once Hyde goes mostly IB (which seems happening fast), the entire pyramid goes mostly IB. [/quote]

It's a toxic history more than a bad rap. In the years after Brown v. Board, white Washington didn't just quietly accept integration. Rather, they fought it every step of the way with procedural ploys. One of them was gerrymandering attendance boundaries to separate students by race, and another was setting up tracking systems where all the white kids were in one track and all the Black kids were in another. It took roughly twenty years of lawsuits after Brown to fully dismantle official segregation. (I'm not saying the schools aren't segregated today, just that it's not done as a matter of policy.)

A lot of DCPS policy about things like boundaries and tracking came out of the settlement of those lawsuits. [/quote]

Funny thing happened between then and now. Black families of high performing kids who want a quality education are opting out of DCPS because the historical discrimination defense is BS and black families know it. Tracking that is being advocated for today is a demand for advanced kids to be allowed to have advanced classes with other advanced classes. So many people are making countervailing "equity" arguments that are a catch 22. Advanced classes and tracking are a way to advance white kids. But testing and other objective measurements are a violation of principles of equity.   [/quote]

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