Reply to Joe Weedon wants permission to send his daughter to Walls

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Joe Weedon wants permission to send his daughter to Walls"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't know Weedon, but why on earth would anyone talk about this with the WaPo?

Looks like political posturing at the expense of an 8th grader.

It's nobody's damn business? How is she going to feel arty school through the end of the year?

My kid can barely look at me when I step foot on campus. ;)  He'd run off to the circus if I let a reporter take pictures of him. [/quote]

Another poster nailed it: Because he spent years chastising families for my choosing Eastern. Now that he is faced with the same decision, he needs a public airing of the dilemma that is now his. All of this trumps his daughter’s right to privacy. [/quote]

So he wanted other parents (high SES) to " pave the way" for his kids to the point of castigating them, but when that didnt happen "in time" hes jumping ship, rather than seize the opportunity to "pave the way" for others? You just cant make this stuff up...[/quote]

Yes, exactly. He knows the teachers there - the commitment. I think their real dilemma was having her tahr the test, not now. Maybe it is the daughter’s decision? The irony is, if she went to Eastern, she’d be a s[b]hoo-in for a very top college[/b]. [/quote]

of course she would. And for schools to change in the way it sounds like the Weedons have historically wanted (neighborhood 'investment' across SES) someone from high SES has to be "the first". Hope they choose Eastern. It sounds like their daughter is comfortable with this (did anyone find it odd how he was taking so much ownership of the decision of a young and apparently thoughtful adult?) and they will feel better as a family for not being complete hypocrites.[/quote]

Why do you think she'd be a shoo in for top colleges coming from Eastern?  (This is an honest question, not snark).  Because the school hasn't sent a kid to yale yet?  The daughter herself wouldn't have much to set her apart from 1000 other white kids with an educated family and (one assumes) good grades.  Plus, I'm not sure how you write a "I'm the only white kid at this school" application essay without sounding awful, so she'd have to write something about her extracurricular card game lifestyle or grandpa or whatever like everyone else.  Or am I missing something--does being a top performer at a not very high performing high school give you a leg up in college admissions?[/quote]

I would imagine being a top performer at a low performing school would increase her chance of graduating top in class. It may not get you automatic access to Yale, but perhaps a strong school and perhaps some merit scholarships. [/quote]

No it would not. Unless Malia really, really challenged herself (learning languages on the side, taking college classes, teaching herself and scoring well on IB exams or SAT2s, she does not get any leg up with eastern. In fact it may hurt her because will compete against top African American classmates in eastern, and THEY will get any merit scholarships to college, etc. [/quote]

No, check this out: https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanbergara/here-are-the-secrets-inside-your-college-admissions-file

This girl is white and came from a "big inner-city public high school, where the majority of the student body is nonwhite and many students are low-income." She was accepted to Yale and saw after all that they said "it would look good to have a student from that high school." It didn't matter she was white and not low-income. [/quote]

I will make your life easier:

Yale practices what's called "need-blind" admissions, so there was no mention of my parents' income anywhere on the form. But the worksheets do their best to allow anybody reading to approximate a guess at what that income might be. A separate text box noted my parents' jobs and where they'd gone to college; a series of drop-down menus allowed admissions officers to note the percentage of students at my high school that were minorities and those that went on to a four-year college. There was a checkbox to note whether or not I lived in a low-income census tract. In addition to pursuing racial diversity, Yale says it makes a concerted effort to accept students from a variety of different geographical areas and from public schools, especially inner-city and rural ones, as well as low-income and first-generation college students. It would have been easy to tell if I fit into any of those categories.

As it happened, I did: I was a student at a large inner-city public school in Minneapolis. My high school was under-resourced, with high percentages of poor, minority, and immigrant students. It had a robust program for Native American students and a program to support teenage mothers.

But I am none of those things. I'm white and grew up middle class. Both of my parents graduated from college — from Princeton, to be exact. I attended a selective magnet program, a mostly white bubble within my school.

And yet, there in my files, I found a note from my an admissions officer: "She'd be a good admit for us from the Minneapolis Public Schools." The other officer's essay about me was even more explicit: "I'm in her corner," she wrote, "and would like to take one from the Minneapolis Public Schools."

[b]Yale, apparently, wanted — even needed — a student to represent not just my high school but my entire 35,000-student school district, which is just 33% white, where 65% of students fall under federal poverty measures, and where almost a third of students are English-language learners. The admissions officers knew, I think, that it would look unfortunate to overlook a public school system as large as Minneapolis.

So they picked me, the white daughter of two Ivy League graduates. I was one of just two students from the entire system to be accepted to Yale and Harvard; the other, a friend of mine, was also the white, middle-class daughter of two college grads. (Two years later, the next student to attend Yale from my inner-city high school was also a white, middle-class friend of mine. Both his parents have master's degrees.)[/b]
[/quote]

From this article, it sounds like it might help your odds to be from DCPS rather than, I guess, MCPS, but I don't imagine you'd get a bump coming from Eastern or Dunbar rather than Wilson or Walls, eh?[/quote]

This is exactly correct. If anything Malia will be dinged for not taking the most challenging courses available. And any essay saying something about how she believes in her local school and that’s why she is at Eastern will rightly be tossed in the trash in favor of an essay by someone who either (1) had no choice but Eastern and gave back to his community (2) some super driven Walls or Wilson or Banneker grad.

Finally- remember that malias parents are not ivy grads so... no advantage there either. Staying at Eastern is just all around dumb unless she wants to improve her card skills [/quote]

I'm pretty sure a LOT more kids will be applying from Walls and go in a 'special basket'. Eastern is a DCPS and she will stand out.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics