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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.[/quote]
Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom.  At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations.  This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.
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There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here.  Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.[/quote]
Your story has holes.  It wasn't the "stroller brigade" pushing for Eastern.  If anything the stroller brigade wanted a viable comprehensive neighborhood middle school option that doesn't require lottery luck[/quote]
That's fair; fixing the high school before the middle schools didn't make much sense to me.[/quote]
Except they did fix middle schools.  Hobson got $40 million.  EH and Jefferson got additional $$ in the Ward 6 Middle School Reform Plan.  I'm not saying they did it right, but from leadership perspective they kow towed to gentrifiers.[/quote]

Only symbolically. They completely ignored the aspect of few high performing students flowing into a middle  school that is set up o serve much higher numbers of struggling students coming from elementary schools that were failing to educate those kids. They preferred to ignore or browbeat parents over that rather than face it head on. "Differentiation" is not an adequate response. Not nearly. Parents want to hear from their education and political leaders " We understand this is a very real concern with merit.  These are the 5 things we are going to so to address that problem.  We base these measures on successes we have researched in middle schools X and Y where there are similar demographics.  Please join us in a tour of middle school X so you can observe for yourself how this works.

No one has the brains or cojones to do this because it is politically fraught, and frankly, there are possibly NO successful models in exisence[/quote]

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