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Reply to "New Jackson-Reed HS (Wilson HS) School Principal - Sah Brown from Eastern High School"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some of you guys have been hammering at a random neighborhood mom who bothered to look into the performance of Eastern's IB Diploma program for pages now.  The exercise is as pointless as it is nuts.

Suggestion: look at the development trajectory of Blair Montgomery HS in MoCo in the last 40 years rather than taking pot shots at moms.

Blair wasn't all that different from Eastern when I was a little kid living in Silver Spring. The school was dramatically under-enrolled, under-performing and filled with low SES minority students.  Then, in the early 80s, MoCo started up two, large, super-duper test-in magnet programs at Blair, each with a county-wide draw, one program for STEM, the other for humanities.  The magnets have always offered preferential treatment in admissions to in-boundary applicants.  Almost since their inception, these programs have admitted a fraction of 8th grade applicants, roughly 10% in this century.

With the magnets in place, Blair began to attract top administrators, resources to renovate and better teachers. These days, Blair is a thriving by-right HS with double the enrollment it had in my day, and a highly diverse student body, attracting sizeable cohorts of black, white, Asian and Latino students, low and high SES.

Our ed leaders in the District would much rather see Eastern languish endlessly as a hopeless case under middling leadership than take a page from the MoCo Blair story.  Go at them, please.[/quote]

I haven't the time to tear down something that exhibits such a glaring misunderstanding of demographics. Suffice it to say the demographics of MoCo and DC are not similar, and that is even more so when one compares the IB population of Blair and Eastern. Your nice little story doesn't address the role of wealth, poverty and education gaps. It also ignores the brain drain of congressionally mandated charters (which I support, BTW) which don't exist in MoCo.  Oh, and picking 30 40 years ago as a point of reference to compare the two while DC was gripped with the worst crack epidemic in the US and MoCo was not kind of encapsulates how little you understand the similarities and differences between the jurisdictions. .

TL:DR  This isn't nearly as simple as you want to pretend it is. [/quote]

Is all that supposed to make us want to enroll in Eastern?[/quote]

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