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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]New executive director last year and new middle school principal this year. There has been lots of staff turnover. The new leadership is focused on making it more rigorous and working to improved instruction so that all kids are engaged. [/quote]

If you step back far enough DCUM threads provide a pretty clear illustration of why public education is so hard and why DC does it so poorly. Here we have a number of families clamoring for more rigor and more true immersion. They want their kids challenged and in classes with other kids at or above grade level. On any BASIS thread (or any thread where it ultimately becomes about BASIS) people lob unfounded complaints about the school forcing kids out or failing to provide IEP supports. There's also the usual suspects chiming in to argue that BASIS and DCI and Latin should have to have demographics that match DC - a recipe for failing schools across the board. SH threads usually boil down to complaints about refusal to track, or some super secret tracking that exists but that SH doesn't openly talk about. [b]Deal and JR threads seem at bottom to be wealthy folks who use public school as a social core and have means and desire to supplement and rise to their "real" station in life when college comes.[/b] The common thread throughout is the usual suspects who seem more interested in virtue signaling than educating children, or people who have come to grips with the fact that DC schools are not there to fully educate their kids.

I remain convinced that the majority of DC residents (black, white, brown, etc.) at all socioeconomic levels want their kids to receive a quality education. The challenge in DC is that the virtue signaling, SJW, apologists for bad parenting and bad behaviors consume a disproportionate amount of oxygen and use social media and access to uneducated Councilmembers (Trayon) to perpetuate the current system and win the day with dumb arguments about how social promotion and "graduating" kids with 6th grade educations is less harmful than alternatives.
 [/quote]
If you look, around, "wealthy folks" in DC public schools with the "means and desire to supplement" to help their children achieve aren't confined to Upper NW these days. These folks amalgamate not only at Deal and JR but at Walls, BASIS, Latin I and to a lesser extent at Banneker and DCI.  We know EotP families at Walls and BASIS who quietly team up to hire tutors to provide small group AP prep/review. Some of these parents send their children to pre-college AP summer programs on college campuses.  The fact that this type of pricey supplementing is kicking in at DCI for IBD exam prep and language immersion, if just in a small way, shouldn't come as a surprise. Many UMC DC families with children in public middle and high schools can afford 5K, 10K, even 15K in academic enrichment per student annually, just not the 30-50K+ to cover tuition and fees at non-sectarian private schools in the area.

If DCI admins were more on the ball, they'd team up with OSSE to help low and moderate-income students access summer IBD programs abroad. OSSE has been providing grants to fund AP prep on college campuses for a small number of high-achieving low SES DCPS students for years.  I tutor an excellent at-risk DCPS student who won a grant from OSSE to spend the month of July at an AP prep residential program on an Ivy League campus. She tells me that her family paid nothing for her to attend.[/quote]

You've identified one of the faults in the "teach to the middle/bottom in the name of equity" approach. The idea seems to be that DC doesn't provide advanced work or rigor because it isn't fair to the kids who can't do the work. They don't allow test-in schools because tests aren't fair to kids who don't know as much (!). This approach makes no sense on its face, but even less so when one realizes that parents will supplement. Eliminating rigor and perversion of equity doesn't make the playing field more fair, it creates even more differentiation. The kids hurt most are the talented ones without access to resources from whom rigor and tracking are withheld. The UMC folks will find the rigor outside of school. The kid without resources for whom education is the key to escaping generational poverty is punished because some loudmouth, virtue signaling, SJW decided that punishing capable kids who lack resources is the only way to ensure everyone knows they are "allies". Allies to generational poverty I would argue.    [/quote]

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