Reply to Student Stratification at Selective High Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I actually don’t think we have the demand pull for this - privates have fulfilled this need for a long time. [/quote]

Don't agree and I've lived in Ward 6 since the early 90s. What used to happen in DC was that UMC families, mostly government employees, would buy a house for a few hundred thousand dollars, leaving them with the dough for privates. Now, a time when any decent halfway decent 3-bedroom house in Georgetown, or AU Park, or Capitol Hill etc. runs you more than a million dollars, things are different. Privates where tuition is 30-45K and fi aid generally isn't available for parents earning six figures has put these programs out of reach for a much higher % of DC families than 30 years ago. Moreover, far more UMC families of teens are staying in the city than did in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, especially EotP.  Droves of parents who wouldn't have touched DCPS past elementary school just 10 years ago are taking the leap. A steady rise in applications not just to Walls but to Banneker and Ellington in the last decade is proof of these trends.[/quote]

I think this is correct but it’s also the reason that bringing back the exam at Walls is not the answer. Walls is just too small to satisfy the kind of increased demand this poster is talking about. And what’s more, these parents aren’t seeking the super-elite, majority-Asian, mini TJ/Stuyvesant magnet school that some posters on this thread seem to dream of. The DC parents just want a decent college prep program. That’s what Walls was, before gentrification. But now there’s more demand for college prep programs, and Walls can’t expand. So right now, an exam that funnels the highest-scoring 8th graders into one tiny school would undercut efforts to expand college prep capacity elsewhere, while also excluding a lot of solid college-bound students from Capitol Hill and elsewhere. [/quote]

A rec league teammate was telling me his dad lied about residency to go to McKinley back in the day, its reputation used to be a lot stronger. Heck Dunbar used to be incredible in the 50s (and was gutted for Banneker). DC has some pretty seriously under enrolled high schools they can use to create strong college prep courses and maybe lessen the load on JR, Walls, and Banneker.

Given Dunbars latest reworking of the curriculum this path seems unlikely. [/quote]

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