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[quote=Anonymous][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]

Here is the link for the OSSE summer study program:
[url]https://osse.dc.gov/page/osse-scholars-summer-college-programs[/url]

These are general academic programs, not specifically tailored to APs. No reason they wouldn’t work for DCI students too. [b]It’s not like IB requires some esoteric skill set that schools like Stanford, Yale and Chicago haven’t heard of.[/b][/quote]

Sort of. The dozen college partners for the OSSE summer study program mostly offer AP exam test prep. Click around on the pre-college summer programs for partners to see that this is true.  As was noted earlier on this thread, DCI's college counselors don't encourage students to double up on AP exams with substantial crossover content with IBD exams, even though doubling up has long been standard practice in high-performing IBD programs in this country. Some IBD exams lend themselves much better to AP test prep than others, e.g. AP Human Geography, AP French, Spanish and Chinese, AP Chemistry, Biology and Physics. There's a reason that a few ambitious DCI families of means have started sending teens to the UK and Austria in the summer, or live-streaming Oxford Study Courses 5 hours behind DC time, for IBD-specific exam prep.  Diploma exams are quite different from AP exams.  There's no multiple choice on IBD exams; they're a lot like college blue book exams, and IBD math is mixed, like Singapore Math (vs. the College Board testing just for Calculus or Stats).  This year, the IBD exams will start going on computers, meaning that typing answers fast will become key to success.  [/quote]

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