Reply to New to looking at Capitol Hill DCPS. Any majority high SES schools?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why not? [/quote]
The demographics are not there.  [b]There is no critical mass of Hill families sufficient to fill an MS.[/b]  Hence, the only path to a high-performing MS is a city-wide solution but G&T programs will not be implemented by DCPS, because the optics would be politically challenging (there would be too many white & asian kids).  Ergo, the only way to do it is for charters to come in that are challenging enough, such that anyone who is not academically high-performing will drop out.  Latin, Basis, DCI...  but nothing from DCPS.  [/quote]
This is just silly. You're telling me that if Brent, Maury, and the Cluster were all feeders to the same middle school, they couldn't fill Stuart-Hobson? That's just objectively wrong.[/quote]
That would work, but how?[/quote]
If Brent, Watkins and Maury fed into SH it would be popular - too popular.  In a few short years it would be a middle class school.  But there is not enough room in SH for the grads from those schools.  Watkins has over 100 fifth graders, Maury and Brent have (or would have) another 100 - more than SH can accommodate.  And that doesn't include the other SH feeders . . .

And who wants to tell JO Wilson and Ludlow Taylor they no longer feed into SH?  [i]You? You Lieutenant Weinberg ?!?![/i]   (A Few Good Men reference).

Also, DCPS must justify spending lots of money for IB programs in Eliot Hine and Jefferson, only to have the target populations for these programs no longer feed into these schools?

How many affluent parents will risk keeping their kid in Brent or Maury or Watkins for fifth grade (or earlier) and risk it on a program at SH that might be good, when Latin has a great program and new building, and BASIS has an emerging program that looks promising, and/or they can afford privates or the suburbs?  People buying expensive houses in-bounds for Brent, Watkins and Maury will increasingly demand strong options, and they will be increasingly intolerant with DCPS's mediocre offerings.  Parents at Watkins and Brent are already uncomfortable with the strength of their elementary schools in the upper grades, and middle school is even more difficult to get right.

Demographics (not a DCPS plan) forced JKLMM schools to improve, and that in turn improved Deal and Wilson.  Those schools all have no concentrations of poverty in their catchment areas.  Hill schools have a different set of demographics to work with - and they are not favorable in the near to mid term for a middle school to emerge as a strong option for more affluent families.  Ward Six has more public housing than any other Ward (per Tommy Wells) and with significant unused capacity in its three middle schools, it becomes difficult to establish a middle class school because there is so much poverty in DC and parents from Wards 8, 7, 5 and even 4 would send their kids to emerging strong middle schools in Ward 6 - just as Deal and Hardy and SH have large enrollments from those areas.  Okay, there is a chance that a Hill school with the middle class as a minority might work if DCPS suddenly became an amazing organization that figured out how to do it right.  But again, people buying million dollar homes don't want their kid to be the trial balloon in a DCPS competency test.[/quote]

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