Reply to Replicating ATS success — what are exact differences

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]ATS should mandate 2/3rds of slots for lower socioeconomic and minority students, similar to how Montessori does their prek. I have no problem with ATS existing or being a home for attentive parents. But it should favor disadvantaged every step of the way. And, please don't tell me its FRL rate is similar or better than other schools, that is truly irrelevant. Its FRL needs to be twice the worst neighborhood school, and its student demographics needs to flip the stats of U.S. public. Then you know it's really serving those who need it in our society. [/quote]

This is an interesting comment, but I think that APS just needs to offer more schools that use the ATS model.  This is a public school district.  It’s unfair to offer a product like ATS- the literal best public elementary school in Virginia- when it benefits so few of the taxpaying population.  I would be fine with them setting aside percentage for students receiving FRL, but there’s no getting around the fact that we need more ATS slots for everyone.[/quote]

All of the options are built and supported by the fact that there is demand for 125%, maybe 175%, of capacity, but no more. As a public system, you don't want to build an option building that then depends on you struggling to fill it every year. As others have noted here, there are huge swaths of APS system that do NOT want rigid ATS for their kids. And if your answer is,fine, don't build buildings, just implement inside current schoools, then I strongly suggest you look into the lessons learned from the failures of "schools win schools" in APS. Long story short, nothing makes a local school more like a civil war battleground than when you ty to divide up its classrooms between very different pedagogies. See Montessori experience at Drew. [/quote]

But demand for ATS is almost 200% of current capacity. Way more than demand for other options. [/quote] This is a fact. look at the waitlists. You could fill a second APS and I think you could fill quite a few more HBs. That said, why is HB such a short school if it was a new build? Why didn't APS maximize that space. Wait, I know why. WE HAVE A HORRIBLE SCHOOL BOARD AND THEY ALL MUST GO.[/quote]

Its true that part of the reason HB works is because all the adults know all the kids, and the kids know that they have a lot of freedom but at the same time have to act to a reasonable standard. It wouldn't work with twice as many kids, or if there were tons of kids there that didn't really want to be there. Not every teacher wants to be in a school where the students can wander around freely and address them directly, and not every teenager can handle being in a building where they can wander around freely and address adults directly--especially if they haven't been given increasing amounts of independence and responsibility all along, and seen it modeled from all of their older peers.

I had kids at both Gunston and HB and I can tell you -- you can't just take parts of the HB model and plunk it down somewhere else, or double it in size. I assume the same is true with ATS. Or at least, you won't automatically get the same results. Not to say there aren't aspects that could be replicated other places, or lessons to be learned, it's just not something you can easily do 1:1. [/quote]

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