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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The NP post does seem thoughtful.  I’m afraid they might have some facts wrong though.  We attended when the school was predominantly white.  It sounds like that may have changed.  But nonetheless, the first class of students even to undergo parcc testing are today’s 11th graders, I believe, because sws did not start to expand until those students were in first grade, and parcc does not start until third.

The scores were low then, relative to demographics, and there were all sorts of excuses, mainly related to sws not being big on tech.  It sounds like the scores are even worse now, and it is being blamed on racial demographics.   Wake up.  Every teacher across dc tells the kids that parcc is testing the teachers, not the students.  This is in a large part true.  The test was designed to test kids in their mastery of the curriculum, and sws kids are falling short because they have not been taught the material.  Covid in spring 2020 was a big wake-up call for us, when we saw that our kid had no idea how to even approach the standard dcps material that was being sent home (sws quickly put an end to that and pivoted back to its own “curticulum”).

Sws parents, look around at your friends who go to other schools.  How are their test scores?  Are the kids happy? Do they have friends? Are they kind?  I bet their scores are better and the rest depends more on the parents than the school.  Despite the sws hype, you really don’t need to sacrifice rigor to raise happy kids.  And the most ambitious kids are going to be happier somewhere where their good work and perseverance is rewarded, which absolutely will just happen at sws.  My high-functioning kids basically felt demoralized that their good efforts went unnoticed. [/quote]

There is this inherent assumption that SWS parents are Hill parents which is less and less true over time. About half my kid's current group of upper elementary friends do not live on Capitol Hill. SWS PARCC exceeds our in bounds school where the majority - something like 80 percent or more - of kids test below grade level. We were grateful to lottery in.

I have never heard anything at SWS downplaying testing. I feel like that is a soundbyte from years ago that gets repeatedly rehashed on DCUM, but literally never experienced anything like that personally and my kid's teachers always discussed their test results, though our kid does well and tests above grade level. Sure, I'd feel differently if my kid didn't perform well and I didn't feel it was being addressed. My kid has a couple friends whose parents mentioned the school providing extra help when their kid underperformed on testing, and that the extra help worked by the time the test was performed again.

I also repeatedly see false or outdated assertions that SWS doesn't assign homework. My kid gets homework (since first or 2nd grade).

SWS lost more ground than other schools on PARCC during the pandemic sh*tshow of virtual learning. SWS also underperforms on PARCC vs LT among minority groups as has been posted repeatedly before in other threads (actually just ELA? Am I reading results correctly that SWS outperforms LT on math?). There is one poster who always calls out this specific comparison. SWS also went through changes recently with a one year off site during the pandemic which (and, it seemed, more leaving/new students coming into upper grades than usual) so I don't know what to make of test scores until we see how kids do on the PARCC this year. A good chunk of my upper elementary kid's class was new to the school within the past couple of years.

Also, yes I like SWS' focus on kindness. In this world of school shootings (and I know someone personally impacted by one), and as someone who was bullied horribly, this matters to me. Some of my kid's friends who lotteried in later elementary grades spoke of bullying that was already starting by mid elementary in their in bounds school where parents were doing anything, including paying for private, to get out. [/quote]

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