Reply to Who said there isn't a North-South divide?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So whats the solution -- should we move to an all lottery model?  You rank your top 4 choices and you get what you get?[/quote]

Eliminate all choice school options in SA.  Make everyone go to their neighborhood school.[/quote]

No, we've got enough equity to move, and plenty of income to afford private, as do all of our neighbors. Force is not likely to help. People who wouldn't send their kids to the neighborhood schools by choice won't go to the neighborhood schools by force. Some that are better integrated and trending in the right direction with test scores might stand a chance, but the ones that have only one SFH neighborhood and then hundreds of units of AH within the walk zone, where over 70% of the students within the physical zone are living below the poverty line, won't ever change unless the neighborhoods themselves change or the boundaries change significantly. The vast majority of UMC professionals will not accept sending their kids to schools without adequate capital, both financial and social. Do I like that this is the truth? No. But it is the truth. It's a fantasy to believe differently. I think most people living in SA want truly diverse schools, and that is why the option schools are so popular. Until they perceive high poverty schools as being just as able to address the needs and abilities of their more affluent children, they will find alternatives. They will because they can. Simple as that. [/quote]

Agreed. People aren’t understanding that a school like Randolph would not be significantly impacted if every UMC kid suddenly enrolled next year. Maybe it drops from 77 % low income to 69%. That’s not going to be acceptable to most educated parents. As well it shouldn’t. [/quote]

Then perhaps they shouldn't have bought houses there in the first place. [/quote]

Or, perhaps they should have moved there, and should advocate for an integrated school that isn't just an SOL cram facility. A high poverty school is a problem, period. We shouldn't, as a county, accept them whether our kids are zoned for them or not. They are not good for anyone, especially poor kids.
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If they moved there and then advocated for things to reduce the FARMS rate (e.g., no more AH in the area, relocating option programs to break up poverty clusters), I would respect that. But when you buy in a 70% FARMS school hoping you'll back-door into a "good" school via the option lottery or neighborhood transfer, don't throw a temper tantrum about the unfairness when it doesn't pan out and then demand that the county give you additional options for getting out of your own neighborhood. I have zero sympathy for that.[/quote]

But having the UMC moving to high poverty neighborhoods/school zones and advocating for better boundaries or more choices is how integration happens, and is the only way. No one else will advocate for such arrangements. Certainly not NA parents.

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Add reasonable boundary adjustments to the list of things I have no problem with them advocating for, because that's something that would actually help the neighborhood school. I am not opposed to integration, I'm opposed to putting resources into creating more avenues for UMC families to flee higher-FARMs schools, which only makes the inequality between neighborhood schools even worse.[/quote]

Actually, option schools make the jr high schools and high school more integrated. Eliminating option schools won't "force" UMC students to attend segregated elementaries. For the hundredth time. Without option schools, UMC students in south Arlington would just go private or move away. Randolph would be just as segregated, with or without option schools.

The big difference is that Wakefield would be as segregated as Randolph, because it would no longer have option elementaries as feeders. No option schools in SA, no UMC in the upper grades. It's that simple.[/quote]

The effect of option programs within neighborhood schools at the middle and high school is negligible. At Wakefield, the effect of immersion and the AP network is to decrease the FARMs rate by a single percentage point. At W-L, the effect of IB is to decrease the FARMs rate by 3 percentage points. At Gunston, montessori and immersion reduce the FARMs rate by 2 percentage points. And then there's HB Woodlawn, where the 18% FARMs rate is only 3 percentage points higher than Yorktown but is 17 points lower than W-L and 32 points lower than Wakefield. That's not integration.[/quote]

Curious how you are calculating that without knowing where current Wakefield students attended elementary and middle school.[/quote]

You can derive it from the historical pupil transfer reports. Up until this year, they gave demographic breakdowns for disadvantaged status by each type of transfer into a school. So you can see how many students transferred in to a school via the option program, as well and how many of them did/did not qualify for FARMs.[/quote]

Hmmm. Transfer reports don't track feeder schools, they track transfer from one school or program to another within school levels. So for example, he 2016-17 transfer report for Gunston shows 297 transfers, and breaks them down by the other middle schools from where those students are zoned for. Now, generally, most of those transfers are in fact immersion students continuing the program into middle school since gunston is the only middle school for that. So it sorta tracks feeder elementaries, But you can't tell if those are SA students who attended claremont or NA who went to key. And you can't figure out what elementaries wakefield students came from via the transfer report either. I think the best estimate would be to say, half of wakefields 2000 students are farms, and assume that the ones who aren't all attended SA elementaries and are distributed across those elementaries in proportion to those schools share of the SA student population.
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