Reply to Banneker versus School Without Walls

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I used to volunteer at Banneker and I was blown away by the students. They were such amazing, hard working and intelligent kid. They were respectful and very motivated to serve in their community.

It's depressing that every time the school is mentioned on DCUM you see parents doing Olympics level mental gymnastics to defend why they don't want to send their children to a school. Just admit that you  where their child would be an ethnic minority. There have been studies that white families have need at least 30 % of  white students where they will feel comfortable sending their children to an ethnically mixed school.

[/quote]

I think most people are arguing that it's not academically rigorous and appeals to lower performing (but academically inclined) minority students as an academic school because DCPS is pretty crappy overall.[/quote]

+1 People are also arguing, I think fairly, that the outcomes are not what you would expect for the Jewel of DCPS.

I agree that white people can be twitchy about Black majority schools, and particularly schools that are majority ADOS rather than majority immigrant. However, in this specific case, you aren't seeing the kind of results that you would expect from a test-in, criteria-based, magnet program that lasts four years.

Basically, I think Banneker might be very good at identifying bright and academically motivated kids (mostly girls) and moving them safely through high school and onward to college. It does that by bringing them up to basically the US median in terms of test scores (AP and SAT). That's a success, if you use the right lens.

[b]But for a MC/UMC Black family, or a white family whose kids are already at the baseline, it's not clear that Banneker is going to provide rigor to move kids above the baseline. [/b]That's the question that all of this fighting about the roots of the SAT are obfuscating.  [/quote]

It does but DCUM is not interested in hearing from Banneker parents. [/quote]

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