Reply to Capitol Hill - middle school and beyond?

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "Capitol Hill - middle school and beyond?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I know of several CH teachers currently sending their kids to SH. This gives me hope for when my younger kids are ready for middle school. [/quote]

We're IB for SH and I thought the same way for a few years. Then my kids got into the upper ES grades at their Hill DCPS post Covid and I took a hard look at SH. We were turned off by several problems that didn't look like they'd be going away.

*Increasing but still weak IB buy-in with, with steady buy-in from Wards 5, 7 and 8.   
*Untracked science and social studies classes where most students work behind grade level. No plans to change that. 
*The fact that we didn't see a single student, teacher or admin of East Asian descent in the building. Our families are from Korea.

[/quote]

I have a K child and I'm trying to understand the negativity association with children behind grade level? Where are kids behind supposed to go to learn? [/quote]

When your K child is in 6th grade and in a class where many students are at a 3rd grade level, then it can be difficult for the teacher to spend a lot of time teaching at a 6th grade level.[/quote]

I think what the PP means is that... this is a public school. They are tasked with teaching kids, all of the kids who walk through their doors, and meeting them whereever they are. Where are those kids supposed to go to learn? Are they supposed to be removed from the school so that more advanced kids can learn?[/quote]

The idea is that the school is supposed to meet everyone's needs, not park the above-grade kids on computers while trying to remediate and manage behavior among the below-grade-level kids. The range is too wide for one teacher to cover. But DCPS pretends this is fine because "equity".[/quote]

This. It's not always true, but in a school where a significant percent of students are below grade level, the school will expend far more resources trying to get those kids up to grade level than it will spend on students at or above grade level who are also there to learn. Sometimes what happens is that the grade level and above students are left to work independently a lot, get bored, and lose interest in school. It sucks watching this happen to your kid.

Also, if the reason kids are below grade level is learning disabilities or developmental delays, that's one thing. But if the reason many kids are below grade level is that they are not getting the support they need outside of school, or they are dealing with major life stressors that make schoolwork hard to impossible, then you have a different problem. Schools are often not well suited to solving these problems, which means the school might expend a lot of energy trying to get those kids up to grade level and fail anyway, and in the meantime your kid has been stuck doing "independent study" in math for two years and isn't ready for HS either. It's a lose-lose.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics