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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There’s already a “pan Ward 6” high school called Eastern that hardly any upper-income parents send their kids to.

A ton of money was spent renovating the school, and an International Bachelorette program was started. How did upper-income folks on Capitol Hill respond? By overwhelmingly continuing to decline to send their kids there.

And what rationale do many of them use? That the achievement of students in the International Bachelorette program is low compared with other schools.

Fixing the physical facilities and starting an advanced program wasn’t enough. It seems that many of these folks also wanted the school to miraculously come preloaded with kids as brilliant as their own — but before they sent their own kids there. A Catch-22 situation if I’ve ever seen one.

Given this history, DCPS should be highly skeptical of claims that upper-income Capitol Hill parents would totally embrace their in-bound middle schools if only DCPS would make X, Y, Z changes.
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The Catch-22 situation you present hasn't been fostered by Hill parents in the 15 years since Eastern was renovated during Michelle Rhee's tenure as chancellor. The wholesale rejection of Eastern's IBD program by high SES Hill parents has been both self-created on DCPS' part and eminently predictable.  If DCPS leaders want most Hill parents to embrace Eastern within, say, ten years, they need to enter into good faith dialogue with parent leaders of DCPS elementary schools on the Hill on how to make that happen now. Newcomers to the Hill with kids may not know that DCPS leaders have never bothered to give UMC Hill parents a voice in Eastern's development. DCPS has never seen value in soliciting our input in any meaningful form. We've effectively been ordered to collectively embrace Eastern, vs. incentivized to do it, a recipe for colossal failure for Eastern as a true in-boundary high school like J-R.

Upper-income Capitol Hil parents would indeed embrace a pan Ward 6 in-bound MS if one were created with extensive input from the parent leaders of the Hill DCPS elementary schools with strong neighborhood buy-in. Some of us got involved in the trying to shape the boundary review process in 2013-2014 as parent leaders at Brent, Maury and Watkins. We joined hands then and lobbied for a pan Ward 6 MS to serve as a neighborhood bridge to Eastern. Yet our input was ignored by both DCPS and the influential Cluster PTA-dominated CH Public School Parents Organization (now W6PSPO) group.  The result was that we've bailed from DCPS to BASIS, the Latins, privates and the burbs en masse for MS in the intervening years.

The tried and tested model some of us backed was that of the handful of stunningly successful MoCo and Arlington test-in HS magnet programs housed in neighborhood high schools that were heavily low-income minority, and failing, as recently as the 1980s. The establishment of the magnets turned things around for our near neighbors in the burbs, resulting in strong and enduring neighborhood buy-in for these programs within just a few years of their establishment. Washington-Liberty's popular IB Diploma program in Arlington operates as a magnet program without the admissions tests MoCo uses, a model we liked. In Arlington, only the highest-performing in-boundary and transfer MS students are permitted to enroll in 9th grade pre-IB classes at W-L after having met an 8th grade GPA cut-off.

If DCPS wanted to see Eastern's IBD program thrive, ed leaders could set a high bar for admission to a magnet program with a city-wide draw and seat set-asides/preferential treatment in admissions for qualified in-boundary students, as in MoCo and Arlington. No other solution is going to work of course and none has. Blaming high SES Hill parents for failing to get onboard with a development plan for Eastern that was imposed on them from the get go may feel good, but serves no purpose. [/quote]

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