Reply to Ludlow-Taylor getting a new a new Principal

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]Concrete suggestions on how L-T could raise in-boundary percentages? Brent and Maury in-boundary parents with kids in the upper grades (I am not one) are the local experts on the subject. Growing LT with one's children is just too big a headache for most in-boundary gentrifiers in a city where lottery seats at far more diverse and upper middle-income friendly schools can be found without much trouble. Look at this thread - posters are called racist at the drop of a hat when the truth is almost always a lot more complicated.[/quote]

First, the high volume traffic and high anxiety on this public schools forum is proof positive that it [i]is [/i]"much trouble" to get a seat at one of these schools.

Next, the "truth" of your "headache" isn't about finding friendliness to your middle income.  DCPS - or rather MySchoolDC - is very clearly courting gentrifiers, and anyone with an ounce of objectivity could see that the DME proposals have been designed to corral families into their neighborhood schools. At the very least, the unified lottery pretty much forced everyone to take a look at the school down the street, something that parents with other options didn't do previously.

Finally, if you're taking shortcuts - like IB participation - to determine the quality of a school, you are indeed an -ist of some sort.  Not wanting your child to be an only is totally understandable.  So is the feeling that factors beyond your control, like poverty or a large percentage of English language learners, will dilute the quality of instruction at a school.  But the problem comes when you expect - and pressure - a principal, and by context a teacher, to [i]eliminate[/i] that factor from a classroom.  This is a city with great economic disparity, and when you enter the public school system, you accept that and (for those not in the homogenous upper NW) [u]look for the schools that know how to deal with it.[/u]

[i]That's[/i] the success of charter schools.  They've got the support of a broad range of families and the autonomy to experiment and find solutions that meet diverse needs.  If you want your neighborhood school to succeed, commit to the "headache" and convince your neighbors to do the same.

But don't hamstring the school's leaders and staff with your elitist requirements that only upper income kids attend.[/quote]

Who needs this preachy screed?  If DCPS were indeed courting gentrifiers as you claim, they definitely wouldn't be allowing Watkins to sink, or Payne to remain 1% white in a school district that the US Census tells me was already more than half white in 2010.  Yes, 1%, down from a whopping 3% (all in preschool and prek) several years ago.

PPs claim that there's no path for those awful parents with elitist requirements from the LT district to charters or OOB schools where most kids are high SES without spectacular luck.  Average stamina is more like it.

Every in-boundary family I know who has stayed the course on the lottery has found an appealing spot no later than 1st grade (charter, SWS, Cap Hill Montessori or OOB).  Every one.  One in-boundary family I know even home schooled for K to buy time until they cracked a spot.  Nobody who can't afford private school needs to put up with the L-T politically correct boosters hassling them.   
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