Reply to ACPS Jefferson Houston I.B. Program Middle School vs. GW open enrollment honors?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] The true final straw was when someone asked a general question about, "What do you think we could do for ACPS to attract those children that are otherwise headed to private school?"  The Superintendent's reply was something along the lines of: "[b]Private schools are a great option for some people, and I don't intend to try to compete for those students[/b]."   I got my answer.

I can afford to send my child to private school, and she is very happy there.  However, it makes me angry that ACPS is failing those students who don't have parents who have the savvy or wherewithal to get their kids moved to a better performing school (if you do that, you have to navigate a complex application process, as well as provide transportation to the out of boundary school yourself). I don't think concentrating underprivileged kids into a few schools is good for THEM, and I can't believe that ACPS has gotten away with a blatantly illegal segregated system as long as it has.  [/quote]

Another J-H critic here:

It sounds like we arrived at similar conclusions, and I had heard Morton Sherman articulate this position as well. He takes the "universal" part of "universal education" very seriously and very literally. One aspect of that is the school district has no interest in cultivating an achievement culture but instead has a strategy that caters to the least common denominator, which trickles down to the classrooms. Mix in a tendency to propose flavor-of-the-day gimmicks without seeking community buy-in rather than truly innovate, and a City Mayor who has been quoted as saying parents in ACPS who put their children in private schools are racist and you get a clearer picture of the vibe is in ACPS. My own view is the school district *should* be trying to compete with those private schools to retain its better students because their presence in the classrooms would likely have a broader positive effect on their peers. But instead, they've written them off, but still cannot find the panacea for their poverty problem. And that, in a nutshell, is the organizational and institutional failure of ACPS. It won't improve until there is a new board, a new superintendent, and a new outlook.[/quote]

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