Reply to CHARTERS MAY MERGE AT WALTER REED (The DC International School, IB Diploma Programme)

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[quote=Anonymous]It's no secret that YY has actually done a thorough job of alienating the DC Chinese community, mainly by failing to hire an ethnic administrator (duh), but I don't see what that has to do w/this topic. Could we return to it, please?

One PP mentioned that DCI will have around 1,000 students  - where does this figure come from?  This means roughly 200 kids in each grade for 5th through 8th?  How do you arrive at these figures w/only 90-100 students total coming out of the several feeder schools from 4th, and some percentage (half? a third?) moving on to other middle schools, including DCPS, privates, and other charters.

Does that mean that it's safe to assume that a lottery will provide MOST of the DCI students?  Do you think that parents at the feeder schools will be OK w/that arrangement?  The immersion schools function as the closest thing to gifted and talented education that DC public schools offer for elementary.  So I'm having trouble imagining a lot of parents at the merging schools wanting their middle schoolers to be in class w/many randomly selected kids who haven't experienced the same sort of rigor yet.  Anybody else?

Another issue is that the feeder schools attract an unually high percentage of upper middle class families for charters, and such families have a long tradition of peeling off from DCPS elementaries for independents and the burbs, even in Upper NW.  Now a good many jump ship from DC Charter - look at Latin threads for a discussion of why it happens.  All this is slowly changing, but it's been an uphill struggle even for Deal/Wilson and Latin to attract and keep many affluent families for middle school and high school.  Are posters convinced that DCI will somehow reverse the trend as soon as it opens, or maybe that this will take a number of years?

Somebody mentioned that w/such a big school, several levels of math could (and would?) be offered.  But where's the tradition of extensive ability grouping in charter middle schools?  Wouldn't that require some sort of policy change?  To my knowledge, Latin only differentiates for 2 subjects, algebra in 8th grade and "get-up-to-speed" Latin for kids who lottery in after 5th, and Two Rivers doesn't differentiate at all (correct me if I'm wrong).  It's Deal that does the most ability grouping/tracking, alone in offering a full year of 7th grade algebra.  Basis pledges to track for math, perhaps extensively, but the school is untested and many PPs predict trouble brewing there if tracking falls largely along race and class lines.

Thanks for the input  :D

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