Reply to Switching schools at 5th grade?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]the earlier poster said the % staying on for the feeder middle school is reflective of the overall mix of abilities at the elementary school.  i think once you have over 1/2 the kids staying thats mostly right.[/quote]

No it’s not an overall mix.  It’s the kids who are lower performing mixing in with lower performing kids from other schools.

Just look at math scores.  Almost 1 in 5 kids at Maury above grade level in math.  EH 1 in 50 kids.  That is a huge difference of 10 fold.[/quote]

This isn’t true at LT. It’s true that the out flux to Basis/Latin is disproportionately kids who are at least on grade level. However, once the kids are in 5th, the kids going to SH are representative, if not slightly above the 5th grade average. A few kids go private, and a handful of kids go to “good” middle schools, but most of the other kids are heading to schools UMC families don’t use. [/quote]

LT loses high performing kids in the upper grades in 4th and 5th.  In fact, stats at the school are not good, much worst then Maury.

Only 1 out of 10 kids above grade level in math.  That’s only 10% which is then diluted with kids leaving in upper grades so really the percentages of high performing kids going to SH is likely in the low single percentages.

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Maury has very high stats, so saying LT's stats are "worse than Maury" is not the same as saying LT's stats are bad. LT is one of the highest performing schools on the Hill, Maury is just higher performing.

My sense is that for a time, more LT families were sending kids to SH than Maury kids were sending their kids to EH. Plus SH was getting more kids from Brent for proximity reasons. So SH's reputation seems to have risen faster than EH's. But I'm enthusiastic to see more Maury families sending their kids to EH as well. The more UMC families on the Hill continue to invest in their in-boundary public schools into MS, the better for the neighborhood and the schools, IMO.

What I am not getting is your tone. Just because a school's test scores are not quite as high as another school's doesn't mean it's a bad school. LT has a slightly higher at-risk percentage than Maury, and I don't know how that shakes out by grade, but that alone could account for the differences in scores because, unfortunately, the strongest predictor of test scores at the elementary level is parents' income and education level.

LT is a well liked school with a lot of IB buy in and a good school culture. That's to be celebrated. [/quote]

Not sure if it is the same person repeatedly posting about test scores, and I appreciate different perspectives. But I would rather evaluate how my child is doing by seeing how many grade levels ahead they are in their reading, what advanced math classes they are taking, what type of writing/narratives they are completing, etc. All of which is not possible to capture in one standardized test score.

Also will add that LT and Maury are great schools with lots of bright kids, but there are also high achieving cohorts of kids coming from other feeder schools at both of those middle schools. I know the enrollment has jumped significantly at EH since COVID, and it may have at SH and other middle schools as well. [/quote]

+1. There are significant demographic differences between LT and Maury, including that LT has a much larger OOB population. The subgroup population scores at LT are very good in ELA (e.g., 100% of white 3rd & 5th graders score 4 or 5 on PARCC last year; you can't quite tell for 4th, but likely 1 single kid didn't; also, it has at-risk scores way above the city average) and decent but not great for math. But LT has kids that excel in all sort of other academic adjacent fora (as I have no doubt Maury does too). It had 6 of the top 15 debate teams at the recent DC elementary school debate tournament, including 1st, 2nd & 4th, and that event had teams from Janney, Mann, and YY among others. It had the 2nd place team at the recent DCPS 3rd-5th grade Math team tournament. It was the only DCPS school in the city to host Math Kangaroo this year and had a bunch of kids place nationally (as well as in DC). It hosts a big science fair with impressive projects. It has an actual printed HS-style newspaper that comes out 3 times a year. It has a super impressive musical that over 60 kids participate in. All of which is to say, it has tons of indicia of smart, high achieving kids with involved parents and teachers.

Maury is a fabulous school with excellent test results (among the best in the city). I would be thrilled to send my kid there too.[/quote]

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