Reply to McKinley Tech - a great school

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OK, so why isn't this great school far more diverse? Why is it 3% white in a city where whites are more than 40% of the population these days? Just poor PR? Serious question.

Glad your teens are happy there thus far but I'm skeptical. You can shout "strong public options!" all you want. But the inconvenient truth is that few UMC families are convinced.  [/quote]

Original poster here.  I had not wanted to get into this but feel I need to address this.  As a UMC white mom myself, i was struck that my white friends had almost no info/personal insights on the school while all my AA friends highly recommended it, and rightly so.  The only thing I can think, sadly, is the a) frankly bigoted and sadly engrained assumption/fear of being singled out as the “only white kid” has kept white people away and the racist view that majority black schools in NE aren’t safe/good and b) so many kids want to only go to schools with their friends and there is a clustering effect around the same public and charter schools.  I’m sorry to be that blunt but otherwise I struggle to understand a rationale that makes sense.  Certainly it’s a STEM school and that doesn’t attract all kids.  But I struggle to see that as the key reason for the demographic composition.

Overall I just think the school (and the kids that attend) deserve recognition and I had wanted to just flag it for parents who struggled as I did to get sufficient information on it in this forum.[/quote]

This +100. And it’s true of many other schools in DC. Schools get stuck in a chicken or egg scenario of there aren’t enough white kids, so white parents wont send their kids there, so then there’s never “enough” white kids for those families to feel comfortable. Meanwhile, they’re adding hours to their commute or paying private school tuition when they likely would have had a good experience at that school—as well as gaining the benefits of a stronger local school community and having your kid exposed to a broader range of people. As a UMC white mom of a child at another predominantly Black school, the amount of conversations I have with white parents who say “we wish we could go there, it’s just not there yet” is tiresome. [/quote]

How much is this about race and how much is it about class?

I want to send my child to schools that have a cohort (at least 25%) of students working at or above grade level in both ELA and math. This almost universally does not happen at schools that are majority at-risk.[/quote]

McKinley Tech is 38.1% economy disadvantaged, which is not the same thing as at-risk technically, but same basic idea. It's not a Title I.

The CAPE scores for ELA show a large majority of students on or above grade level. The math scores aren't as good, but they do have a lot of kids scoring a 3 so near grade level, and you have to remember that the best math students don't take the math CAPE because they took Algebra I and Geometry in middle school. Weirdly the Algebra II CAPE isn't shown, that's strange. [/quote]

Last year's CAPE scores, show that 79.4% of McKinley Tech students are BELOW grade level in math and 48% are BELOW grade level in ELA.

Not particularly impressive, especially for a school that has selective admissions and a tech/STEM emphasis.[/quote]

True enough.

Just for comparison, take a look at CAPE scores for Walls, another school with selective admissions but no tech/STEM emphasis.

At Walls, 32.2% are below grade level in math and 3% are below grade level in ELA.[/quote]

Again, that's not what this shows.

Interestingly, McKinley Tech is 35% English Language Learners.[/quote]

Oops sorry, pulled from the wrong box. Only 5% ELLs.[/quote]

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