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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Amen to 8:00 AM---

That's why they should focus on taking the OOB population West of the Park and redirecting them "en masse" to one middle school in order to start creating the core mass of prepared students needed to create another functioning feeder pattern.  Then take the EoftheP neighborhoods along 16th Street from Colonial Village down to Dupont and feed them into a maximum of three elementary schools and feed those into the new MS/HS as well.  Right now---that corridor disperses the HIH into too many ES, none of which perform well (except perhaps for Shephard and Ross) beyond preK, K and the early grades---as the HIH parents peel off for charters, privates or west of the park OOB slots.  [/quote]

I actually think this is a reasonable idea.  How do you constitute it?  What makes it work?

If you just broke the feeder pattern at middle school would it work, e.g., no further feeder from out-of-boundary attendance at JKLM, etc., only geographic preference?

Or would you have to do something to limit access at PK4 or K for out-of-boundary students?

I say this assuming that you do some serious work on investing in these schools to make sure people are  interested in attending them.  
 
This is the left hand to the boundary commission right hand of this process - the Mayor can decide on the boundaries, but for them to work they need to program in some serious investment to entice people who are just knee-jerk avoiding their local school to stay.  It’s really going to be incumbent on the Mayor to fund these schools to make that work.

[/quote]

Right. Because it is all about funding. Not.  The issue with any middle school located east of the park is that the students are in wildly divergent places academically as they leave their elementary schools. Parents of children who are academically sound as they leave elementary school will not allow those kids to enter a middle school where a majority of kids are struggling academically: thus you have them individually finding schools with a majority of good students through OOB processes, charters or leaving the public system altogether.

The answer is not in funding, it is in finding a way to funnel these academically well-prepared students all to the same place so they are not outnumbered by students needing remedial work.

How?  That should be discussed. But honest discussion about this direction is considered taboo in this city.  We need leaders who are not afraid to tackle the enormous gap in academic preparation in areas of this city outside upper NW head on rather than hiding behind funding and programming.  Some students are simply better prepared academically and some are dismally left behind. These two groups may need different things from a school program and we should not shy away from that fact any longer.[/quote]

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