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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]you can make a school look better if you add 50 high-SES students to 150 low-SES students, but that doesn't make it automatically a better school for the 150 low-SES students who were already there.[/quote]

Common sense says otherwise. Involve dozens of pesky upper middle-class parents in a school community and good quickly comes of the leadership roles they play there.  [b]Well-heeled parents waste no time setting about raising money, identifying and objecting to questionable practices by admins and teachers and pushing to oust the lowest adult performers, organizing school events, creating and sitting on hiring panels, lobbying DCPS for inputs, writing external grant proposals and forming partnerships with supporting organizations, asking for at and above grade-level courses etc. etc. [/b] Hence, the school becomes better overall, like Brent has in the last decade. It's worth prioritizing attracting as many well-educated families as possible to a school serving poor kids, period. Just look at studies of the college track records of KIPP graduates versus those of high-performing low SES kids who attended socioeconomically diverse schools all the way up.  The KIPP graduates drop out of college at roughly triple the rate of low SES kids who attended high schools that were overwhelmingly high SES.  Isolating poor minority kids in economically segregated schools in the name of "fairness" (e.g. not permitting test-in school-within-a-school middle school programs) is a really bad idea.  http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2011/06/kipps-underwhelming-college-completion.html

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How many upper middle-class parents do you need in a school community to make all of the bolded take place?  I am an upper middle-class parent, and I don't do any of the above, other than donate money.  I know a small number of parents who do the above, but most I know do not.[/quote]

+1 the pp describes more accurately the kind of parent activity at elementary schools, which often have students attending for 7 years, give or take. Middle school is a fast three years and the last one is spent looking or and applying to high schools, unless you have a good feed, which Jefferson does not.[/quote]

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