Reply to When will Hardy Middle School be as attractive as Deal Middle School?

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Reply to "When will Hardy Middle School be as attractive as Deal Middle School?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I can't comment on Hardy but Deal seems to be past the tipping point. It's like survival of the fittest to find a seat at lunch because the cafeteria now has to hold hundreds more students than it was planned for.  [b]Some classes are well past 30 students in size.[/b]  The sports teams are either so competitive to get a spot that many talented kids are cut or the are so poorly organized that its just a frustrating experience.  Parents are actively discouraged from scheduling a conference with teachers on conference day because the teachers don't have the bandwidth to meet with all of the parents.  Many of the student computers are broken and have not been repaired or replaced.  Some of the teachers are good and the curriculum is moderately rigorous (a debatable issue) but the place is really showing the wear and tear of the overcrowding.  I don't believe Deal students today have the same experience students did 4-5 years ago.[/quote]

Hardy parent here. My 7th grader's science, honors math and honors English all have more than 30 students. Social Studies high 20s. Try understanding that when the school is actually underenrolled. Last week DC also had one substitute each day - same substitute, different subject. It was actually an improvement as there have been numerous days with no substitute coverage all so the kids were unsupervised until the gym teacher or an admin stepped in.

These are symptoms of poor management and a lack of leadership and it is time for everyone to thank the principal for getting the school to this point and find a new leader. Our ES has been  increasing its IB election to Hardy the last several years, and it looks like a big drop-off for 6th grade[/quote]

The problem is that DCPS is highly resistant to segregation based on academic competence (colloquially known as "tracking"), combined with an almost singular infatuation with the concept of "equity" (in their world, "equity" means providing as much money as possible to low-income students).  So, the prospect of adding honors classes to create several class sizes of 16-or-so (in the first year of the added class(es) anyway) would be truly immoral to them.  Of course, most other school districts throughout the United States have "excellence" as one of many stated structural goals ("equity" as defined here being one strong goal as well), but you are just not going to find,in practice, academic excellence as a goal here.[/quote]

You must be new to DC.  Here, "equity," "inclusion" and diversity will always come before academic excellence and overall rigor.[/quote]

Actually, it took me several years of observation for me to figure this out.  These are value-embedded words that mean different things to different citizens.  The words are associated with positive value, but because they are subject to interpretation, they "should" not be used in conjunction with the agency's policy or its structural goals.  Yet, DCPS (and numerous nonprofit political activist groups) use them to accomplish specific goals.  The arguments used by DCPS to support its programmatic decisions really confused me until I realized that they (perhaps intentionally?) use these words with subjective meaning, without explaining exactly what they are doing with them.  It is a mistake to impute too much incompetence to DCPS once you realize that there is an ideological agenda embedded in what they are doing as a government agency.[/quote]

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