Reply to 21,000 new students in DCPS/charters by 2026?

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Reply to "21,000 new students in DCPS/charters by 2026?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The stumbling block is a viable high school. Middle school goes by in an instant. Why go an iffy one if the high school that follows is awful?

DCPS’ application schools are both gems and a problem, siphoning off a thousand or more students combined.  [/quote]

But there is plenty of space at EOTP high schools - Coolidge, Roosevelt and Cardozo all have plenty of seats.  You just need a critical mass of students to move to those schools all at once and the place to get them is from a high performing neighborhood based middle school (or two).

From what I understand lots of EOTP parents are basically happy with the neighborhood ES options - it is middle school when things go off the rails.  So you need a way to bridge the gap to get to those empty high schools.

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I don't disagree with the principle - there is space and the children will have to go somewhere and there are not enough charter, application, and OOB seats for the number of students. The issue remains that the middle and high school options EOTP are not attractive to a lot of families. I used to work in with middle schoolers in Ward 4 and none of their parents were particularly enthusiastic about the high school options either, so it's not just an "upper middle class but not wealthy enough to buy into the Wilson feeder area" issue.

My observation was that [b]in a class of 25 kids, the 10 that were actively invested in learning were completely derailed if not actively antagonized by the 5-10 who were actively invested in disrupting class and that the other 5-10 kids in the room often fell somewhere between those extremes.[/b] In my middle and high school experience, in a class of 25, there were usually 15 people who were actually focused and 10 who didn't really care. We didn't have kids starting fights in classrooms with other students or with teachers. We didn't have kids just getting up and walking out. We didn't have kids skipping class to roam the hallways. It wasn't even a particularly good school district. The behavioral problems just were not as serious as I observed them to be here. There is a culture of apathy toward education that starts somewhere in late elementary, and until DCPS figures out how to keep kids engaged in learning after that time, the problems are going to persist.

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Thanks.
Hey, PP out there who just posted that application and charter HS hurt the traditional DCPS? Shut up. You can't have kids invested in learning and kids invested in disrupting in the same classroom. If you don't separate them, those invested in learning will go learn elsewhere and the school failure cannot be blamed on the refugee school where the invested learners landed.[/quote]

PP here. I don't think it's the application and charter high schools that are hurting the traditional DCPS. I do think that with other options, parents (and students) are more likely to exercise those options. I know my students were. The kids I knew all wanted to go to Paul. Some of them wanted to go to Capital City. A few wanted to go to Bell. None of them wanted to go to Cardozo and even though it was right up the way, I don't think I heard even one student mention Coolidge.

I think that the problem is bigger than schools can tackle, though, and I think that schools themselves do not always help the kids to feel engaged. I know a lot of really great teachers, but I also know a fair few who are not so great. I love working with middle schoolers, but they are very sensitive to criticism and prone to giving up. There are teachers who are able to work with that age group and then there are others who are less good at it. DCPS itself does not always send the best people, to coin a phrase.[/quote]

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