Reply to City Plan to Diversity and Fill Selective High Schools Not Controversial like NYC's

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Reply to "City Plan to Diversity and Fill Selective High Schools Not Controversial like NYC's"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why do so many people act like DC schools are improving. It seems like smoke and mirrors to me. DC is constantly lowering the standards and then acting like kids are doing better. They have not been able to move the needle on regular high schools or middle schools. In fact, my sense is that Wilson is slightly worse than a few years ago. It certainly is not improving.[/quote]

[b]Well you have to move the needle on ES first, and it has been.[/b]

The most consistent measure, that is respected is the NAEP which measures 4th and 8th grade. DC is one of the few jurisdictions across the country whose scores are improving. Our scores are below the national average, but not stagnating or falling like Virginia and Maryland.

From the Post in Oct 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-is-a-bright-spot-in-the-nations-overall-lackluster-standardized-test-results/2019/10/29/0c386ea2-fa51-11e9-8190-6be4deb56e01_story.html

... “There is clearly something good happening in D.C. when it comes to eighth-grade scores,” said Matthew Chingos, vice president of education data and policy at the Urban Institute .

The increase was driven largely by the performance of Hispanic students, who scored an average of 250 points on the exam, an eight-point increase since 2017. Black eighth-grade students had a one-point increase to 241 on the reading exam, and white students registered a one-point decline to 299.

Even so, a significant achievement gap persists between white students in the District and their Hispanic and black peers, although the gaps narrowed on this year’s test.

Overall, black, Hispanic and white students made gains on the test, and Kang said the city’s overall growth on the test cannot be attributed to demographic shifts in the city. ..."[/quote]

No, you don't necessarily have to move the ES needle first.  You have to retain your strongest students system-wide, rather than losing most of them to the burbs, privates and UMC-friendly charters like Latin and BASIS.

If you doubt this, look at what MoCo did with Blair Montgomery HS, in Silver Spring, in the 80s.  Rather than spending a decade or two "moving the needle no ES first" to raise HS standards, the county created two kick-ass test-in HS programs with a county-wide draw, one for humanities, the other for STEM.  The new programs were housed them in a struggling overwhelmingly low SES minority HS.  After just a few years, affluent parents living on the western side of the county (Bethesda, Rockville area) had started beating down the door to send their teens to Blair.  The influx of high SES students dramatically revitalized the whole school - leadership, facility, programming. The same could happen in DC at a failing HS like Eastern if the MS bridge wasn't being lost.[/quote]

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