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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Sadly all decent middle school options at extremely hard to get into. This shouldn’t be the case. It’s very frustrating. You’re literally competing for a handful of spots.[/quote]

I think what's frustrating is that you are not "competing" for those spots. It's luck and money, at least for the public school spots (for private, it's money, luck, and for a small number of schools, merit).[b] Either you can afford to buy in-bound for Deal and Hardy or you can't. If you can't, maybe you get lucky with a lottery spot at a feeder, or a lottery spot at BASIS or Latin. For DCI, you really need to nab a lottery spot at a feeder in ECE, [/b]both because spots later in elementary can be hard to come by and because moving a kid to an immersion school in mid to late elementary, if they aren't already at an immersion school, is far from ideal.

So basically you either win the PK3 lottery or you win the 5th grade lottery or you have enough money to buy your way into one of the two DCPS middles that are actually good. Or you move or you pay for private. Literally none of this has anything to do with competing, you cannot prepare yourself or your kid for any of that, there's no way to earn your way into a good program with effort or skill. Which sucks because some kids really are hard working and academically inclined, love learning and want to learn more in an environment where other kids also want to learn. And the system does not care. Not even a little. Put your name in the drawing and see what happens, kid. Sorry your parents aren't rich. Good luck.[/quote]

These are paths but there is another one, which is to make do at a mediocre-but-not-awful middle school (this is Francis, SH, EH, Jefferson, ITDS) and then get into an application high school. I've been here for 20 years and I know MANY kids in this category, some of whom have now gone on to good colleges.

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Sorry but schools above (SH, EH, Jefferson) are not mediocre.  They are poorly performing.  Look at the other thread.  They don’t even offer geometry.  There is no tracking in other classes and you are with kids 3, 4 grades apart.  Kids are falling behind their peers even with families using tutors.

Things have changed at the high school.  Walls is a crap shot now and you can’t rely on it if you have a top performing kids.  So many kids who should get in did not.  Like PP above says, you have absolutely no control. 
[/quote]

Jefferson and EH both offer Geometry to students whose data indicates that they are ready for it. Do those schools have a lot of kids behind grade level? Yes. Do those kids have a number of kids at or above grade level? Also yes. As a parent of one of those kids, it is exhausting having people on this board with no first-hand (or really even second-hand) experience at these schools make false claims like "this is a poorly performing school that doesn't even offer geometry". We love our kid's teachers, they pay a lot of attention to exactly what our child's strengths and opportunity for growth are, and they've been very clear with us that just because our child is one of the higher performers, they want to keep pushing and challenging them. The kids are placed in cohorts, and because they are providing accelerated math and also intensive remedial classes, that means that for other non-tracked classes, kids actually tend to be in classes with kids of more similar ability levels to them. And we know many kids who've graduated from the school and have gone on to be successful at select high schools. So no, kids who coming as high performers as not falling massively behind and/or relying heavily on tutoring. [/quote]

So the school does not actually have a geometry class with a good cohort of students in it.

I don’t see how you can say there is a number of kids above grade level.  The data is there for both EH and Jefferson.  2% and 1% kids above grade level in math.  That is like 1-2 kids per grade.

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Well, I met some Stuart-Hobson kids at a Walls open house and they said they are currently in Geometry. I guess we'll see when the next round of testing data comes out.

You need to review the middle school math spreadsheet on the OSSE website to have an informed opinion about this. If an 8th grader is taking Geometry and scores a 4, that's "grade level" in the totals but that student is clearly working above grade level, no?[/quote]

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