Reply to Help me Edit: Response to Brookings Report

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[quote=Anonymous]In our long experience on Capitol Hill in DCPS schools, the absolute best tool urban elementary schools can be given to promote integration, at least after white parents have been drawn in by free preschool and preK, is the provision of more qualified adult hands on deck in classrooms than the school system provides.

For example, Maury, Brent and Ludlow-Taylor have attracted and retained droves of in-boundary families in the last decade in large part by dramatically improving standard DCPS teacher:student ratios.  This is done with  classroom aides (often grad students in education) and/or "floater teachers" supported by PTA dollars.

Under the "floater teacher" model, one highly experienced teacher per grade is not assigned a class. Instead, s/he who moves from classroom to classroom for that grade providing extra help for struggling students, and extra challenge for advanced learners.  Without floater teachers at our school, we'd have bailed several years ago.  From our point of view, and that of many other UMC parents in our school community, the low SES/high SES achievement gap in the classroom would have been too wide for one teacher to effectively differentiate instruction, at least by the upper grades.

Classroom aides and floater teachers are the critical carrots DCPS schools need to retain sizeable white cohorts in majority-minority elementary schools, after free ECE has drawn in this demographic. However, retention of white families into the upper grades only happens when PTAs fund the extra help.  Rotten, short-sighted system making replication very difficult and slow.

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