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[quote=Anonymous]

Wow, in my city this policy was de facto but not de jure, and now it is being challenged, though I still know tons of families who use old/fake/grandma's address to get into a "preferred" elementary school. I'm surprised that D.C. will allow someone who lived in a kindergarten zone for one minute to remain through fifth grade, but I also understand that they are dealing with human psychology and they've decided that making allowances for would-be white-flighters keeps some middle class families in the system, at least for longer.

I've learned that "word of mouth" about good and bad schools is often based on hearsay and old/bad information. Visit the schools yourself. Get over the logical fallacy that a school can't be good if people you know have rejected it. They may have rejected it just because everyone else they know did too. It creates a vicious cycle of self-reinforcing segregation.

We were zoned out of a preferred school and into a non-preferred school. What was puzzling is that the new school had nearly identical scores and is fully accredited, but when all the (mainly white, mainly affluent) parents from my neighborhood visited the school, the principal had to keep saying "Yes we ARE accredited" like a broken record because that was the word on the street, and why would the school's actual principal know better than my neighbor who rejected the school 12 years ago? :roll:

If you are angling to get into a preferred school, please do your due diligence to see what's what with your actual zoned school. You may be surprised at all the good things that are going on there that aren't being reported to you. People who spend the money for private or go to the trouble to rent a property elsewhere just for kindergarten admittance are unlikely to be reliable narrators about the actual conditions of the local school. How do schools "get better" anyway? Because somebody connected to you took the time to check them out, enrolled their kid, and then reported back. I guarantee you the people who've been attending the school for a long time already knew it was a good school. (Case in point: during a rezoning meeting, a mom from our now-zoned school stood up and said, "I don't know why you keep saying it's not a good school; it IS a good school!" and parents from our original school booed her. BOOED her. In front of children. For saying a school that had nearly identical test scores, just a higher poverty rate and a much smaller white population, was a good school. I mean, when you think about it, wouldn't the test scores being only a couple of points lower yet with a much higher poverty rate means it's the SUPERIOR school?)  Don't be those booers who think a school is only good if their friends already go there. [/quote]

Well siad !! --said [/quote]

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