Reply to Boundary Review December town halls

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm firmly of the belief that the boundaries just need to be reset. Bowser will never do it. Doesn't have the guts. But it's just pulling off a bandaid. So the whiners send their kids to St. Albans. Those who are in these schools who aren't multigenerational poor will demand more from them and they will change quickly. Some people don't remember that Deal was this thing that people shunned not that long ago. And now it's got every program you can think of and is massively overfilled.

The right thing in my opinion is to make MacFarland the default MS for every student between Cardozo and Takoma west of Brookland, get rid of feeder rights to middle school, make Oyster-Adams' middle school another elementary and end dual language at Oyster, where no concentration of Spanish speakers live (yes, yes, World Bank blah blah blah, those people don't live inordinately near Oyster) add dual language at Brightwood and Dorothy Height, etc.

But it's NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. Good policy is subject to you all here, and DCUM says no, so Bowser obeys. The end.[/quote]

Agreed.

And Hardy was also shunned - just 5 years ago.

They need to rip the bandage off and start over.

There is still a political price to be paid for all of this tinkering around the edges too - people are pissed and political capital is being spent and they aren't even solving the problem.

But here is the real political problem - in order to wholesale re-do the boundaries you need to take on two very powerful lobbies in DC - the charter school lobby and the real estate lobby both of whom benefit enormously from the current clusterfu(k of DCPS boundaries.[/quote]

How do the boundaries impact the charter school lobby? Why should they care? [/quote]

Because a lot of their students are middle class white kids from gentrifying neighborhoods whose parents don't have the courage to actually have their kids attend school in their own neighborhood - if you the MS/HS problem in Ward 4 they lose a lot of their customers.[/quote]

NP and courage is an odd choice to describe this.  We are a middle class family in Ward 4 who sends their kids to our neighborhood school.  But would I send my kids to the zoned HS? Nope.  But courage has nothing to do with it- it’s a terrible high school.  It’s not brave to send your kid to a school that won’t educate them.[/quote]

Again there is a ton of data on this - the SES make-up of the student body is the single biggest indicator of how good a school will be.  If all of the middle class families in Ward 4 suddenly had their kids attending say Wells and Coolidge rather than charters or Deal/J-R the school would immediately improve dramatically.

There is lots of evidence of this including locally - the exact same thing happened at Hardy which no one wanted to attend until suddenly Eaton was moved there and the school and its test scores improved immediately.

What is so bizarre about this to me as the parent of 2 J-R students is that J-R is not a great school at all.  There are a lot of great teachers and students/families but it is not a rigorous school academically at all - both of my kids had more homework at Deal than they had at J-R.

My oldest is a sophomore in college and he and a lot of his friends (mostly male) were not prepared at all for the rigors of college - I think it was a shock that they were actually expected to read books for their classes.

And the facilities and behavior issues at J-R continue to be real problems.

All of which again begs the question about how much do these parents really even know about the neighborhood schools they refuse to send their kids to or the schools they oddly think are so much better.[/quote]

The Maury situation shows what the DME office really thinks of middle class families who actually do this and how it can be yanked away any time. Private, charters or moving are the choices. WFH will allow my family to move once 9th grade is approaching.[/quote]

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