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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DCPS won’t change until people are willing to make policy decisions without the fear of being called “racist.”

Example 1: “Gifted” programs would keep middle and upper income families in neighborhood schools, improving academic outcomes (and providing low income academically advanced children a better education).

Example 2: Feeder patterns that concentrate higher performing elementary schools to improve middle and high schools. Feed all the hill middle schools into one school … magically you have a second Deal. Bet you would get a second Wilson out of that too.

But we can’t do either of those things, because it’s “racist.”

[/quote]

Regarding the suggestion to feed all Hill elementariness into one HS, I think there are other obstacles as well. [b]Currently they feed to three schools and to create a single MS, you'd need a huge building. You need at least two MSs there for space reasons.[/b]

Also, while I agree that there is some dogma involved that prevents pushing for more opportunities for high achieving kids on the Hill, I also think you have conflicting goals of a lot of parents in the neighborhood. Even among parents of high achieving kids, you also have this attachment to neighborhood schools and walkability, and when you look at how far apart Jefferson and Eliot-Hine currently are, you can see that a lot of families on the Hill would have to sacrifice walkable school commutes to make this happen. among the UMC families I know who are choosing to attend their IB MS on the Hill, a major selling point is keeping the walkable commutes they've had in elementary which really become part of the culture of the neighborhood, and also help a lot when you have kids in elementary and MS. I think this is one of the reasons that the school where you are seeing the most buy in from IB families presently is Stuart-Hobson -- it's very close to the feeder elementary that also has the most IB buy in in the zone (L-T) and also very close to JOW (still not a ton of IB buy in but improving and likely to make a big jump when they open their new campus in 2026), and that's appealing for families who have gotten used to short walking and biking commutes for the last 6 or 7 years.

Likewise one reason Jefferson has struggled so much with getting buy in is that the feeder with the most IB buy in, Brent, is also the least convenient to that MS campus. But buy in at Amidon-Bowen is improving and that has helped -- families see the benefit of a nearby school and want to keep the vibes going.

I don't think your premise is totally wrong -- I absolutely think the resistance to tracking and better opportunities for higher achieving kids is due to a misguided belief that supporting academic achievers is racist. But specifically regarding the idea of a unified Hill middle school, the resistance may once have been due to misguided equity beliefs, but I don't think it is anymore. As all three Hill MSs have increased their IB buy in, and as the Hill builds off the success of schools like Brent, Maury, and L-T with success at Payne, Chisolm, JOW, and Amidon-Bowen, I think you will continue to see increased buy in at all three MSs. Which might actually lead to a better trajectory than Deal, which has constant issues with overcrowding, if the result is three strong MSs instead of just one.[/quote]

And this is where "that's racist" will come out.  First objection is "too many schools, so we won't have a big enough building."  Ok.... feed only the schools that are actually on the Hill into one middle/high school: Watkins, Brent, Maury, LT, Payne.  The middle and high school will be excellent, immediately.

Why won't that fly?  It's "racist." [/quote]

It won't fly because five schools is still too many. When you create an "excellent" middle school with an "excellent" high school, the IB capture rate will go way up.

If you think people will be fine with being kicked out of an excellent feeder pattern and reassigned to much worse one, think again. They will oppose this very hard and it won't go through.[/quote]

It's also geographically nonsensical. If those 5 schools feed into one middle school, are you suggesting that all the schools on the fringes of Ward 6 feed into the same school? So JOW, Miner, Chisolm, Van Ness, and Amidon-Bowen would all go to the same middle school? That makes zero sense.  JOW is literally 3 blocks from L-T. Miner is only a little further from Maury. Chisolm and Payne are pretty close as well. Meanwhile Van Ness and Amidon Bowen are way closer to Brent than to any of the other schools they'd be grouped with.

[b]People would call that racist because it literally would be racist. You just cherry-picked the 5 whitest schools and ignored geography[/b] in order to group them together. Also Chisolm is actually much more desirable than Watkins at this point but it has a large Hispanic population because of the immersion program. So you can't even argue that you picked the best schools. Just the whitest ones. Good work.[/quote]

Exhibit A of the race card problem.

Like it or not, the Hill is an actual neighborhood, and the schools listed are the zones that are actually in that neighborhood.  DCPS gerrymandered SH, EH and Jefferson precisely to avoid having too many white kids in one school.  Those school feeder patterns were not chosen because it makes the most geographic sense or because it was the smartest educational play.

JO isn't on the hill, and most of the boundary is nowhere near the Hill. Van Ness boundary - not on the Hill. Amidon Bowen boundary - not on the Hill.

But it doesn't matter, because the race issue will never be overcome in DC.  So we'll just keep having three mediocre, at best, middle schools, and a shit high school. [/quote]

Don't think that the middle school boundaries as a whole have been gerrymandered/drawn for specific purposes you suggest. For years, the only DCPS schools on/near the hill that had much diversity was the Cluster School. That 100% was gerrymandered, and IMO should be redrawn, but people are very attached to the roots of when the Cluster was formed. At the time, it did do a decent job at integrating schools, but as charter schools have come onto the scene and the DCPS enrollment across the entire hill has started to rebound, now it is just a long and skinny boundary with many kids who do stay in DCPS peeling off to attend other closer schools instead of travelling across the hill for various schools in the cluster.

If you look at a map, the DCPS middle schools are strategically located so nobody has to travel miles to get to school. And until the mid 2000s there was Hine by Eastern Market as well. I was far away from having kids in school at the time so I don't remember what schools fed into that, but when it closed it left EH and Jefferson on the edges of the broader neighborhood causing some kids to have to travel a bit further. During Michelle Rhee's time and the years of crazy charter openings, many other former DCPS schools closed and/or were re-opened as charters. The only other nearby DCPS middle schools are part of K-8 education campuses (Wheatley and Browne). Two Rivers Young used to be a DCPS high school, and KIPP in Trinidad used to be Webb Elementary School.

All that to say, I do not think there is some master plan to gerrymander all public schools. It is a matter of distance, enrollment (both of the feeder schools, and capacity of the middle schools) - which is also hard to plan for when enrollment changes can vary so much within a 10 year span. [/quote]

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