Reply to Will Van Ness Elementary School be on the same level as Brent/Maury in 3 years?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Van Ness Elementary School near the Navy Yard is slated to open for the 2015 - 2016 school year.  With all the new development (Whole Foods, Harris Teeter, etc) and housing springing up every year, how likely will Van Ness become a high performing, high demand elementary school like Brent & Maury?  My take on this is that it will open with limited grades (PS3, PK4, K), and and a grade every year until it becomes a full fledged elementary school.  I think this will allow the school to grow just as the community is growing, and that it will most likely being just as good (or even better) than Brent & Maury.[/quote]

If Watkins is a barometer, you will be waiting a long, long, long time.  That's not meant to be a slight, but more of an observation that Watkins is in a far more developed area than Van Ness, is a well-established school, feeds to SH, and it still can't come close to filling itself with IB kids.

Two factors.  Development doesn't necessarily equal lots of young kids.  As others have noted, that area is more targeted toward young professionals than families.  You also have so many options.  Even if you had the potential to fill Van Ness with a critical mass a high SES kids, you will still lose a fair number to charters and privates.

I think you need to lower your expectations and hope that in 5 years it might be on par with Ludlow Taylor.  [/quote]

I predict the following for Van Ness Elementary:
The school will open only for PS3, PK4, K.  Doing this will allow the school to start off as a school with a majority of inbound kids from high SES familes (most of the the kids living in public housing are much older).  Every year, the school will add a grade and pretty much keep the demographics the same.  It will have a snowball effect.  Since a ton of new housing is planned, families from across the city will see Van Ness Elementary as a up and coming school, and they will also have lots of different new housing units to choose from.  By the time Van Ness Elementary is a full PS3 - 5 elementary school, it will be at least on the same level as what Brent is now.[/quote]

You predict or speculate?  Even if you are assuming only two classes per grade, you are going to need at least 60 IB high SES kids (20 per grade).  I'd be shocked if there are that many total living IB right now, but you really need 100+ to account for leakage to other options.  You can't just plop a school down next to a Wholefoods, throw open the doors, and call it Brent II.

As we are seeing with Eliot-Hine right now, parents are very reluctant to have their kids be the guinea pigs.  Brent did not just emerge fully formed.  Lots of people continue to forget that fact.  It wasn't that long ago when getting into Brent OOB was a reasonable proposition, and that was when the area around it was full on gentrified.

Van Ness needs to crawl, then walk, then trot, and then you can tell me about the marathons it will run.  [/quote]

The difference with Van Ness is that it will be essentially building a school from the ground up (new curriculum, new principal, new teachers, new school culture, etc), so you are much more likely to have a high rate of High SES in bound kids going to the school.  You are also going to have a high number of highly involved parents putting in the effort to make sure that it's an outstanding school[/quote]

As PP pointed out, Brent also has essentially been rebuilt since 2005.  Phase I modernization, new principal (Dr. Wilhoyt succeeded by Mr. Young), new teachers and staff, more rigorous curriculum, new ECE program, new school culture, concurrent with inducing an increasing number of high SES in bound kids going to the school, with a high number of highly involved parents putting in the effort to make sure that it's an outstanding school.  The difference between Brent and Van Ness, at least in the short term, may be the size of the IB population from which a critical mass of high SES students can be drawn.  Right now, there just don't seem to be that many families lwith school age children living in Capitol Quarter and nearby condos/apartments.  In Brent's case, it is a smaller school that was able to supplement a smallish IB population of elementary aged students with highly motivated families who were IB for other Capitol Hill/Ward 6 schools such as Watkins, Tyler, Ludlow-Taylor, Miner, Payne and Amidon.  Van Ness almost certainly will have a substantial citywide draw crossing racial and socioeconomic barriers from day one, which will have associated benefits and burdens, and could affect the ability of nearby schools such as Ludlow and Amidon to retain more high SES students.  As to the comment about a new curriculum, I wonder what the posters thinking now that we are living in the realm of CCSS?[/quote]

Brent parent here, and this analysis of Brent history is really off-putting.  The insinuation that Only OOB families from the Capitol Hill area are "motivated" and other aren't is wrong and judgemental ( if I am being kind ).  My child's classmates at Brent were overwhelming OOB from outside Capitol Hill and you are completely wrong about your analysis of the level of motivation or academic seriousness of those kids and their families.  If there was a problem, it was that the school let those kids down early in their education. For sure they and their families didn't let the school down. Check yourself and your assumptions[/quote]

Perhaps you should check your baggage and read my post more carefully.  i neither stated nor implied that OOB students not from Capitol Hill were somehow unmotivated or academically unserious.  My point, however inartfully phrased, was that socioeconomic factors, coupled with becoming a true neighborhood school, played a critical role in turning Brent around.  This is a fact, not an assumption.  Academic resuts results speak for themselves, as does the contrast in classroom and playground behavior in the last few years as compared to seven or eight years ago.  In any event, you can't have it both ways.  Any blame can't fall solely on "Brent."  Children who are academically serious and have motivated families should be able to overcome whatever shortcomings may exist at the school.  It happens in classrooms all around the world everyday. [/quote]

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