Reply to WotP elementary schools-- Attrition in older grades?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a general rule, I find that parents who graduated from Ivy League schools, as my spouse and I did, aren't half as hung up on dispatching their little kids to them as those who didn't, and not just because they're secure in the knowledge that legacy preferences await.  As an Ivy alum, you see college friends contending with the same sort of problems adults face everywhere - being unlucky in love, going bankrupt,  getting fired or passed over for promotions, struggling to afford college, getting cancer etc.  Somewhere along the way, you stop thinking in terms of an Ivy degree innoculating your children against life's hardships.  Moreover, you think of brilliant and highly motivated grad school classmates who went to little colleges you'd never heard of.  I'd be thrilled for my DCPS kids to get a great education anywhere there's one to be had.  
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Another ivy parent who seconds this.^

One important influence my ivy undergrad had on me was to really appreciate the importance of solid preparation. I went to a weak HS with little HW and had a rough time. Most of my peers whether from private or publics like New Trier or Wellesley high breezed through the first year. It was a mistake i am working to avoid with my kids and factored into our decision to pull the out from our wotp school at grade 4 because Hardy was the ms. We want them somewhere challenging enough to push them to develop good study habits.[/quote]

If you read the Hardy thread, its boosters would tell you it is comparable to Deal.[/quote]

We visited both schools and that is clearly not the case.[/quote]

Maybe in a decade.[/quote]

The two schools will never be the same. Hardy is a small school in the hearth of Georgetown. Deal is a huge school built in what was 30 years ago a suburb. No surprise the difference in volume and field space between the two schools. So the whole debate about the difference in the sports facilities is one of the most stupid ones I have ever read in DCUM. Of course Hardy's sport facilities are smaller than Deal, given that its school population is 1/3 of Deal's and given its location, which is in the hearth of one of the few historic districts of this country..

However when it comes to academic, the recent past of a paternalistic Principal (Pope) who had made of Hardy his personal reign , reflecting his personal views and aspirations, and attracting the students he liked (through a less than transparent application system) are over, as the more recent bad managerial moves by DCPS (two headed principal shared with Hyde...).

Hardy is now a solid school, with a solid managerial team and strong teacher body. Honor classes have been established and will be enhanced from 2014-2015. IB numbers are growing. Differential with Deal is mainly in demographics, [b]as the number of IB is growing but is still lower than Deal's (it will take no more than a couple of years though at the present rate)[/b]. This means that any same kid has the same chance of doing well or doing bad at Deal or Hardy. It really depends on who that kid is. On average , at the aggregate level, kids do better at Deal than at Hardy (as measured by DC CAS) because of the Deal families average higher SES status. As soon as the IB numbers will be aligned,  the DC CAS outcomes will be too.

Of course, you will still have the random idiot parent who will argue that Hardy has no baseball court and is thus an inferior school for her/his baseball champion kid.

[/quote]

With the low in-bounds Hardy enrollment from the Mann and Key school districts, it is fanciful in the extreme to predict that the rates of IB enrollment at Deal and Hardy will converge within two years.[/quote]

Are you a Deal parent trying to reassure yourself that your kid is in the better middle school?[/quote]

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