Reply to Stuart Hobson Middle School?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Not the PP you responded to here.

I'd agree with you if Brent, Maury and SWS were feeding into SH.  Fact is, the two or three strongest, most upper middle class, most white, and most in-boundary Hill DCPS elementary schools don't lead to SH.  This means that SH will limp along fed by comparatively weaker JO Wilson, Ludlow Taylor and Watkins for a good decade.  Yes, many SWS parents live in-boundary for SH, which will help the school pick up, but not a lot and not rapidly.

[b]Wish things were different[/b]. Calling PPs who've been around long enough to have a good feel for what I just described can't advance your magical thinking about Hobson.

[/quote]
Not OPP - Long time resident here and I don't think you really do.  There's a strain of commentators here that seems to live for dumping on the evil "Cluster".

I get a different vibe.  Yes there are public school parents who are either pro-charter or aren't ideologically opposed to charters and will pursue that option, but I talk to others who will not consider any charter school on principle.  There's also a scarcity of decent MS charter options for the non-ideological who would consider either charters or DCPS.  Even for our advanced student BASIS is a bridge too far, probably as much as SH is to some PPs above.

There are plenty of white parents who don't judge schools based on some acceptable level of whiteness, even those with kids currently enrolled in overly white schools.  It's actually a weakness in the Hill ES landscape.  DCPS is 20% Hispanic in 2017 and there are Hill schools with virtually no Latino (or ELL) students despite having the only two citywide enrollment ES options in DCPS.  All of the Hill schools would benefit from greater real diversity and not just whiting out from lower ES grades upward.[/quote]

You're misreading the vibe.  Hill parents dearly want high-performing, diverse neighborhood middle schools, however they're packaged, but DC has staunchly refused to work with them to create any for the last quarter century.

Boston and San Fran boldly dumped neighborhood elementary schools in the 70s.  DC didn't.  If the whiteness of the Hill ES landscape is a "weakness," it's also a function of DC Home Rule-based policy decisions coming out of the 70s, decisions made by AA city leaders (with few exceptions).  I'm not thrilled that my bilingual kids' DCPS has so few ELL students (1%) that money for an ELL coordinator was diverted to support other support staff long ago.  But I accept that the real estate market is calling the demographic shots at the school because that's what hard-won Home Rule has brought DC.  I bought a home for my strong in-bound DCPS, like hundreds of other parents, and don't come her to slam "overly white schools" resulting from real estate transactions guided by both market forces and policy decisions made by democratically-elected DC City Council Members and their mayors. [/quote]

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