Reply to Public/Charter School Lottery Experience

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

Would you mind telling me about your lottery experience and why you chose not to send your child(ren) to your IB school? TIA[/quote]

For us -- very few parents I have met in our neighborhood send their kids to our neighborhood school. That is in part, I think, because there are multiple Tier One charter schools (and even more lower tier charter schools) near us. Also, what used to be our neighborhood school closed and now half the neighborhood is zoned for an elementary to the south of us and half to the northeast. Either one would be a long walk with a preschooler (I'd probably try to bike or just drive). We visited our inbound school and it looked fine, but their sell seemed like, "We're a nice neighborhood school focusing on preparing our kids for the future." Fine, but if we can't walk there, why not drive an extra 5-10 minutes and get to a school that has dual language, or is Tier One, or has something else that sounds so special? Also, I don't think test scores are everything, the fact that over 75% of kids tested didn't even "meet expectations" on the standardized tests was not a selling point. Now, I'd overlook these scores if the school had a really compelling approach or mission; say, if their sell was -- "We don't teach to the test and spend time reading Shakespeare instead." Or, "part of our mission is to serve children with special needs, who don't do well on the standardized tests, but here's how we can show you these kids are making progress." If the school's "sell" is that they are teaching kids the basics, but the scores indicate that most of the kids at the school don't know the basics, well, that's not really encouraging to a prospective parent. If we didn't get in anywhere else, yes, I would have sent my kids to our neighborhood school for preschool and taken it year by year. But we did the lottery and got into charters that sounded better, so we went there. [/quote]

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