Reply to Revised Boundary Recommendations to be released on or about June 13

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]This is a glaring example of how in Dysfunctional City one hand doesn't know (or doesn't care) what the other is doing. At the same time that DCPS/DME are proposing to put more students into cars at the price of walkabililty, DC's planning office and DDOT for several years have aggressively pushed the opposite policies. These include trying to eliminate or reduce off-street parking requirements for new development, to discourage car use, reducing lanes on major avenues in favor of bike lanes, etc. Future plans include congestion road pricing. You would think that the Office of the Mayor (of which DME is a part) would be coordinating major policy initiatives, but no.[/quote]

What if choice sets wouldn't work in your cluster, but were extremely beneficial in another?

As I posted in 9:38 above,  the SWS discussion has a lot of people claiming that they want that proximity preference which they don't have.  They may have a right to attend Ludlow-Taylor, which is very close-by, but some don't want it.  Wouldn't it be better to give these families prefernce for another geographically-close school then drive them off to a charter in another part of the city?

Even the fear that everyone would choose SWS over Ludlow-Taylor is tempered by the fact that the specialized programming at SWS is not for everyone.

My own neighborhood school is dual language.  But what if I preferred traditional learning offered at another school that's also close by?  Maybe I'd like to have a choice between the two.  And maybe that geographicaly-convenient choice is better than a charter or OOB school that puts me and the kid in a car every day.[/quote]

You're ignoring the earlier poster's point about a disfunctional city administration:  one agency promotes a high-traffic policy, while another seeks to restrict traffic.  But hey, nothing new; we've all chosen to live here.

To your point about a lottery school in the same proximity as a somewhat desirable "neighborhood school":  why wouldn't the obvious solution be to give a proximity preference to the lottery school?  DCPS would have to come up with some kind of metric for what constitutes "proximity," but that would seem a less sticky solution than getting this "choice sets" business started.

I mean, I don't like the idea of "proximity preference" for a lottery school, either (I'm sure Walls and Banneker wouldn't care for it, for example), but once DCPS got started with the whole "choice" thing within DCPS (outside of charters, that is), it's too much to expect for them to admit initiating foolish policy in the first place.

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I haven't ignored anything.  To the contrary, I provided an example for how the choice sets policy could work to keep families at a school closer to their home.  If I live in the neighborhood of Ludlow-Taylor, but I prefer the SWS Reggio Emelia program that's just a couple blocks away, the choice set scenario gives me a better shot at getting into that school.  AND it keeps me closer to home.

It's not something that would work for the JKLM/Hearst/Eaton situation, but it could actually be beneficial for other areas of the city.

I'm one who thinks a city-wide school with specialized programming should give equal access to everyone.  But we have charters for that. Parents who are willing to drive their kids across town for a particular school should not have that access diminished by neighborhood preference.   But if it's a DCPS school and DC wants to encourage neighborhood attendance, then it makes sense to give families geographical preference.  As I see it, that's the objective of choice sets.

And I'll point out that the DME has not "pushed" anything as of yet.  The policy examples A-C have not yet reached the stage of policy, proposal or even recommendation.  They're just examples of policy that [i]could[/i] meet the objective of giving families more choices than they currently have, with preference for choices that are close to where they live.

That would be in line with policy that seeks to limit commuter patterns.[/quote]

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