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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

It's a little frustrating that in order to attend DCI you must already win the charter lotteries for the feeder schools; it basically locks students out if they don't win early on. [b]Talk about the cycle of poverty....[/quote]
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You mean like Stokes, which is 69% free and reduced meal students?  Or DC Bilingual, which is 85%?

The other schools have a higher percentage of middle and higher income families, yes, but none of them are below 30% FARM.  There is this pernicious idea that these schools are somehow only for middle class families.  They may have a higher demand from middle class families than other schools, so their pool of lottery applicants is more heavily tilted in that direction.  But that doesn't mean they don't have major appeal for lower income families also. 
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Not true.  LAMB is well below 30%.  Yu Ying is below 20%.[/quote]

You are right, I wrote that without checking them all, it was an assumption.  Here are the free and reduced meals percentages (2012-13 school year):

DC Bilingual- 85.5% 339 students
Stokes- 68.7%  335 students
Mundo Verde- 33.3% 237 students
LAMB- 29.7% 273 students
Yu Ying- 16.6% 439 students

Those are from the PCSB Performance Reports from last fall, which captures data from the 2012-13 school year.  New reports will be out this fall for 2013-14.  Combining them all, the overall free and reduced meal percentage is:

46.77%

These charters may have a lower FARM rate than DC as a whole, but they seem to me to be among the only schools in the city which are truly able to mix lower income and high income families.  The vast majority of other schools in the city are vast majority poor, with a small slug up in Ward 3 that are vast majority middle and high income.  I don't understand why people think it's a bad thing to have schools which are achieving this kind of mix.
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Who thinks this is bad?!  BTW, it's not just DCI schools.  Look at: Cap City, CM, Haynes, IT, & Two Rivers.  [/quote]

No one said it was bad -- to the contrary they said they wanted in!  The problem is that it seems the only way to pull of this race/class mixing is to lock everyone out after low-odds lotteries in early ed (or at least, that's what I infer from the behavior of the schools themselves).  You can hardly be surprised that the very people you are working so hard to exclude don't support your school. [/quote]

What do you mean, the people we're working so hard to exclude? Nobody is locking outsiders out, with the exception of Yu Ying, I guess, because they don't take kids after first grade. Oh, and LAMB because of the Montessori. But you can lottery into Stokes, DCB and MV all the way up to 5th grade, and lottery into DCI all the way up to 9th grade.

The lack of coveted seats in DC isn't the fault of the coveted schools! In fact, MV just expanded and will again, YY has expanded a couple of times, and LAMB has, too. The ugly truth about the lottery is that siblings have a nearly complete lock on seats for the foreseeable future. Whether or not you can get into DCI, or even wish to, you should support the effort because at the very least it will take hundreds of kids out of the middle and high school lotteries. At best, it will be a model and inspiration for a similar DCPS program.[/quote]

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