Reply to Why are certain charters on the top of everyone's lists? What is the magic that makes them so loved?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Congratulations to you.

My point is that when all the kids like you go to charters, the disadvantaged kids that are left behind in DCPS are left with an even worse alternative in DCPS. Charters leavie the schools with a worse cohort of kids.  We then blame all their problems on DCPS and on the kids themselves.

So we should be honest about this impact and try to mitigate it - or just shut down DCPS and go to charters.

I don't know why that offends you so much. [/quote]

Please, just stop with the "congratulations to you" because the way you keep putting it offends me in a condescending way, it reads as though you think you are congratulating a person of privilege, a trust fund baby who inherited millions without lifting a finger.  You never walked a mile in my shoes, you have no idea of the disadvantages I had, what I went through and the sacrifices I made in life to get to where I am.

Of course the answer is to mitigate the problems, but your attacking and criticizing charters based on the choices and motivation of those who attend them certainly isn't the answer - and neither is characterizing DCPS as an unacceptable option to be shut down.  DCPS schools need to continue to be robustly supported as neighborhood schools and general education.  But - disadvantaged children and families also need the wraparound education to teach them the life skills and provide the coaching to help them toward becoming more self-sufficient in their future life prospects.  But at the same time you also need to recognize the function and purpose of charter schools, which is *NOT* general-education neighborhood schools, it's targeted as a.) specialized education and b.) NOT as being a neighborhood school, such as language immersion, liberal arts or college prep, or to cover other more narrow focus areas.  There is complementarity to having both charters and DCPS schools, and there are lessons to be learned from where we are at.  But the problem is, most people don't seem to understand it on either side, whether the charter critics who think charters are competing with "general education" or the charter applicants who might apply at a charter because it's supposed to be "good" per the "HRC" discussions in places like DCUM but without really understanding that what's "good" for person A might not be good for person B, and that not every charter is the perfect fit for every student - nor is that even the aim of charters.

If the issue is that DCPS is left with a "worse cohort of kids" then the question that should be at the fore is, identifying what is worse and what to do about it.  If it's core academics, like reading and math skills, then DCPS should focus on bolstering those, with math and reading labs, for example they could run after-school or summer programs focusing on those areas.  If the issues are behavioral and disciplinary, then they should be focusing on wraparound services and supports to help deal with those.  It's basically filling in the gaps which higher-SES families fill in at home.  DCPS spends more per student than any district in the nation - it's not as though they don't have the resources.  But as we saw in the "at risk funding" thread, how DCPS chooses to direct said resources is far more the problem.

The point is, with DCPS you can't just pretend everything's hunky dory with how they do things and just point all the blame externally, blaming charters, et cetera - you need to focus on and work with the students you have first and foremost, not the students you wish you had.  And by doing that, the students you have will become the students you wish you had.  If DCPS bolstered up in those areas, you might actually start to see a lot of families who had been avoiding DCPS starting to return, because in many cases they are avoiding DCPS because of rowdy classrooms where kids are talking, disrupting, aren't paying attention and aren't learning, where teachers have to progress at a painfully slow and limited pace, because the critical mass of kids don't have those core skills that would have been reinforced at home in the higher-SES households.[/quote]

PP here.  I legitimately meant it when I said congratulations.  I don't know your story, but it sounds like you did not let hard times stop you.   If it came off as condescending, I apologize.

My only point was that the fact that you overcame hard times does not mean that we should assume all can do so without lots of help.   I will point out that noting the problems caused by charters is not the same as assuming everything is hunky dory with DCPS.  It's not.   I agree with you about almost everything you said about DCPS, and I suspect if we got in the same room together we'd find a lot more to agree about.[/quote]

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