Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes. I am one of the current Hardy parents who has posted here and I have spoken to many of my Ward 3 colleagues about why they will or will not send their students to Hardy. Race - either directly stated or implied - is a huge issue.

Huh. Is this also an issue with them at Wilson?

Nor is it an issue at Deal which had a substantial AA population. The discussion about Hardy isn't about race at all, it's about academic quality. It's the old DC shuffle -- when people don't like the question, or don't like the answer, they try to invent a racial issue to inject and get everyone sideways. I call BS on this one.

If my IB child goes to Hardy in a year, I will refuse to send my child in a uniform. Others should do so as well. It is a public school.

If my IB child goes to Hardy in a year, I will refuse to send my child in a uniform. Others should do so as well. It is a public school.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes. I am one of the current Hardy parents who has posted here and I have spoken to many of my Ward 3 colleagues about why they will or will not send their students to Hardy. Race - either directly stated or implied - is a huge issue.

Huh. Is this also an issue with them at Wilson?

See previous answer....

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes. I am one of the current Hardy parents who has posted here and I have spoken to many of my Ward 3 colleagues about why they will or will not send their students to Hardy. Race - either directly stated or implied - is a huge issue.

odd -- whites are in the minority at Wilson and it doesn't seem to be an issue there.

It's really not all that complicated - there's a threshold - hard to define, but it exists - where if the population of white students falls below X, the school faces additional barriers to recruiting white students.

Wilson and Deal are above this threshold; the best example of a school below this threshold is Banneker, which has the best scores in the city yet can't attract a single white student most years. And Hardy is also below this threshold.

Hope that helps you understand this phenomenon. I assure you, it exists.

Anonymous wrote:Yes. I am one of the current Hardy parents who has posted here and I have spoken to many of my Ward 3 colleagues about why they will or will not send their students to Hardy. Race - either directly stated or implied - is a huge issue.

Huh. Is this also an issue with them at Wilson?

Anonymous wrote:Yes. I am one of the current Hardy parents who has posted here and I have spoken to many of my Ward 3 colleagues about why they will or will not send their students to Hardy. Race - either directly stated or implied - is a huge issue.

odd -- whites are in the minority at Wilson and it doesn't seem to be an issue there.

Yes. I am one of the current Hardy parents who has posted here and I have spoken to many of my Ward 3 colleagues about why they will or will not send their students to Hardy. Race - either directly stated or implied - is a huge issue.

There seems to be a lot of speculation here about what ward 3 parents think and feel. Anyone in this discussion actually from ward 3?

Anonymous wrote:Sooooo.....

Does anyone have a sense of how many IB are going to really be at Hardy?

No. How would anyone "really" know. There will be about 130 kids in each class. There are 5 elementary schools that feed into it. Who know what is happening in every single one of these schools? Only the principal and the registrar have the answer you're looking for. Looks like you'll have to wait for the numbers to be posted on the school page at the DCPS site.

Sooooo.....

Does anyone have a sense of how many IB are going to really be at Hardy?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Please, stop the fake racism meme. There's criticism of Hardy uniforms because public school kids don't wear uniforms unless they are too poor to purchase normal clothes; virtually NO public schools in the US require uniforms and Hardy is an extreme outlier in that regard.

Uniforms across the board are either worn by the extremely privileged in private schools or wanna-be imitators, or by the extremely poor. Hardy kids are neither. Nuff said.

I said it before, I'll say it again: if your reaction to a predominantly middle-class, AA student body wearing uniforms is "this is a group of thugs that is forced to wear these uniforms so they can be controlled" then the problem is you, not the uniforms. Please take some time to carefully consider the implications of your views.

Wow. DC is not Missouri. We desire integration/diversity here; whereas your interpretation of a benign issue like school uniforms (!,?) is coming from a different place/p.o.v. entirely.

I think you are proving the point. Thanks goodness, we are not Ferguson; our police are not shooting unarmed children and as a general rule, our citizens do seek integration/diversity. And yet, for a large and influential part of our community, the fact that a group of African American students attend a school with a uniform policy is indicative of the fact that they are a group of thugs with whom it would be automatically unacceptable to attend school.

This is false, absurd and offensive. Deal has a very large African American population, and families in NW are clamoring (and paying handsomely through real estate) to go there. Can someone please explain what is it about Hardy that results in it serving only 13% of its in-bounds school age population?

Unrealistic fear and a bad recent history with Rhee that hasn't rubbed off yet.

It isn't the scores, which are 3 points higher in Math and 5 points lower in reading than Wilson's

I don't think you can ascribe it to "fear." There's a widespread perception among within the school's boundary area that Hardy hasn't got its act together yet and just doesn't offer the options that people expect in a middle school. It seems that the Hardy administration needs to do a searching assessment of the school, its teaching and its program offerings can figure out quickly why that is so. Don't blame it on Rhee. I know she was controversial, especially in the eastern parts of the city, but many in Ward 3 still revere her.

I doubt it, but that would be an interesting survey -- the percentage of ward 3 parents who still revere Rhee.

[quote=Anonymous]Hardy has uniforms because it has uniforms. There's always resistance to change even if it means going back to normal; especially when there's a perception that there's some kind of racial motive for "normal," as utterly ridiculous as it might seem to a nonbiased mind.[/quote]I have no problem if you enroll your kid and convince other parents to vote to dump the uniforms. What annoys me is the impression I get that your kid couldn't handle going to a school where he/she has to wear a uniform of the type that poor people wear. Really? Not the most important thing in a kid's education in my experience.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Hardy has uniforms because it has uniforms. There's always resistance to change even if it means going back to normal; especially when there's a perception that there's some kind of racial motive for "normal," as utterly ridiculous as it might seem to a nonbiased mind.

Ridiculous like building UDC a new campus at St. Elizabeth's was racially motivated.
Like building a new, purpose-build, centrally located performing high school would be racially motivated,
Like having rigorous test-in magnet schools would be racially motivated.
Like building bike paths is racially motivated.
Like rethinking Easter Monday at the zoo is racially motivated.
Like the proposed DC bottle deposit law is racially motivated!!!

Uh...whut? Someone is living on another planet if s/he thinks this list is at all relevant to what the thread was discussing.

I think it's to point out how absurd it is to so frequently ascribe a racial motive to things in DC. Like the continued belief in the existence of "The Plan" and all that bullshit.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Please, stop the fake racism meme. There's criticism of Hardy uniforms because public school kids don't wear uniforms unless they are too poor to purchase normal clothes; virtually NO public schools in the US require uniforms and Hardy is an extreme outlier in that regard.

Uniforms across the board are either worn by the extremely privileged in private schools or wanna-be imitators, or by the extremely poor. Hardy kids are neither. Nuff said.

I said it before, I'll say it again: if your reaction to a predominantly middle-class, AA student body wearing uniforms is "this is a group of thugs that is forced to wear these uniforms so they can be controlled" then the problem is you, not the uniforms. Please take some time to carefully consider the implications of your views.

Wow. DC is not Missouri. We desire integration/diversity here; whereas your interpretation of a benign issue like school uniforms (!,?) is coming from a different place/p.o.v. entirely.

I think you are proving the point. Thanks goodness, we are not Ferguson; our police are not shooting unarmed children and as a general rule, our citizens do seek integration/diversity. And yet, for a large and influential part of our community, the fact that a group of African American students attend a school with a uniform policy is indicative of the fact that they are a group of thugs with whom it would be automatically unacceptable to attend school.

This is false, absurd and offensive. Deal has a very large African American population, and families in NW are clamoring (and paying handsomely through real estate) to go there. Can someone please explain what is it about Hardy that results in it serving only 13% of its in-bounds school age population?

Unrealistic fear and a bad recent history with Rhee that hasn't rubbed off yet.

It isn't the scores, which are 3 points higher in Math and 5 points lower in reading than Wilson's

I don't think you can ascribe it to "fear." There's a widespread perception among within the school's boundary area that Hardy hasn't got its act together yet and just doesn't offer the options that people expect in a middle school. It seems that the Hardy administration needs to do a searching assessment of the school, its teaching and its program offerings can figure out quickly why that is so. Don't blame it on Rhee. I know she was controversial, especially in the eastern parts of the city, but many in Ward 3 still revere her.