Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some please explain this to me. How can the county 2 miles up the road and the other 5 miles down the road both which have tons more students get it right and DC can't? What's wrong? No need to reinvent the wheel. Just do what they do in MoCo. It's so damn frustrating.

Let's just say that in DC we have our own way of doing things. And the most important thing is that folks who work in local government "understand DC." There were a couple of mayors (Williams and Fenty) who hired people who wanted to do what they did in places like San Francisco, New York and Portland, but that's not the DC way. Now we have a city government again that understands DC!

That's not entirely true. The part of Williams is correct, but Fenty had some corruption issues, and arrogance issues, and was naive enough to think these would not come back to bite him. School reform was great, but the heavy-handed approach was not. Furthermore, he angered the charter constituency by trying to strangle it. Charter students are now more than 1/3 of public school students in DC and rapidly approaching 40%. That was just stupid.

Today, these places are known as Montgomery and Fairfax Counties, respectively.

And Marin County, and the Eastside near Seattle, and 325 places outside of the Los Angeles Unified School District ...

Anonymous wrote:Wouldn't the fairest system be one in which children enrolled in DCPS are randomly assigned to DC schools, so that schools throughout DC are pretty balance racially and economically? Plus it would create a strong incentive for more educated, affluent parents to advocate for more $$ for the less desirable schools, especially if their children were assigned there. No more "in bounds" or "out of bounds." Need to think more along lines of "One City" no longer "my ward" or "my neighborhood."

That was tried a few decades ago in every major city west of the Rockies. It was called "desegregation busing" and it had the effect of emptying the inner cities of the middle class. It turns out that parents who had their children in good schools didn't want to send them to bad schools in order to satisfy a social agenda. That's not to say the social agenda (racial balance) was in any way ignoble, but it was an easily predicted colossal failure. Those who could, fled to the suburbs and created school districts which the poor couldn't afford to buy into. Problem solved. Today, these places are known as Montgomery and Fairfax Counties, respectively.

"Wouldn't the fairest system be one in which children enrolled in DCPS are randomly assigned to DC schools, so that schools throughout DC are pretty balance racially and economically? Plus it would create a strong incentive for more educated, affluent parents to advocate for more $$ for the less desirable schools, especially if their children were assigned there. No more "in bounds" or "out of bounds." Need to think more along lines of "One City" no longer "my ward" or "my neighborhood.""

That's done in other big cities - Boston and San Francisco, for example - and it pretty much has backfired, doing nothing to fix the poorly performing schools. Basically, the affluent families who get in the good schools stay, and the ones that get into the poorly performance schools move to the suburbs or use privates.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some please explain this to me. How can the county 2 miles up the road and the other 5 miles down the road both which have tons more students get it right and DC can't? What's wrong? No need to reinvent the wheel. Just do what they do in MoCo. It's so damn frustrating.

Let's just say that in DC we have our own way of doing things. And the most important thing is that folks who work in local government "understand DC." There were a couple of mayors (Williams and Fenty) who hired people who wanted to do what they did in places like San Francisco, New York and Portland, but that's not the DC way. Now we have a city government again that understands DC!

Let's just say that when DCPS was developing its teacher evaluation plan, it never gave one look to the already successful plan that MoCo a few years ago.

Let's just say that DCPS instituted its failed K-8 plan by fiat, without consulting community groups.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If there are only a limited number of "good schools" the fairest way is that every student in DCPS gets the same chance at a slice of the pie -- until you expand the pie.

The problem is that good schools don't happen at random, as numerous posters in this thread have commented the biggest factor in school quality is the number of proficient students. Proficient students are more likely to come from families that have the resources to abandon DCPS if they are unhappy. Your proposal would be perfectly fair, in that in short order there would be no good schools left in DC.

DCPS is faced with a fundamental challenge: do they maximize fairness, or maximize the quality of the schools by appealing to families of proficient students? No easy answer there.

DC has a bigger challenge -- educating the children who don't have strong home supports. Reform was supposed to do that with the magic of highly effective teachers. Oddly, there are few highly effective teachers in the most difficult schools.

Anonymous wrote:Some please explain this to me. How can the county 2 miles up the road and the other 5 miles down the road both which have tons more students get it right and DC can't? What's wrong? No need to reinvent the wheel. Just do what they do in MoCo. It's so damn frustrating.

Let's just say that in DC we have our own way of doing things. And the most important thing is that folks who work in local government "understand DC." There were a couple of mayors (Williams and Fenty) who hired people who wanted to do what they did in places like San Francisco, New York and Portland, but that's not the DC way. Now we have a city government again that understands DC!

Some please explain this to me. How can the county 2 miles up the road and the other 5 miles down the road both which have tons more students get it right and DC can't? What's wrong? No need to reinvent the wheel. Just do what they do in MoCo. It's so damn frustrating.

A point of clarification. Deal started working on IB during principal Kim's first year at the school. Before the building renovations started. Building strong academic programs have nothing to do with nice facilities.

Anonymous wrote:If there are only a limited number of "good schools" the fairest way is that every student in DCPS gets the same chance at a slice of the pie -- until you expand the pie.

The problem is that good schools don't happen at random, as numerous posters in this thread have commented the biggest factor in school quality is the number of proficient students. Proficient students are more likely to come from families that have the resources to abandon DCPS if they are unhappy. Your proposal would be perfectly fair, in that in short order there would be no good schools left in DC.

DCPS is faced with a fundamental challenge: do they maximize fairness, or maximize the quality of the schools by appealing to families of proficient students? No easy answer there.

Pp, that idea will yield a tiny pie as the taxpayers in the higher brackets head for md and va. No invested parent would blindly leave their child's education up to so many unknowns.

If there are only a limited number of "good schools" the fairest way is that every student in DCPS gets the same chance at a slice of the pie -- until you expand the pie.

16:48 that is absolutely ridiculous. The value of a neighborhood school is partly in the fact that it is in the neighborhood, at least for small children in elementary school There is no way I would send my child to a public school on the other side of the city - good or bad. If it came to that I would simply move or go to a parochial or private school nearby.

Wouldn't the fairest system be one in which children enrolled in DCPS are randomly assigned to DC schools, so that schools throughout DC are pretty balance racially and economically? Plus it would create a strong incentive for more educated, affluent parents to advocate for more $$ for the less desirable schools, especially if their children were assigned there. No more "in bounds" or "out of bounds." Need to think more along lines of "One City" no longer "my ward" or "my neighborhood."

Anonymous wrote:Quick question. Why aren't parents working to develop their own schools? Why do they insist on the OOB system? This defeats the purpose and will always make for terrible schools in Wards 4, 5, 6 etc.

That's a stunningly naive question. The time for "parents" to work to improve their own schools is BEFORE THEY HAVE CHILDREN and most of us weren't thinking and advocating passionately about school improvement before having kids. It takes time for a school to get better, for the dysfunction to dissipate. You're question is sort of like, "Why aren't the family members of a murder victim allowed on the jury?" Answer: because you can't expect them to make objective decisions. Making schools better has to be a priority of DCPS and the community at large, not the parents who have a directly vested interest by having school age children. My child's education will NEVER be a social experiment. My child will go to a school where her ONE chance at elementary (and then middle and then high) school will not be a crap shoot.