Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

As you seem to be familiar with the acievement gap at Brent you must have heard that the gap correlates with students admitted to Brent at First Grade and above. Brent can't remediate its way out of a situation where students admitted to fill seats via the lottery find themselves unprepared by the schools they left.

I'll fix this for you. Unprepared by ...

... by the prenatal care they didn't get
... by the poverty-driven cortisol that crossed the placenta when they were in utero
... by the relative lack of high-nutrient foods (DHA, EPA) they didn't get ages 0-3 as their brains developed critical neuro pathways
... by the 30 million words they didn't hear by age 3, a result that will follow them at Watkins, SH and for the rest of their entire lives [ http://literacy.rice.edu/thirty-million-word-gap ]
... by the comparatively ad hoc, likely low-quality and unstable child care they received prior to school
... by the books they weren't read, the art classes they didn't have as 2 year olds, the Please Touch Museum they didn't visit at age 4
.... by the slapping around they received throughout early childhood for getting on mama's last nerve

It's really time to reframe "the gap" and stop making "shitty teachers" and "shitty administrators" and "David Grosso" the absolute and only scapegoats.

-- not a teacher or a Grosso staffer

I don't understand how you can detail the systemic, institutionally embedded causes of poverty, and then somehow exempt public schools from that list? Public schools are the next thing in that list that fail kids, in many cases.

the children reach school age far behind their peers, thus the achievement gap. even if schooling helps improve, their higher SES cohorts are also improving and more dramatically at that. You may not see much of a difference in a 3 yr old classroom but by 1st grade the differences are obvious. It happens if in high performing schools with highly effective teachers.

The point is that poor kids don't get to go to high performing schools with highly effective teachers, by and large. https://edtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/Ed%20Trust%20Facts%20on%20Teacher%20Equity.pdf

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom. At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations. This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.

There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here. Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.

Eastern is a fully articulated high school that was renovated for the students who attend and who will attend. It was the right thing to do and the renovation is beautiful.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

As you seem to be familiar with the acievement gap at Brent you must have heard that the gap correlates with students admitted to Brent at First Grade and above. Brent can't remediate its way out of a situation where students admitted to fill seats via the lottery find themselves unprepared by the schools they left.

I'll fix this for you. Unprepared by ...

... by the prenatal care they didn't get
... by the poverty-driven cortisol that crossed the placenta when they were in utero
... by the relative lack of high-nutrient foods (DHA, EPA) they didn't get ages 0-3 as their brains developed critical neuro pathways
... by the 30 million words they didn't hear by age 3, a result that will follow them at Watkins, SH and for the rest of their entire lives [ http://literacy.rice.edu/thirty-million-word-gap ]
... by the comparatively ad hoc, likely low-quality and unstable child care they received prior to school
... by the books they weren't read, the art classes they didn't have as 2 year olds, the Please Touch Museum they didn't visit at age 4
.... by the slapping around they received throughout early childhood for getting on mama's last nerve

It's really time to reframe "the gap" and stop making "shitty teachers" and "shitty administrators" and "David Grosso" the absolute and only scapegoats.

-- not a teacher or a Grosso staffer

I don't understand how you can detail the systemic, institutionally embedded causes of poverty, and then somehow exempt public schools from that list? Public schools are the next thing in that list that fail kids, in many cases.

the children reach school age far behind their peers, thus the achievement gap. even if schooling helps improve, their higher SES cohorts are also improving and more dramatically at that. You may not see much of a difference in a 3 yr old classroom but by 1st grade the differences are obvious. It happens if in high performing schools with highly effective teachers.

Anonymous wrote:

As you seem to be familiar with the acievement gap at Brent you must have heard that the gap correlates with students admitted to Brent at First Grade and above. Brent can't remediate its way out of a situation where students admitted to fill seats via the lottery find themselves unprepared by the schools they left.

I'll fix this for you. Unprepared by ...

... by the prenatal care they didn't get
... by the poverty-driven cortisol that crossed the placenta when they were in utero
... by the relative lack of high-nutrient foods (DHA, EPA) they didn't get ages 0-3 as their brains developed critical neuro pathways
... by the 30 million words they didn't hear by age 3, a result that will follow them at Watkins, SH and for the rest of their entire lives [ http://literacy.rice.edu/thirty-million-word-gap ]
... by the comparatively ad hoc, likely low-quality and unstable child care they received prior to school
... by the books they weren't read, the art classes they didn't have as 2 year olds, the Please Touch Museum they didn't visit at age 4
.... by the slapping around they received throughout early childhood for getting on mama's last nerve

It's really time to reframe "the gap" and stop making "shitty teachers" and "shitty administrators" and "David Grosso" the absolute and only scapegoats.

-- not a teacher or a Grosso staffer

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

PS. I also would take issue with the view that DCPS kowtowed to gentrified. If anything, it kowtowed to the interests of families from Wards 7 and 8 who were active in the Cluster. Some inbound families ultimately benefitted from the modernization of SH but then again DCPS pulled SWS from the Cluster and refused to consider granting proximity preference. From all appearances, DCPS made sure that the majority of families moving on to SH for many years did not live on the Hill when Brent and Maury got pushed aside. This was simply good ole fashioned Chocolate City politics.

That's a funny way to look it. SWS not receiving an unprecedented preference is somehow "Chocolate City Politics"?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom. At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations. This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.

There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here. Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.

Your story has holes. It wasn't the "stroller brigade" pushing for Eastern. If anything the stroller brigade wanted a viable comprehensive neighborhood middle school option that doesn't require lottery luck

That's fair; fixing the high school before the middle schools didn't make much sense to me.

Except they did fix middle schools. Hobson got $40 million. EH and Jefferson got additional $$ in the Ward 6 Middle School Reform Plan. I'm not saying they did it right, but from leadership perspective they kow towed to gentrifiers.

Ah, someone from Central Office chimes in. Please tell us exactly what has been done to modernize Jefferson and Eliot-Hince since the "Reform Plan" was supposed to have been implemented. My understanding is that neither DCPS nor DGS has been able to account for millions allocated for windows and other capital expenditures at EH. It was a group of motivated parents who embarrassed Bowser into making some basic repairs to restrooms last year. As for the Cluster, they got pretty much everything they wanted now that funds for the modernization of Watkins were reprogrammed so I will let them speak for themselves.

PS. I also would take issue with the view that DCPS kowtowed to gentrified. If anything, it kowtowed to the interests of families from Wards 7 and 8 who were active in the Cluster. Some inbound families ultimately benefitted from the modernization of SH but then again DCPS pulled SWS from the Cluster and refused to consider granting proximity preference. From all appearances, DCPS made sure that the majority of families moving on to SH for many years did not live on the Hill when Brent and Maury got pushed aside. This was simply good ole fashioned Chocolate City politics.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

PS. I also would take issue with the view that DCPS kowtowed to gentrified. If anything, it kowtowed to the interests of families from Wards 7 and 8 who were active in the Cluster. Some inbound families ultimately benefitted from the modernization of SH but then again DCPS pulled SWS from the Cluster and refused to consider granting proximity preference. From all appearances, DCPS made sure that the majority of families moving on to SH for many years did not live on the Hill when Brent and Maury got pushed aside. This was simply good ole fashioned Chocolate City politics.

That's a funny way to look it. SWS not receiving an unprecedented preference is somehow "Chocolate City Politics"?

Anonymous wrote:

PS. I also would take issue with the view that DCPS kowtowed to gentrified. If anything, it kowtowed to the interests of families from Wards 7 and 8 who were active in the Cluster. Some inbound families ultimately benefitted from the modernization of SH but then again DCPS pulled SWS from the Cluster and refused to consider granting proximity preference. From all appearances, DCPS made sure that the majority of families moving on to SH for many years did not live on the Hill when Brent and Maury got pushed aside. This was simply good ole fashioned Chocolate City politics.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom. At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations. This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.

There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here. Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.

Show me one school system in the past 25 years where significant numbers of non economically disadvantaged families enrolled children in schools that were majority econ disadvantaged. The only ones I can find are when the school used a magnet program or a school within a school model. To fault non econ disadvantaged Hill families for not enrolling their kids is to ask them to do something that has no recent precedent.

Wouldn't that be DCPS? How exactly did Brent turn around other than having a significant number of non-economically disadvantaged families enroll their kids into the school when it was majority economically disadvantaged?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom. At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations. This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.

There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here. Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.

Show me one school system in the past 25 years where significant numbers of non economically disadvantaged families enrolled children in schools that were majority econ disadvantaged. The only ones I can find are when the school used a magnet program or a school within a school model. To fault non econ disadvantaged Hill families for not enrolling their kids is to ask them to do something that has no recent precedent.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom. At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations. This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.

There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here. Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.

Your story has holes. It wasn't the "stroller brigade" pushing for Eastern. If anything the stroller brigade wanted a viable comprehensive neighborhood middle school option that doesn't require lottery luck

That's fair; fixing the high school before the middle schools didn't make much sense to me.

Except they did fix middle schools. Hobson got $40 million. EH and Jefferson got additional $$ in the Ward 6 Middle School Reform Plan. I'm not saying they did it right, but from leadership perspective they kow towed to gentrifiers.

Ah, someone from Central Office chimes in. Please tell us exactly what has been done to modernize Jefferson and Eliot-Hince since the "Reform Plan" was supposed to have been implemented. My understanding is that neither DCPS nor DGS has been able to account for millions allocated for windows and other capital expenditures at EH. It was a group of motivated parents who embarrassed Bowser into making some basic repairs to restrooms last year. As for the Cluster, they got pretty much everything they wanted now that funds for the modernization of Watkins were reprogrammed so I will let them speak for themselves.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom. At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations. This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.

There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here. Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.

Your story has holes. It wasn't the "stroller brigade" pushing for Eastern. If anything the stroller brigade wanted a viable comprehensive neighborhood middle school option that doesn't require lottery luck

That's fair; fixing the high school before the middle schools didn't make much sense to me.

Except they did fix middle schools. Hobson got $40 million. EH and Jefferson got additional $$ in the Ward 6 Middle School Reform Plan. I'm not saying they did it right, but from leadership perspective they kow towed to gentrifiers.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom. At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations. This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.

There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here. Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.

Your story has holes. It wasn't the "stroller brigade" pushing for Eastern. If anything the stroller brigade wanted a viable comprehensive neighborhood middle school option that doesn't require lottery luck

That's fair; fixing the high school before the middle schools didn't make much sense to me.

Except they did fix middle schools. Hobson got $40 million. EH and Jefferson got additional $$ in the Ward 6 Middle School Reform Plan. I'm not saying they did it right, but from leadership perspective they kow towed to gentrifiers.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really hate that we're talking about "shitty" schools. I really don't know that the test scores reflect how good or bad a school is in DC. Rather it reflects the social and economic capital of the families that send their children there. Median Growth Percentile has been suggested to do a much better job at reflecting the performance of a school. Jefferson's scores there are a little better than Brent's, although by this metric, all our kids should go to DC Prep Edgewood's middle school.

I wish people would stop talking about not sending their kids to bad schools when what they should be saying is they don't want to send their kids to schools with a lot of poor kids who aren't performing at grade level. Which is fair enough.

But they are shitty schools. It's not just the kids, but the fact that being poor means you have fewer access to resources, and hence shitty schools (no matter who enrolls there.) Bad teachers, bad administration, bad facilities. It's not true that your kid will do fine there just by dint of being high SES - that's your white privilege speaking. Your kid will have to go to a crappy school, because poor people get crappy things (the definition of being poor) and may suffer, just like the poor kids. Not as badly (because again, privilege) but to pretend like their mere presence is what changes a bad school into a good school is pretty offensive. It's a product of income inequality plus gentrification that makes this self-evident. In the same way that moving into a run-down house doesn't make it a nice house just because you're rich, sending your rich kid to a shitty, poor school doesn't turn it into a good school.

How do you reach that conclusion about the teachers and administrators? Because they haven't solved poverty? For as much as DC gripes about facilities deficiencies there's little evidence that modernized facilities improve learning. The teachers and administrators can only serve the families that enroll. If that happens to be predominantly at risk and/FARM students then your common core standards for quality assessment are largely irrelevant.

You're the one speaking from a position of profound entitlement.

I'm not the shitty schools poster, but more power to her. Profound entitlement? Knock off the holier-than-thou shaming already. A school in which 12% of 6th graders test proficient is shitty by any measure of course, and not necessarily because teachers and admins there aren't doing a good job.

a school as affluent and low at risk at Brent only has 12% advanced. That doesn't impress me all that much

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No doubt, there are many potential reasons kids arrive at schools with below grade level skills. However, for parents considering sending their kids to Jefferson, the question is can Jefferson adequately teach my child given their resources and the cohort of students entering. Jefferson's response is differentiation in the classroom.

Maybe more than differentiation in the classroom. At a Brent PTA meeting several months ago, the Jefferson Academy vice principal did say that they'd be glad to offer "advanced classes," e.g. 7th grade algebra, if they had a cohort of students ready for them.

Henderson, Grosso, Allen and company don't seem to have their heads around the problem of funding pricey if-you-build-it-they-will-come renovations without also funding instructors/resources for honors classes (better than the at-grade level variant you find at Stuart Hobson), creating false narratives. The problem is quite simple: DCPS leaders and politicians aren't providing incentives to middle school principals to allocate funds for the advanced instruction needed to attract and retain cohorts of in-boundary students in gentrifying zones.

OK, so academic tracking along race lines was a serious problem in previous generations. This time around, tracking could be done thoughtfully, with the sort of "flex tracking" with strong after-hours support you see at BASIS and Deal for math.

There is definitely a "chicken and egg" dilemma at work here. Hill parents don't trust DCPS to provide an adequate path for their kids. And after the Eastern debacle, where DCPS moved mountains to reconstitute, renovate and install IB at the "stroller brigade's" request, and they still didn't show up, Hill parents don't have much credibility with downtown either.

Your story has holes. It wasn't the "stroller brigade" pushing for Eastern. If anything the stroller brigade wanted a viable comprehensive neighborhood middle school option that doesn't require lottery luck

That's fair; fixing the high school before the middle schools didn't make much sense to me.