Whatever about the overcrowding at Wilson -- we have beautiful new high schools with few students in them like Dunbar and Eastern. You can't force families to use schools where they don't feel like their children will be welcome.

jsteele wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here's a solution that should satisfy everyone:

1) Families where the parent(s) work(s) get first choice for schools and guaranteed IB to neighborhood schools.

2) SAHMS and families with 3 or more kids go into lottery for whatever is left over. SAHMS because they contribute so little to the economy (gym memberships aside) and have so much free time to drive their kids across town, Large families because they are overpopulating the planet and DCPS and make supermarket checkout lines dreadful.

3) Big Law families guaranteed access to Ward 8 schools. DC places a 100% tax on Big Law families who send their kids to private school. 20% housing transfer tax on Big Law families who sell to move to MoCo or NOVA.

There. Problem solved.

-- Troll Trifecta.

You forgot to include a preference for circumcised boys.

As long as they were breast-fed until age 3.

Anonymous wrote:Here's a solution that should satisfy everyone:

1) Families where the parent(s) work(s) get first choice for schools and guaranteed IB to neighborhood schools.

2) SAHMS and families with 3 or more kids go into lottery for whatever is left over. SAHMS because they contribute so little to the economy (gym memberships aside) and have so much free time to drive their kids across town, Large families because they are overpopulating the planet and DCPS and make supermarket checkout lines dreadful.

3) Big Law families guaranteed access to Ward 8 schools. DC places a 100% tax on Big Law families who send their kids to private school. 20% housing transfer tax on Big Law families who sell to move to MoCo or NOVA.

There. Problem solved.

-- Troll Trifecta.

You forgot to include a preference for circumcised boys.

Here's a solution that should satisfy everyone:

1) Families where the parent(s) work(s) get first choice for schools and guaranteed IB to neighborhood schools.

2) SAHMS and families with 3 or more kids go into lottery for whatever is left over. SAHMS because they contribute so little to the economy (gym memberships aside) and have so much free time to drive their kids across town, Large families because they are overpopulating the planet and DCPS and make supermarket checkout lines dreadful.

3) Big Law families guaranteed access to Ward 8 schools. DC places a 100% tax on Big Law families who send their kids to private school. 20% housing transfer tax on Big Law families who sell to move to MoCo or NOVA.

There. Problem solved.

-- Troll Trifecta.

It would be a shame if anyone messed with Eaton or Hearst in any way, including feeder patterns. They are the model of what an urban school should be: high performing, with a mix of races and incomes but with a critical mass of high SES families. They're not suburban-white like JKLM. They're not troubled like just about everywhere else. And even if the OOB parents don't mind being directed to Hardy, if enough CP residents get mad and pull the next generation from the schools, then you've ruined the schools.

Tinkering with WofP schools boundaries or indulging in 1970s social engineering Boston isn't going to work. The smart thing is to maintain as much of Deal and Wilson while finding a good release valve for the overcrowding, and then come up with more lottery-in or application schools for the rest of the city, so that motivated parents and kids can have something to shoot for beyond the 1-10 charter chances. As for everyone else, the sad truth is that until you tackle root causes of poverty, blah blah blah, you can't turn around those schools. A delegation of high SES kids isn't going to make a difference.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The boundary issue is interesting. Yet, the more critical issue is that people are clamoring for Deal boundary because of the quality option that it provides for our children. We would not be fighting to get into Deal if the academic and social programming wasn't revamped. Deal is now doing incredibly well and attracting a lot of families because it made this change. I would suggest that if it were not for the overcrowding that has been caused by the success of Deal, we probably would not be even in this discussion of redrawing boundaries because people would have continued the flight out of DC after ES. What is the plan to improve other such schools? We are lacking a comprehensive strategy to turn other schools around.

When Deal was still a "junior high" five years ago, it had a good reputation. The school had some pretty advanced courses courtesy of the PTA like robotics, and a few longtime teachers had been there since the 60s. It may not have been as wildly popular as today however.

My guess is that DC will eventually do away with high school boundaries like other large cities, San Fransisco for example. It is a successful model that has been proven to work, but only if parents are willing to separate the high schools from any notions of "neighborhood identity."

San Francisco has one of the worst urban school systems.

No, of course not. (I was the one you're referring to.) But it explains, I suspect, a fair portion of the "premium" upper NW homeowners pay for <6000 square foot lots with 1940s homes <2000 square feet. Visit the homes of AU Park and Van Ness (etc.,) residents and you'll see that they're not living the life of luxury with bellhops and elevators that the gentrifiers portray (often under the guise of "Trust Fund babies").

There's a market price for homes, and people should realize that when the price in Upper NW is really high, there's probably a reason for it. And it's not because of the spacious housing stock.

Is it really as simplistic as the vision thing? How many millennials moving to Bloomingdale or Petworth could afford a similar home in-bound for Janney, Stoddert or Mann?

Anonymous wrote:
You don't read the Washington Post?

Fair question. I read the Opinion and Local sections. My employer provides most other news-clips for me. I recently moved back to DC (in June) after 7 years away.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I love all these "urban pioneers". They move to Shaw, Logan, Bloomy, Trux and hang out at the cool bars, ride their bikes, do lots of unpermitted renovations to their row house. They think they are making a difference. Could not imagine living in boring upper NW. THEN the babies come along and look out! God forbid they do some real pioneering and do the dirty work. No, that's too much work. Besides, there is that new beer garden opening up soon. Instead, they impose on the grownups west of the park to come bail them out with the good schools. How very millennial of you! But it's not for them they say, it's really about the poor kids. So. Awesome.

Courtland Milloy of the Post termed them "myopic little twits.". He shoud have won a Pulitzer for that.

Given that Milloy fled to PG County in the 90s, lives there to this day, and was part of the overall defunding of DC services during that time, I think he's essentially forfeited any right to critique DC's current residents. He should be writing what he knows: suburban MD issues.

Anonymous wrote:Without any knowledge of Milloy, I find the argument pertaining to the "urban pioneers" amusing and, somewhat on-point.

There is a whole lot of "Boring. Boring. Boring. I could never live in upper NW. B-O-R-I-N-G." But then kids come along and all of the sudden we see why forward-looking parents moved to upper NW. So now the chant becomes Unfair. Unfair. Unfair.

What these people don't realize, among countless other things, is that, perhaps, many of the parents in upper NW have a similar outlook to the parents in Bloomy and Petworth and Columbia Heights. Maybe they'd have liked to stay in a more urban setting (may not, to be fair), but they chose to look further down the line than "what's on tap this week" and chose the Boring area for exactly the reasons the urban pioneers are not decreeing Unfair.

You don't read the Washington Post?

Without any knowledge of Milloy, I find the argument pertaining to the "urban pioneers" amusing and, somewhat on-point.

There is a whole lot of "Boring. Boring. Boring. I could never live in upper NW. B-O-R-I-N-G." But then kids come along and all of the sudden we see why forward-looking parents moved to upper NW. So now the chant becomes Unfair. Unfair. Unfair.

What these people don't realize, among countless other things, is that, perhaps, many of the parents in upper NW have a similar outlook to the parents in Bloomy and Petworth and Columbia Heights. Maybe they'd have liked to stay in a more urban setting (may not, to be fair), but they chose to look further down the line than "what's on tap this week" and chose the Boring area for exactly the reasons the urban pioneers are not decreeing Unfair.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I love all these "urban pioneers". They move to Shaw, Logan, Bloomy, Trux and hang out at the cool bars, ride their bikes, do lots of unpermitted renovations to their row house. They think they are making a difference. Could not imagine living in boring upper NW. THEN the babies come along and look out! God forbid they do some real pioneering and do the dirty work. No, that's too much work. Besides, there is that new beer garden opening up soon. Instead, they impose on the grownups west of the park to come bail them out with the good schools. How very millennial of you! But it's not for them they say, it's really about the poor kids. So. Awesome.

Courtland Milloy of the Post termed them "myopic little twits.". He shoud have won a Pulitzer for that.

Mr. Milloy is a race-baiting embarrassment and irrelevant to any productive discussion.

As long as the elementary school boundaries are preserved, the flight to the suburbs won't happen. In other cities without high school boundaries, every school has a unique focus. Students apply to the high school they'd like to attend. Isn't this how the schools in southeastern Montgomery County determine attendance?

If the neighborhoods across the city resist the idea of no high school boundaries, then I doubt it will happen. DCPS seems to be very willing to involve the community in every step of the process.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I heard someone on the radio today who said the fairest proposed system would be to randomly assign students to particular DCPS schools, to assure a mixture of more affluent students and disadvantaged students. So a student in AU Park (and their siblings) might be assigned a spot in Ward 8 and a kid from Barry Farm could go to Janney.

I really, really hope they do it. It is the fairest thing!

Because "bussing" worked so well in the past.