Anonymous wrote:OP here again - it's probably clear enough in my post, but the point of my last 3 paragraphs (and what I wrote in an earlier post) is that DCPS is the example of 80% poor 20% middle class/affluent, give or take.

So the best you can hope for at the HS and probably MS level is to concentrate the well-prepared students to try to create some positive peer pressure, and even then they will not be an overwhelming majority, and may still be a minority (Wilson in DC looks nothing like Whitman in Bethesda).

Whereas if you try to do some social engineering and somehow succeed in distributing the affluent families evenly throughout the city's schools (you'd never succeed for reasons already explained, but suppose you did) then they will not have critical mass anywhere and "the prison will be run by the inmates", a phrase which, in the context of DC, takes on a more literal meaning!

BTW some posters mentioned several other HSs which they see as promising within DCPS... honestly, I had not heard of anything decent non-charter outside of Wilson, but maybe I need to look into that some more. I'll admit to some ignorance of HSs east of the park. Same for MSs, non-charter. My understanding has generally been that Deal is borderline yes, Hardy borderline no but with potential, and everything else non-charter is a clear and resounding no. Again, I may be out of date/uninformed - I'm sceptical but I'd be very happy to be wrong about that.

Anonymous wrote:OP here, wow, I love how active DCUM forums can be!

Ok, this has really helped me. I was unsure of what my opinion was on all of this, and I think now my opinion is the following:

- the boundary for Wilson should stay as it is (not sure about Deal, but sounds like Wilson has the real crowding problem)
- everyone resident within the boundary gets first preference
- then those OOB with siblings attending
- then those OOB from Rhee-era feeder schools
- then everyone else
- until the school has reached capacity.

This is how it works in cities with good neighborhood schools, that I have seen. Everyone IB for neighborhood schools gets in first and if (only if) there are extra spots, they do a lottery.

In practice, this would, it sounds to me, drastically reduce OOB attendance thru feeder schools, which seems fair to me.

In response to the PP(s) who say that even IB is not an entitlement, sure, same as how you can buy a house next to a park, pay a premium, and yet the govt builds a trash dump on the park, over your protests.

But if you are going to cut property owners out of 40-year old boundaries for a desirable school then you should have a compelling reason. The only compelling reason I can think of would be overcrowding that is solely due to increased school-age population within the boundary.

But in this case Wilson is big enough to handle all children within boundary. The 47% of OOB should be cut before any boundary shrinking takes place.

To the OOB parent above who refers to the contract, I am not going to get into the legal issues of contract law! But I will ask you this: what reasonable expectation did you have for Wilson when you bought your house in Eckington or Anacostia, etc? It seems to me that a purchaser in Crestwood or Palisades had a reasonable expectation of Wilson, and paid a preimum for it, but the purchaser in Anacostia or Eckington or Co Heights did not have a reasonable expectation; they won a lottery, and probably their house was inexpensive (by DC standards!).

It seems much more fair to me to take away someone's lottery win than to take away something that someone paid for with their hard-earned dollars.

Therefore, I think the OOB kids must be excluded before any IB kids, with some grandfathering. Tough on those OOB families of course, but you are no worse off than when you bought your house. You only had a lucky windfall taken away from you. Like as if you bought a house, and later the govt announced a new park, and then the govt changed its mind and didn't build the park. You're not worse off.

To those (perhaps Rhee?) who say they want to "force" high socio-economic status parents to invest in DCPS, good luck with that. White participation in DCPS (sad but true, race is a good SES proxy in DC) is at a multi-decade record high of 12%, correct? And a whopping 22% at Wilson? The idea that local schools are bad is already assumed in most parts of DC. For many high-SES parents, Deal and Wilson are probably on the borderline of acceptable quality. Worsen them and people will likely do something else, as they have for decades. And yes someone will take their place in their house if they move to the 'burbs, but probably someone childless.

As an aside, I came to the depressing realization when reading all of this, that there probably just isn't the demographics in DC to support a system-wide high-quality public school system right now. I mean even if you accomplished the goal of "spreading out" all the high-SES parents across the city schools, they would be spread too thin. A universal quality education in DC seems demographically impossible now.

The only long term hope for DCPS is demographic change. This city just has more poverty than it can bear, not in terms of tax base (where the mean average plays a role), but in terms of critical mass for social capital accumulation (where the median rules all).

In the meantime, probably better to preserve whatever quality has been concentrated in a small number of schools west of the park, than to pursue a beggar-thy-neighbor policy and ruin all schools within DC...

Anonymous wrote:

Yeah. No. Not at the high school level and likely irrelevant at the middle school level, too. The days of parent reading volunteers and PTA (!?) are long past being a factor by the time a teen crosses the threshold of Wilson vs Dunbar. You're confusing pk4 with AP history. "sahms" have nothing to do with the latter.

Anonymous wrote:People think middle school and high school in DCPS are a disaster. And, they are. But what they don't realize is that it all started with elementary, but nobody was paying attention. It all cascades from there.

I think the whole system needs to be shored up. Sure, it would be great to have more middle schools and high schools that could replicate what's going on in some of the better ones. But that's dealing with the symptoms.

Ideally, officials and policymakers need to go back and look at what's going on - it's too much of a critical mass of kids who didn't get adequate foundational skills, kids who had a rough upbringing and as such may have behavioral problems, and so on. And those problems get more segregated and concentrated going from elementary to middle school, and even more so from middle school into high school - as those who can flee the middle and high schools, leaving the problems behind.

This city needs to wrap its head around how to break this cycle, with very early interventions, even at the pre-K level, robustly working on instilling strong foundational academic skills together with identifying and deprogramming the many counterproductive cultural issues coming from multi-generational poverty and teaching these kids what "normal" is in today's society, and instilling values, instilling a sense of curiosity and ambition, and a desire to break that cycle and become functional, successful, and hopefully prosperous members of modern society.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with the OP and think the way to resolve this is to end the feeder rights, while grandfathering in the students that are already at Deal or Wilson and their younger siblings. Yes, some students will lose out on when feeder rights end. Some students are going to lose out no matter which way you slice it, but all the other alternatives seem more unfair to me. I think a companion to this will be coming up with more resources to support failing schools in other parts of the city, even if it means allocating away some Deal/Wilson resources -- good staff, funding, whatever it takes.

Deal and Wilson do not get extra funding. They get standard per pupil funding and likely less than many other schools because they are not Title I schools. Several failing high schools across the city have gotten renovations in excess of $100 million in cost, lack of funding is not the problem. The key resource that Deal and Wilson have that is hard to replicate is the percentage of the student body that arrives prepared. That is not a resource you can allocate to another school. They need to find ways to make prepared students want to go to other schools.

Yes, the kids are more prepared -- but also their families are more likely to have resources (in both time and money) to contribute to the school. Deal's annual PTA dues are $150/family; my kid's EOTP PTA dues are $35/family. More SAHMs means more people available to volunteer. Deal parents are probably more likely than those at, say, Sousa, to be able to prevail on their employers to make corporate contributions.

IMO the biggest source of educational inequality is the difference in how much parents are able to contribute to their child's school. Unfortunately, you can't exactly prevent parents from doing that -- investing your resources in your child is a fundamental part of being a parent.

Anonymous wrote:But won't giving preference to "OOB from Rhee-era feeder schools" pretty much shut out for the next 10 years those students who were unlucky in the lottery and didn't get into a Deal/Wilson elementary feeder school? It seems unfair that they lost the lottery once at pre-k/k and now they are pretty much forever shut out and it would be more fair to allow them an equal shot at the lottery to Deal/Wilson.