Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:DCI has significantly different demographics from Latin and BASIS which is just plain harder. It is also significantly larger with 804 students (and it's still growing/adding a grade).
It is also a newer school.
From the beginning DCI intended to allow students an option not to pursue an IB diploma (read their charter application). They know a significant portion of their students may not ever attend college, and are supposed to be offering them the IB career diploma and training.
So why not just make DCI a vocational program with a bit of language instruction? Sheesh. We really need more high-performing schools in this city to serve taxpayers, not skim milk IB program BS. DCI can't built a critical mass of strong students without a more serious curriculum, teaching and higher standards.
Theres’s
nothing inherently skim milk or not-rigorous about the IB diploma or career track programs. DCI is offering both.
But like all start up schools, it will probably take a few years at full capacity before they hit their stride. The bleeding edge kids (and their parents) are always in for a bumpy ride.
Disagree. We're native Mandarin speakers, fairly new to DC, who were given permission to sit in on the most advanced Chinese class early this year. We visited to help us decide if we'd take our DCI spot. The kids' Chinese didn't impress, and that's putting it mildly. We'd read about poor Chinese skills on DCUM threads but took the posts with a grain of salt. A teacher told us that
there are NO students in the MS who speak Chinese at home with native-speaking parents.
As a parent who got a high score on higher level IB diploma Chinese in the 90s, it looked to me like the kids are on track to score low on standard level IB diploma Chinese. We also sat in on an advanced 9th grade math class that didn't impress us. We observed 9th graders at BASIS knocking it out the park in AB and BC calc classes. We saw chaos in hallways and at dismissal. DCPC just can't build a truly rigorous IB diploma program this way. Not even close.