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It will be a long time before Wilson loses its diversity. The public schools are a definite barrier for white DC parents and except for sitricts where parents actively engage before their kids reach school age this will be true for a long time, as well. A relatively small number of schools accounts for the small change in the racial composition of DC schools. If anything distorts that, it may be the often uncritically acclaimed charter schools.

Still, there's more to school than test scores or the demographic composition of the schools. Having known many products of DC area schools through grad school, postdoc training, teaching, supervising interns, etc, I've always been pretty unimpressed with a lot of the products of DC's tiffany 'burbs. There's more chip on the shoulder than good academic training and some districts have gone through periods of emphasizing test scores over things like current events (I supervised some Fairfax grads with that background). The cmplaint I've heard from Wilson grads has been that there hasn't always been enough practice in writing, but I have to say they're much less likely to be stereotypiucal know it all kids (who don't know much) than many of the products of MoCo and Fairfax. Alexandria, which shares many issues with DC also seems to turn pout decent high schoolers. Still, it will take a a generation or so for DC to have more high performing high schools. One thing they could do is abandon middle school and go to K-8 or or junior high systems. The imposition of middle school has in systems been demonstrated to contribute to increased behavior problems and it mostky was done by districts to better use their post-Baby Boom glut of school buildings.

by Rich on Jul 19, 2012 11:08 pm • link • report