Reducing personnel at central office
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Anonymous
Are you being deliberately obtuse? The kids with the highest scores are the most advanced learners. Their scores indicate the highest level of mastery. If you create a larger lottery pool including students with good, but less high scores, and a lower scoring student wins a lottery seat and a higher scoring student does not win a seat, you have reduced opportunity for the more advanced learner who would have gained admission through the prior paradigm. You can debate the merits of either paradigm based on your personal values and agenda, but the lottery absolutely gave students with less evidence of giftedness or mastery of advanced material more potential access to rigorous programming and reduced access for outlier students by widening the pool. |
Anonymous
DP. Have a chance at what? An accelerated local Math course? ELC? HIGH? These hardly are at the same level or breadth as the programming available at the magnets, which have far too few seats to meet the needs of the identified population. And unless you are lucky enough to be with a large cohort, many schools "implementing" the latter two are doing so without fidelity, having to reduce the intended enrichments/challenge because of more heterogeneous levels of students they are including in those classes to manage class size. And CES, itself, is less broad than the HGC model that preceded it. One can say it is more focused to a particular test result/subject area competency, but that doesn't mean those with such results aren't highly capable in other areas. Some CES programs effectively cohort for math, some don't. Where's science in all of this? There's been a crusade against GT programming for decades. It's ridden the wave of equity, which isn't bad in and of itself, but creates a monster when paired, with budgetary decisions of convenience drawing from old analyses showing inequitable GT identification/program admittance (which may still occur). Those have resulted in slashing of GT programming, swapping one kind of inequity for another, instead of the robust expansion that would address both. |
Anonymous
That same DP. While I agree with your general thought, high exposure-related scores don't correlate well enough with learning ability. We need to modify the identification paradigm to take outside prep, which isn't an evil in and of itself, out of it and focus on that ability instead of relying on exposure. |
Anonymous
I agree with you it would be better to identify innate ability rather than mastery, but this is the data the district has available, so it’s all we have to go on right now. That said, families shouldn’t be fighting each other for scraps. The district should provide all identified students equivalent access to appropriate enriched coursework, not just a small portion of randomly selected students out of the pool. The fact that kids identified for ELA enrichment literally re-read novels in 6th and 7th grade that are part of the elementary school curriculum while magnet kids forge ahead with a bespoke experience is highly problematic. |
Anonymous
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A good example of wasting money:
Title One ES A. Parent coordinator from Linkages to Learning (funding from MoCo) B. School based PCC (there 5 days a week) C. CO PCC (there 1 day a week) D. Community/School Coordinator (5 days a week) You have four people essentially doing the same job. B may refer a family to A. B may also say, "They don't need me at that school" and not go on their assigned day. D is bringing in organizations/programs that A,B, and C have been working with. Instead of having 4 people do the same job, why not have 1 FT person doing all the work. This could fund 2 more teacher positions at the school. |
Anonymous
These are the type of things that should be sent directly to the BoE during this current operating budget session so it can all thoroughly be looked at. Reporting it to MCCPTA, Black & Brown Coalition and others would also be helpful so they could be advocates for better use of resource and funds. |
Anonymous
We had a Panamanian guy for our CO PCC who never came to our school. Our admin requested a new person. Our new person is so much better but I wonder if the other guy is still milking the system. |
Anonymous
What does his nationality have to do with anything? |
Anonymous
DCUM Dog Whistle |
Anonymous
Exactly right. You have career bureaucrats like George Moore taking up space when he can’t even remember what he says in an IEP meeting. Sorry if this man has some kind of mild cognitive impairment but he shouldn’t be making decisions for our kids |
Anonymous
| So...with a few weeks in, how is your new boss doing over there at CO? |
Anonymous
Could easily cover the costs of 8 paras for that which would likely improve outcomes. |
Anonymous
Yes, SN parents are exhausted, but we still sound the alarm all the time. We are ignored, told we should be grateful for the little we do get because there are not enough staff, or we are gaslit. They get away with it because stigma against disabilities still exists. No one thinks that a child with disabilities can learn or succeed. Therefore the school system has NO curriculum packages for even the most basic, well known disabilities like dyslexia (they only have begun to roll out small amounts of OG training). And they have been able to get away with this because until 2017 the standard set by the US Supreme Court for a "free and appropriate public education" was "de minimus", meaning the school merely had to show that a special education student had made a little bit more than "no progress". Now, after Endrew F., the standard is raised a bit but still a very low bar. Even given the low bar, I talk to parents frequently who are told, illegally, that their kids don't qualify for services or accommodations - that is a failure of central office to properly train staff who run and participate in special ed meetings. The lack of any curriculum for common special ed problems - dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, autistic learning beyond ADA, social lessons, emotional lessons, etc. is also a failure of central special ed. |
Anonymous
Have they fixed all the errors with this test? It was so new and unproven that there were major issues. |
Anonymous
Yes, most of the CO funding is to implement equity policies designed to improve optics. |