Brookings Institution article about the new MCPS middle school magnet selection process

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
The magnet experience includes a strong peer group (ideally the very best students drawn from all over the school district), teachers who are trained and experienced in teaching this population, an enriched curriculum that integrates related disciplines. So at Eastern when 6th grade children are learning about the Russian revolution in their magnet World Studies class they would be reading Animal Farm in their magnet English class and they would be reading several books that deal with an Utopia theme in their Literature and the Humanities magnet class. They would then do projects in each of these classes that might be linked to each other. They would probably also do a thematically linked project in their magnet Media class.
The experience at a magnet middle school does not compare to the experience in an enriched class or two in a regular middle school even if you have a strong peer group.

Sure it compares. They're both experiences in taking enriched/advanced classes in middle school.

Alternatively, one might with equal validity say: the experience of taking two enriched/advanced classes (one in humanities, one in math) with a strong peer group in your home community middle school doesn't compare with the experience of taking three enriched/advanced classes in either humanities or math (but not both) with a strong peer group in a scary gang middle school a long bus ride away halfway across the county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
The magnet experience includes a strong peer group (ideally the very best students drawn from all over the school district), teachers who are trained and experienced in teaching this population, an enriched curriculum that integrates related disciplines. So at Eastern when 6th grade children are learning about the Russian revolution in their magnet World Studies class they would be reading Animal Farm in their magnet English class and they would be reading several books that deal with an Utopia theme in their Literature and the Humanities magnet class. They would then do projects in each of these classes that might be linked to each other. They would probably also do a thematically linked project in their magnet Media class.
The experience at a magnet middle school does not compare to the experience in an enriched class or two in a regular middle school even if you have a strong peer group.

Sure it compares. They're both experiences in taking enriched/advanced classes in middle school.

Alternatively, one might with equal validity say: the experience of taking two enriched/advanced classes (one in humanities, one in math) with a strong peer group in your home community middle school doesn't compare with the experience of taking three enriched/advanced classes in either humanities or math (but not both) with a strong peer group in a scary gang middle school a long bus ride away halfway across the county.

^^^(I personally don't think that the four magnet middle schools in the county are scary gang middle schools, but I know for a fact that there are people who do think they are)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MCPS shouldn't release median scores because they'd tell us absolutely nothing other than what we already know.

Yes.. That students with much higher test scores weren't admitted because of peer cohort; that the threshold was indeed lowered.

The median score of accepted students would not tell you that.

So what would then. If the scores of students accepted from some middle school clusters were lower than the scores of students rejected from more high performing clusters that would tell us that the peer cohort device had an undue influence on the selection process this year. How can we verify if this is what MCPS did?

You need the average/mean score for each MS and/or the cutoff scores. MCPS has never released that data and I doubt it will now. Also, many people on this board put too much emphasis on the median scores. All it told you in the past is what a PP stated, that half the students scored above or below that number. Yes, HGCs like Cold Spring had a higher median by a few points historically, but that doesn't rule out that there were kids that got in with lower scores-- in fact, it confirms that some kids did, but we don't know how many and what was the lowest score.

I think MCPS spread the seats amongst all of the MS schools. They accepted the top few students from each school. Does that mean some kids scored lower than others in some of the criteria, I am sure that is true. But that is why MCPS won't release the data because confidentiality can't be maintained if only 2-4 students got in per ES or center program.

[Anonymous]

Do t like the constant lies here from one individual. I really hope Jeff tracks and sees if she is coming from a MCPS server or something.

A) ces and magnet is not at all a “merit based system”. Merit based means quantitative testing based, like the NYC magnets were: stack ranked scores, take the top 400 scorers, publish them

B) MCPS Starr and smith have consistently said for four years that their focus is on the achievement gap and they feel adding a few diversity kids to the fixed ces and magnet programs may do that.

C) There is something tax payers, students, parents can do. And that is vote, file formal complaints, ask for transparency, ask for more centers, ask for better and more challenging curricula/more subject matter, and demand accountability.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm not the PP but I would be fine giving a bump to truly low SES kids. A poor kid scoring 92% that is willing to do the work and ride the bus for 2-3 hours can get in. However a kid who is MC and white who gets a 95% should not be bumping out a kid who is asian and gets a 99%.

The way you would do it would be to give extra % points for being poor and then choose the top students.

maybe.. but is that what happened? Do they know which child is on FARMs? Hard to tell without seeing the numbers. What we do know is that they used "peer cohort". So say that a low income student from a W cluster (yes, they do have a few) got a 93% but had a peer group at the W school. Based on MCPS admission criteria, that low income child would've been denied.

Well....no, because peer cohort was not the only factor. Other factors, including FARMS status, MAP scores, etc. went into the mix per the guidance at the time.

Per MCPS, if there was a peer cohort, they were denied, irrespective of test scores.

We know that's not true because there are kids from schools WITH cohorts at TPMS and Eastern. The bar may have been higher, but it isn't as if there are zero kids at Eastern who would otherwise be at Pyle or Westland.

+1 also not true at TPMS. There are kids from Pyle, Cabin John and Hoover in the 6th grade cohort.

Correct. I agree with another PP that those kids were likely outliers at their own schools. So, now the magnet program is for outliers. Which is GREAT. That's exactly what I would hope and want for a magnet program, to pull out the outliers from each of the schools and educate them together.

My kid is one of those kids at the magnet now from one of the schools with a large peer cohort. From what I can tell, it seems a bit random who made it into the magnet from those schools. I'm not saying the kids weren't high scoring, I'm just saying that they were not necessarily "extreme outliers," or at least the committee didn't have enough information in front of them to make that determination. Remember, the committee knew very little information that would have served to differentiate those kids, given that only percentile scores were reported for the COGAT. And the kids with the highest MAP scores (anecdotally, it is of course hard to know or verify what a kid's MAP score was, but kids do talk) were not necessarily the kids who got in. I think that a parent for the Cold Spring CES also reported that same information. The CES teachers also told me that they thought the selection seemed a bit random. I feel lucky that my kid got in; I wouldn't say that the process is designed to find "extreme outliers" among upper middle class kids.

Teacher said the same to us. Seemed like a random bunch in many classes. I don’t say more since I don’t want to get the teacher team in trouble. When the workload starts kicking in in HS and scores plummet it will get frustrating for all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think most people on dcum have heartily endorsed universal screening as a way to identify children who might have been missed in previous years and to generally expand the applicant pool. It was therefore only to be expected that there would be some drop off in the numbers of students coming from ESs that typically send a lot of students.
What makes me and other parents suspicious is that the number of students coming from high performing ES dropped so precipitously. It seems especially strange that only a couple of children from Cold Spring CES would gain admission to the middle school magnets this year as Cold Spring always reported the highest median magnet middle school test results in the past.
If you look at MCPS's own data (https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/schools/msmagnet/about/MS%20Magnet%20Field%20Test%20Data%20by%20Sending%20MS.pdf)
the sending middle school clusters that had the most students who did well on the COGAT test were: Hoover, Frost, Pyle, SSIMs, Sligo, Cabin John. These were the same schools that saw ridiculously low number of students accepted into the middle school magnets presumably on the basis of the peer cohort criteria. What is more telling is that only 25 students were accepted to Takoma from all the CES schools and only 28 were accepted to Eastern from all the CES schools.

I will also note that if MCPS was concerned that high performing students in low performing schools might not have a peer group, that may not be the case as nearly every middle school appears to have at a minimum 20 students who are "qualified" wrt their COGAT scores and so there are enough qualified students in every middle school to run an enriched math and enriched humanities class.

MCPS needs to release the median scores of accepted students for every sending middle school so we can see whether they did indeed find dozens more kids they missed in years past (in which case I will be the first to congratulate them) or whether they tried to socially engineer the program with a clumsy peer cohort device.

Sounds like there's already such a strong cohort at Cold Spring they don't need a magnet.

? high performing kids don't need a more challenging curriculum? You think a peer cohort is the magic bullet and can replace a dumbdown curriculum?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do t like the constant lies here from one individual. I really hope Jeff tracks and sees if she is coming from a MCPS server or something.

A) ces and magnet is not at all a “merit based system”. Merit based means quantitative testing based, like the NYC magnets were: stack ranked scores, take the top 400 scorers, publish them

B) MCPS Starr and smith have consistently said for four years that their focus is on the achievement gap and they feel adding a few diversity kids to the fixed ces and magnet programs may do that.

C) There is something tax payers, students, parents can do. And that is vote, file formal complaints, ask for transparency, ask for more centers, ask for better and more challenging curricula/more subject matter, and demand accountability.

A few diversity kids will never close the achievement gap. So I don't think that's their reasoning. I think they would like more kids to have the opportunity though.

[Anonymous]

We love the new enriched classes that came out of the cohort criteria. Our DD takes more rigorous classes without spending hours on the bus. Not to mention the many students who may have not been admitted or adequately challenged without this change. It seems like a huge win for MCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MCPS shouldn't release median scores because they'd tell us absolutely nothing other than what we already know.

Yes.. That students with much higher test scores weren't admitted because of peer cohort; that the threshold was indeed lowered.

Median scores wouldn't show that.

No one knows what the scores will show because MCPS hasn't released them. But it's obnoxious to keep insisting that the scores have tumbled now that there's universal screening, when having far more kids screened would suggest that MCPS has an opportunity to choose the best from a much larger pool.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MCPS shouldn't release median scores because they'd tell us absolutely nothing other than what we already know.

Yes.. That students with much higher test scores weren't admitted because of peer cohort; that the threshold was indeed lowered.

The median score of accepted students would not tell you that.

So what would then. If the scores of students accepted from some middle school clusters were lower than the scores of students rejected from more high performing clusters that would tell us that the peer cohort device had an undue influence on the selection process this year. How can we verify if this is what MCPS did?

You need the average/mean score for each MS and/or the cutoff scores. MCPS has never released that data and I doubt it will now. Also, many people on this board put too much emphasis on the median scores. All it told you in the past is what a PP stated, that half the students scored above or below that number. Yes, HGCs like Cold Spring had a higher median by a few points historically, but that doesn't rule out that there were kids that got in with lower scores-- in fact, it confirms that some kids did, but we don't know how many and what was the lowest score.

I think MCPS spread the seats amongst all of the MS schools. They accepted the top few students from each school. Does that mean some kids scored lower than others in some of the criteria, I am sure that is true. But that is why MCPS won't release the data because confidentiality can't be maintained if only 2-4 students got in per ES or center program.

This may well be what they did but that is grossly unfair to students from schools feeding into Hoover, Frost, Pyle, SSIM, Sligo and Cabin John. There are tons of kids who were shut out. I think the enriched courses are a fantastic idea for the top 20% of students in the county but the top 5% of students do need something different - they need a true magnet program. I think MCPS should consider putting a new magnet middle school in the Western part of the county.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MCPS shouldn't release median scores because they'd tell us absolutely nothing other than what we already know.

Yes.. That students with much higher test scores weren't admitted because of peer cohort; that the threshold was indeed lowered.

The median score of accepted students would not tell you that.

So what would then. If the scores of students accepted from some middle school clusters were lower than the scores of students rejected from more high performing clusters that would tell us that the peer cohort device had an undue influence on the selection process this year. How can we verify if this is what MCPS did?

You need the average/mean score for each MS and/or the cutoff scores. MCPS has never released that data and I doubt it will now. Also, many people on this board put too much emphasis on the median scores. All it told you in the past is what a PP stated, that half the students scored above or below that number. Yes, HGCs like Cold Spring had a higher median by a few points historically, but that doesn't rule out that there were kids that got in with lower scores-- in fact, it confirms that some kids did, but we don't know how many and what was the lowest score.

I think MCPS spread the seats amongst all of the MS schools. They accepted the top few students from each school. Does that mean some kids scored lower than others in some of the criteria, I am sure that is true. But that is why MCPS won't release the data because confidentiality can't be maintained if only 2-4 students got in per ES or center program.

This may well be what they did but that is grossly unfair to students from schools feeding into Hoover, Frost, Pyle, SSIM, Sligo and Cabin John. There are tons of kids who were shut out. I think the enriched courses are a fantastic idea for the top 20% of students in the county but the top 5% of students do need something different - they need a true magnet program. I think MCPS should consider putting a new magnet middle school in the Western part of the county.

I agree that MCPS needs to add more magnet seats and/or open another magnet in the western part of the country. I believe that was the main point of the Brookings article. MCPS doesn't want to financially invest in educating this population like the Florida example. I think fighting over who got 200 spaces and how MCPS did it is a waste of energy. The outrage on this and many other threads should be directed at opening new MS magnets and/or adding more than two magnet classes to MS schools with top 5% students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We love the new enriched classes that came out of the cohort criteria. Our DD takes more rigorous classes without spending hours on the bus. Not to mention the many students who may have not been admitted or adequately challenged without this change. It seems like a huge win for MCPS.

Who cares if you like it! My kid was cheated out of their spot because of racial quotas.

[Anonymous]

^^^(I personally don't think that the four magnet middle schools in the county are scary gang middle schools, but I know for a fact that there are people who do think they are)

I do think the crime in the area is a bigger influencer than people think. There are more people in the west who are willing to except the long bus ride to the Poolesville magnet -which is farther away than you think and a nightmare in bad weather. The same people decide the bus ride to SS is too far. If you pull up the crime maps for the areas around the Silver Spring schools it is pretty bad.

Honestly, its fine if some people don't want to go to school in Silver Spring because of the crime. Let them stay in their home schools but don't block the kids who score at the very top and want to go.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

^^^(I personally don't think that the four magnet middle schools in the county are scary gang middle schools, but I know for a fact that there are people who do think they are)

I do think the crime in the area is a bigger influencer than people think. There are more people in the west who are willing to except the long bus ride to the Poolesville magnet -which is farther away than you think and a nightmare in bad weather. The same people decide the bus ride to SS is too far. If you pull up the crime maps for the areas around the Silver Spring schools it is pretty bad.

Honestly, its fine if some people don't want to go to school in Silver Spring because of the crime. Let them stay in their home schools but don't block the kids who score at the very top and want to go.

Parents from the western part of the county should steer their kids clear of these horrible magnet programs. Those schools are full of junior felons!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

^^^(I personally don't think that the four magnet middle schools in the county are scary gang middle schools, but I know for a fact that there are people who do think they are)

I do think the crime in the area is a bigger influencer than people think. There are more people in the west who are willing to except the long bus ride to the Poolesville magnet -which is farther away than you think and a nightmare in bad weather. The same people decide the bus ride to SS is too far. If you pull up the crime maps for the areas around the Silver Spring schools it is pretty bad.

Honestly, its fine if some people don't want to go to school in Silver Spring because of the crime. Let them stay in their home schools but don't block the kids who score at the very top and want to go.

Parents from the western part of the county should steer their kids clear of these horrible magnet programs. Those schools are full of junior felons!

Another reason to love the cohort changes.