MCPS to end areawide Blair Magnet and countywide Richard Montgomery's IB program

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I agree that all mcps students who want these options (13 APs, Calc AB or BC? Multivariable?) should have them.

I do not think the regional program is the way to do that. I would add additional countywide programs as needed.

But realize that the universities are going to meet your student where they are and done may not give credit for certain APs.

Your student needs to maximize the opportunities at their school and give back to their community. That’s the key.

That's one key, and places the burden entirely on the student (and possibly sympathetic teachers working outside the norm) to rectify the difference in opportunity afforded by the local school.

Rectifying that disparity is the other key, and is on MCPS to resolve. That is, if they are being honest about their priorities.

MCPS is not willing to rectify it. They've been clear to some of us who have kids at schools that don't meet their needs. And, the new regions are going to make things worse, not better.

Generally, the A students (by objective measure, not report cards) are the ones who are able to handle rigor.

There are only 440 seats in Blair SMCS, for over 51,000 students in MCPS. More than 40% of those 440 seats are taken by students from Wootton and Churchill. This is not equitable. I like that the regional model will allow many more students access to sought-after programs.

These 440 kids were the best STEM kids in MCPS. It does not matter what cluster they came from. Now there will be dilution of all programs.

Wrong. Very few Blair SMCS kids come from Whitman, whose students win plenty of awards. If only 4 clusters send the vast majority of students, Blair SMCS is not getting the "best STEM kids" in MCPS. It's getting the nearest STEM kids in MCPS plus a few whose home high schools are not very good and don't mind busing for 2 hours a day.

Your claim is vastly untrue based on the fact that Blair SMCS on average sending 5-10 students to MIT, 10-20 to other ivies, 50% students to TOP 20 colleges, and 1-2 students to represent U.S.A. in international STEM competitions every year. That's the outcome from a total of 100-100 student body. Show me evidence that Whitman can produce that good stats.

You must not understand sampling. Whitman is a 3000+ student public high school cluster that accepts every student in its geographic cachement, whether they're English language learners or have cognitive disabilities. Comparing its results to a tiny magnet program that accepts only kids with high MAP-M scores is not the correct comparison.

No need to show percentage as it's unfair to compare percentage for a selected program vs. a public catchment. Show me the absolute college admission numbers because Whitman only can send >=100 qualified students to Blair if SMCS becomes regional. I think I can find the past results on Bethesda magazine, but you need to exclude the ones taking advantage of alumni heritage, or whatever money/power can buy as Whitman has many affluent families (the number is unknown on paper but Whitman parents should have a good understanding).

e.g., this one for 2023: https://bethesdamagazine.com/2023/09/13/where-montgomery-county-high-school-graduates-are-going-to-college/
Blair SMCS: MIT - 7; Harvard - 3; Princeton - 2; Yale - 6;
RMIB: MIT - 1; Harvard - 2; Princeton - 4; Yale - 1;
Whitman: MIT - 0; Harvard - 0; Princeton - 2; Yale - 3.

I'm just taking a quick look but you are welcome to provide more evidence.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree that all mcps students who want these options (13 APs, Calc AB or BC? Multivariable?) should have them.

I do not think the regional program is the way to do that. I would add additional countywide programs as needed.

But realize that the universities are going to meet your student where they are and done may not give credit for certain APs.

Your student needs to maximize the opportunities at their school and give back to their community. That’s the key.

That's one key, and places the burden entirely on the student (and possibly sympathetic teachers working outside the norm) to rectify the difference in opportunity afforded by the local school.

Rectifying that disparity is the other key, and is on MCPS to resolve. That is, if they are being honest about their priorities.

MCPS is not willing to rectify it. They've been clear to some of us who have kids at schools that don't meet their needs. And, the new regions are going to make things worse, not better.

Generally, the A students (by objective measure, not report cards) are the ones who are able to handle rigor.

There are only 440 seats in Blair SMCS, for over 51,000 students in MCPS. More than 40% of those 440 seats are taken by students from Wootton and Churchill. This is not equitable. I like that the regional model will allow many more students access to sought-after programs.

I said in one of my replies first based on my personal and anecdotal experience: SMCS curriculum is challenging even for the top 1% student. As I have one top 1% kid and one 0.1% kid in every possible measure, my top 0.1% kid rode through this program with joy and fullness, while the top 1% kid can struggle in some classes as I can envision (they are still young but not as talented). The 440 seats attract about the top 1%. You can use better measures to identify the absolute top 1%, or expand the seats to about 500 or so. But the only way to handle students > 90% but below 99% is to significantly water down the program. No single region among the 6 new regions would contribute that many 99% students. If you are lucky to be in Region #1 where Blair sits, you better pray the water down process happens slower. If you live in the other five regions, good luck to you as building-up even a significantly watered-down program still takes years of effort based on the past experience with forming the Poolsville SMCS.

+1 Applies to RMIB, as well, and for the IB, it will be even worse.

Look at the diploma rate of the other regions. If you scatter the 1% performers in RMIB to other regions, you will see the IB pass rate decline. Even if the teachers water down the curriculum so that the 90% students are able to keep up, the exam doesn't get watered down, so the pass rate will decline.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:The worst thing about this is the loss of the incredible magnet teachers that we will have at both the RM IB and Blair SMCS. My son is a student at the Blair Magnet program, and their math teacher has a PHD in math from Yale! Other teachers are equally qualified and hold PHDs from many renowned universities in the country. There is no way that these teachers will opt for teaching county magnet programs, as they are more than qualified to teach college level classes with much more pay as well. They stay because they enjoy teaching a group of highly motivated students who love to learn. The loss of teachers will be something we won't be able to replace, even after Taylor is gone.

Seems like you are making a lot of assumptions here, about the teachers and the future students.

Not that pp, but my child also goes to the same program, and more than one teachers told their personal stories to students about why they chose to stay in Blair SMACS, and the reasons are highly similar to what described above. They will choose to leave the magnet as it's not rewarding anymore to themselves, and practically many of the current courses will not exist anymore due to lack of enrollment.

If true, those teachers are not great in reasoning then, and perhaps not as incredible as some PPs describe. They’re assuming students in the future regional magnet will not be a group of highly motivated students who love to learn. We don’t know the criteria of the regional program, so we don’t know what those students will be like. If they maintain a hard cutoff of 90% MAP (“A” students by objective measure), the type of students should be the same. Incredible teachers are good at reasoning and not emotionally reactive.

It has been repeatedly cited in this forum that the median MAP-M score for the admitted students is somewhere around 285, which is >99% for Grade 12 according to NWEA breakdown. More than 50% of the current SMACS students came from Churchill and Wootton, and the 3rd is WJ. Many admitted students had won state or national STEM prizes before joining SMACS. What makes believe that the new regional program wouldn't be significantly watered down?

The fact that most of the current students came from just 3 schools suggests that it should be no problem to fill the regional programs with kids from 4-5 schools each, right? The admission standards might have to be a tad bit lower if the distribution of smart kids isn't exactly equal between those 3 schools and the others in the county, but presumably that's a pretty small difference.

Is this a joke?
It's astronomically different. What is your explanation for why almost no one in Silver Spring qualifies for SMACS, while students from Rockville/Potomac/Bethesda bus in from far away?

SMACS already struggles to fill upper level courses, offering many electives only once every 2 years.

Splitting Blair SMACS into 3 would eliminate those classes.

The Functions (advanced/accelerated Alg2/Precalculus) class has 20 kids. If you split those kids across 2-3 regions, what happens to them?

Yes, there are students that would thrive in regional STEM programs that enhance their current home school offerings with more AP options and some electives. No, no one is helped by shattering the current SMACS into 4 parts and pretending that those kids are well-matched to programs that run courses at half the academic pace.

What on earth makes you think that "almost no one in Silver Spring qualifies"? There's like 30+ Silver Spring kids who actually attend Blair SMCS every year right now, plus presumably many others who get "beat out' by richer kids from elsewhere in the county who can juice their MAP scores in ways most Silver Spring families can't. Why would the difference in the number of smart, motivated kids from rich schools and poor schools be "astronomically different"?

Plus lots of bright Silver Spring kids attend the Wheaton engineering and biomedical magnets, not because they don't qualify for SMCS, but because their interests are in engineering, medicine, and life sciences.

And the engineering magnet (application-based) at Wheaton will be made into an interest-based, less rigorous program. Wheaton's biomedical application-based program is being cancelled, or perhaps moved to a criteria-based medical-science program at Kennedy HS in the new Region 3. This isn't fair to the Wheaton community - that school built these programs up and they are effectively losing each of them. In place of its Engineering program, Wheaton is getting one criteria-based SMCS program, which probably has some overlap with the current engineering program. Why introduce this type of chaos in Wheaton HS?

I made my previous comment not knowing anything about the futures of these programs. The open house for engineering last fall looked great. The academies for engineering and social studies looked good too. It seemed like Wheaton takes its academies seriously (unlike Blair where the open house barely mentioned them).

At the Wheaton engineering academy it looks like one could get a good engineering prep education, no multivariable calculus, but some of the same engineering courses as the magnet. I don't know what the outcomes are like for it, or how serious the students are, but it might be a good indication of what interest based programs are like.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree that all mcps students who want these options (13 APs, Calc AB or BC? Multivariable?) should have them.

I do not think the regional program is the way to do that. I would add additional countywide programs as needed.

But realize that the universities are going to meet your student where they are and done may not give credit for certain APs.

Your student needs to maximize the opportunities at their school and give back to their community. That’s the key.

That's one key, and places the burden entirely on the student (and possibly sympathetic teachers working outside the norm) to rectify the difference in opportunity afforded by the local school.

Rectifying that disparity is the other key, and is on MCPS to resolve. That is, if they are being honest about their priorities.

MCPS is not willing to rectify it. They've been clear to some of us who have kids at schools that don't meet their needs. And, the new regions are going to make things worse, not better.

Generally, the A students (by objective measure, not report cards) are the ones who are able to handle rigor.

There are only 440 seats in Blair SMCS, for over 51,000 students in MCPS. More than 40% of those 440 seats are taken by students from Wootton and Churchill. This is not equitable. I like that the regional model will allow many more students access to sought-after programs.

These 440 kids were the best STEM kids in MCPS. It does not matter what cluster they came from. Now there will be dilution of all programs.

Wrong. Very few Blair SMCS kids come from Whitman, whose students win plenty of awards. If only 4 clusters send the vast majority of students, Blair SMCS is not getting the "best STEM kids" in MCPS. It's getting the nearest STEM kids in MCPS plus a few whose home high schools are not very good and don't mind busing for 2 hours a day.

Your claim is vastly untrue based on the fact that Blair SMCS on average sending 5-10 students to MIT, 10-20 to other ivies, 50% students to TOP 20 colleges, and 1-2 students to represent U.S.A. in international STEM competitions every year. That's the outcome from a total of 100-100 student body. Show me evidence that Whitman can produce that good stats.

You must not understand sampling. Whitman is a 3000+ student public high school cluster that accepts every student in its geographic cachement, whether they're English language learners or have cognitive disabilities. Comparing its results to a tiny magnet program that accepts only kids with high MAP-M scores is not the correct comparison.

Teacher from Springbrook Cluster here. I wish my students had access to Whitman's program for students with cognitive disabilities. My students with cognitive disabilities remained in mainstream classrooms, despite one receiving an IEP (after 1.5 years) and having a 50 IQ score. It's great that the Whitman Cluster scores this level of caring from the school district.

[Anonymous]

It is eyebrow-raising that over 40% of students in MCPS’s most sought-after program, Blair SMCS, come from only two schools (Churchill and Wootton).

There are many highly capable students from our almost 52,000 total student body, beyond the 440 seats available, that would benefit from such a program.

It is good that regional magnets will allow many more SMCS seats to be available.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is eyebrow-raising that over 40% of students in MCPS’s most sought-after program, Blair SMCS, come from only two schools (Churchill and Wootton).

There are many highly capable students from our almost 52,000 total student body, beyond the 440 seats available, that would benefit from such a program.

It is good that regional magnets will allow many more SMCS seats to be available.

I wrote the above post and am the one who originally pointed out this apparent pipeline. FWIW, my children are 99 percentile, but I think anyone > 90 percentile can handle the rigor.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The worst thing about this is the loss of the incredible magnet teachers that we will have at both the RM IB and Blair SMCS. My son is a student at the Blair Magnet program, and their math teacher has a PHD in math from Yale! Other teachers are equally qualified and hold PHDs from many renowned universities in the country. There is no way that these teachers will opt for teaching county magnet programs, as they are more than qualified to teach college level classes with much more pay as well. They stay because they enjoy teaching a group of highly motivated students who love to learn. The loss of teachers will be something we won't be able to replace, even after Taylor is gone.

Seems like you are making a lot of assumptions here, about the teachers and the future students.

Not that pp, but my child also goes to the same program, and more than one teachers told their personal stories to students about why they chose to stay in Blair SMACS, and the reasons are highly similar to what described above. They will choose to leave the magnet as it's not rewarding anymore to themselves, and practically many of the current courses will not exist anymore due to lack of enrollment.

If true, those teachers are not great in reasoning then, and perhaps not as incredible as some PPs describe. They’re assuming students in the future regional magnet will not be a group of highly motivated students who love to learn. We don’t know the criteria of the regional program, so we don’t know what those students will be like. If they maintain a hard cutoff of 90% MAP (“A” students by objective measure), the type of students should be the same. Incredible teachers are good at reasoning and not emotionally reactive.

It has been repeatedly cited in this forum that the median MAP-M score for the admitted students is somewhere around 285, which is >99% for Grade 12 according to NWEA breakdown. More than 50% of the current SMACS students came from Churchill and Wootton, and the 3rd is WJ. Many admitted students had won state or national STEM prizes before joining SMACS. What makes believe that the new regional program wouldn't be significantly watered down?

The fact that most of the current students came from just 3 schools suggests that it should be no problem to fill the regional programs with kids from 4-5 schools each, right? The admission standards might have to be a tad bit lower if the distribution of smart kids isn't exactly equal between those 3 schools and the others in the county, but presumably that's a pretty small difference.

Is this a joke?
It's astronomically different. What is your explanation for why almost no one in Silver Spring qualifies for SMACS, while students from Rockville/Potomac/Bethesda bus in from far away?

SMACS already struggles to fill upper level courses, offering many electives only once every 2 years.

Splitting Blair SMACS into 3 would eliminate those classes.

The Functions (advanced/accelerated Alg2/Precalculus) class has 20 kids. If you split those kids across 2-3 regions, what happens to them?

Yes, there are students that would thrive in regional STEM programs that enhance their current home school offerings with more AP options and some electives. No, no one is helped by shattering the current SMACS into 4 parts and pretending that those kids are well-matched to programs that run courses at half the academic pace.

What on earth makes you think that "almost no one in Silver Spring qualifies"? There's like 30+ Silver Spring kids who actually attend Blair SMCS every year right now, plus presumably many others who get "beat out' by richer kids from elsewhere in the county who can juice their MAP scores in ways most Silver Spring families can't. Why would the difference in the number of smart, motivated kids from rich schools and poor schools be "astronomically different"?

Plus lots of bright Silver Spring kids attend the Wheaton engineering and biomedical magnets, not because they don't qualify for SMCS, but because their interests are in engineering, medicine, and life sciences.

And the engineering magnet (application-based) at Wheaton will be made into an interest-based, less rigorous program. Wheaton's biomedical application-based program is being cancelled, or perhaps moved to a criteria-based medical-science program at Kennedy HS in the new Region 3. This isn't fair to the Wheaton community - that school built these programs up and they are effectively losing each of them. In place of its Engineering program, Wheaton is getting one criteria-based SMCS program, which probably has some overlap with the current engineering program. Why introduce this type of chaos in Wheaton HS?

I made my previous comment not knowing anything about the futures of these programs. The open house for engineering last fall looked great. The academies for engineering and social studies looked good too. It seemed like Wheaton takes its academies seriously (unlike Blair where the open house barely mentioned them).

At the Wheaton engineering academy it looks like one could get a good engineering prep education, no multivariable calculus, but some of the same engineering courses as the magnet. I don't know what the outcomes are like for it, or how serious the students are, but it might be a good indication of what interest based programs are like.

Wheaton HS MV.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is eyebrow-raising that over 40% of students in MCPS’s most sought-after program, Blair SMCS, come from only two schools (Churchill and Wootton).

There are many highly capable students from our almost 52,000 total student body, beyond the 440 seats available, that would benefit from such a program.

It is good that regional magnets will allow many more SMCS seats to be available.

Which is unreasonable given they have options for higher level classes, unlike other DCC schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It is eyebrow-raising that over 40% of students in MCPS’s most sought-after program, Blair SMCS, come from only two schools (Churchill and Wootton).

There are many highly capable students from our almost 52,000 total student body, beyond the 440 seats available, that would benefit from such a program.

It is good that regional magnets will allow many more SMCS seats to be available.

That's absolutely not a reason to change the existing successful program.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is eyebrow-raising that over 40% of students in MCPS’s most sought-after program, Blair SMCS, come from only two schools (Churchill and Wootton).

There are many highly capable students from our almost 52,000 total student body, beyond the 440 seats available, that would benefit from such a program.

It is good that regional magnets will allow many more SMCS seats to be available.

That's absolutely not a reason to change the existing successful program.

They should just keep blair open to the DCC where there are not as many opportunities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is eyebrow-raising that over 40% of students in MCPS’s most sought-after program, Blair SMCS, come from only two schools (Churchill and Wootton).

There are many highly capable students from our almost 52,000 total student body, beyond the 440 seats available, that would benefit from such a program.

It is good that regional magnets will allow many more SMCS seats to be available.

I wrote the above post and am the one who originally pointed out this apparent pipeline. FWIW, my children are 99 percentile, but I think anyone > 90 percentile can handle the rigor.

On what basis do you think that?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is eyebrow-raising that over 40% of students in MCPS’s most sought-after program, Blair SMCS, come from only two schools (Churchill and Wootton).

There are many highly capable students from our almost 52,000 total student body, beyond the 440 seats available, that would benefit from such a program.

It is good that regional magnets will allow many more SMCS seats to be available.

That's absolutely not a reason to change the existing successful program.

That’s your opinion, not a fact. As a parent in a cluster where few students attend SMCS because of the long commute, I hope the regional programs will offer more opportunities to students beyond the few clusters that send kids now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree that all mcps students who want these options (13 APs, Calc AB or BC? Multivariable?) should have them.

I do not think the regional program is the way to do that. I would add additional countywide programs as needed.

But realize that the universities are going to meet your student where they are and done may not give credit for certain APs.

Your student needs to maximize the opportunities at their school and give back to their community. That’s the key.

That's one key, and places the burden entirely on the student (and possibly sympathetic teachers working outside the norm) to rectify the difference in opportunity afforded by the local school.

Rectifying that disparity is the other key, and is on MCPS to resolve. That is, if they are being honest about their priorities.

MCPS is not willing to rectify it. They've been clear to some of us who have kids at schools that don't meet their needs. And, the new regions are going to make things worse, not better.

Generally, the A students (by objective measure, not report cards) are the ones who are able to handle rigor.

There are only 440 seats in Blair SMCS, for over 51,000 students in MCPS. More than 40% of those 440 seats are taken by students from Wootton and Churchill. This is not equitable. I like that the regional model will allow many more students access to sought-after programs.

These 440 kids were the best STEM kids in MCPS. It does not matter what cluster they came from. Now there will be dilution of all programs.

Wrong. Very few Blair SMCS kids come from Whitman, whose students win plenty of awards. If only 4 clusters send the vast majority of students, Blair SMCS is not getting the "best STEM kids" in MCPS. It's getting the nearest STEM kids in MCPS plus a few whose home high schools are not very good and don't mind busing for 2 hours a day.

The nearest kids aren't half the population of SMCS.

Whitman sends a bunch to SMCS every year. It's a less STEMy demographic than Churchill and Wootton. More lawyers and business people who send their kids to Big 3 l Big 5 privates instead of RMIB, so they can park a teenager's Acura or Range Rover.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is eyebrow-raising that over 40% of students in MCPS’s most sought-after program, Blair SMCS, come from only two schools (Churchill and Wootton).

There are many highly capable students from our almost 52,000 total student body, beyond the 440 seats available, that would benefit from such a program.

It is good that regional magnets will allow many more SMCS seats to be available.

That's absolutely not a reason to change the existing successful program.

That’s your opinion, not a fact. As a parent in a cluster where few students attend SMCS because of the long commute, I hope the regional programs will offer more opportunities to students beyond the few clusters that send kids now.

It's also opinion that a 90% performer can handle those very advanced magnet level classes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The worst thing about this is the loss of the incredible magnet teachers that we will have at both the RM IB and Blair SMCS. My son is a student at the Blair Magnet program, and their math teacher has a PHD in math from Yale! Other teachers are equally qualified and hold PHDs from many renowned universities in the country. There is no way that these teachers will opt for teaching county magnet programs, as they are more than qualified to teach college level classes with much more pay as well. They stay because they enjoy teaching a group of highly motivated students who love to learn. The loss of teachers will be something we won't be able to replace, even after Taylor is gone.

Seems like you are making a lot of assumptions here, about the teachers and the future students.

Not that pp, but my child also goes to the same program, and more than one teachers told their personal stories to students about why they chose to stay in Blair SMACS, and the reasons are highly similar to what described above. They will choose to leave the magnet as it's not rewarding anymore to themselves, and practically many of the current courses will not exist anymore due to lack of enrollment.

If true, those teachers are not great in reasoning then, and perhaps not as incredible as some PPs describe. They’re assuming students in the future regional magnet will not be a group of highly motivated students who love to learn. We don’t know the criteria of the regional program, so we don’t know what those students will be like. If they maintain a hard cutoff of 90% MAP (“A” students by objective measure), the type of students should be the same. Incredible teachers are good at reasoning and not emotionally reactive.

It has been repeatedly cited in this forum that the median MAP-M score for the admitted students is somewhere around 285, which is >99% for Grade 12 according to NWEA breakdown. More than 50% of the current SMACS students came from Churchill and Wootton, and the 3rd is WJ. Many admitted students had won state or national STEM prizes before joining SMACS. What makes believe that the new regional program wouldn't be significantly watered down?

The fact that most of the current students came from just 3 schools suggests that it should be no problem to fill the regional programs with kids from 4-5 schools each, right? The admission standards might have to be a tad bit lower if the distribution of smart kids isn't exactly equal between those 3 schools and the others in the county, but presumably that's a pretty small difference.

Is this a joke?
It's astronomically different. What is your explanation for why almost no one in Silver Spring qualifies for SMACS, while students from Rockville/Potomac/Bethesda bus in from far away?

SMACS already struggles to fill upper level courses, offering many electives only once every 2 years.

Splitting Blair SMACS into 3 would eliminate those classes.

The Functions (advanced/accelerated Alg2/Precalculus) class has 20 kids. If you split those kids across 2-3 regions, what happens to them?

Yes, there are students that would thrive in regional STEM programs that enhance their current home school offerings with more AP options and some electives. No, no one is helped by shattering the current SMACS into 4 parts and pretending that those kids are well-matched to programs that run courses at half the academic pace.

What on earth makes you think that "almost no one in Silver Spring qualifies"? There's like 30+ Silver Spring kids who actually attend Blair SMCS every year right now, plus presumably many others who get "beat out' by richer kids from elsewhere in the county who can juice their MAP scores in ways most Silver Spring families can't. Why would the difference in the number of smart, motivated kids from rich schools and poor schools be "astronomically different"?

Plus lots of bright Silver Spring kids attend the Wheaton engineering and biomedical magnets, not because they don't qualify for SMCS, but because their interests are in engineering, medicine, and life sciences.

Wheaton PLTW is a great program, but it's maybe 0.75 of the STEM program that SMACS is. SMACS offers an extra year each of math, lab science, and computer science via its accelerated courses (Functions A/B or Precalc A/B/C, Physics "DP" and Chem "DP", and CS ADSA), plus many electives to choose from.

The only unique offering at Wheaton PLTW is the junior year very specific engineering elective (civil aviation, bio, etc), not much consolation for being a whole year or more behind in 3 different STEM subjects compared to SMCS.

Look at the Wheaton curriculum:
https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/wheatonhs/academies/Applicationprograms/#Engineeringapp

And the SMCS curriculum:
https://old.mbhs.edu/departments/magnet/ParentResources/PlanningGuideJR-SRYrs.pdf