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.
It's not a competition though, so they aren't behind. And they are headed to top university engineering programs so they are doing just fine.
That's right, it's not a competition! So there's no need to blow up the existing programs that meet different needs for different students!
No one is saying blow up the existing programs; they are saying expand or add more programs to make it accessible to more students. You aren't going to get support when you are actively trying to exclude smart kids.
They absolutely are blowing up the programs. There won’t be enough students for offering the courses they do now in these programs, so the curriculum and opportunities will be watered down. They are moving humanities to interest based instead of by application. They are completely blowing up Global Ecology, it will no longer exist.
Oh the drama, there were 800 students who qualified last year.. There is enough students, the questions do those students want it and no all do.
What do you mean by qualified? That is nonsense.
As in they make it on the waitlist after screening and those are the ones who applied. Many kids have zero interest.
Qualification standards for application is bare minimum. You need to finish Algebra 1 by 8th grade, have a GPA of 3.0 or up, and live in the catchment area. The accepted ones have at least finished geometry (20 or so finished algebra 2), have a perfect GPA, does ton of ECs, and had been competing at national level for STEM relevant competitions.
And I haven’t mentioned that 40-50% of the graduates of Blair SMCS students have perfect GPA for all challenging magnet courses and AP ELA courses, finished at least 10 AP tests with 5, won medals in numerous national competitions, and quite some published first author papers. You don’t want your kids to compete with them for college admission unless your kid is exceptionally outstanding and extremely self-driven.
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.
It's not a competition though, so they aren't behind. And they are headed to top university engineering programs so they are doing just fine.
That's right, it's not a competition! So there's no need to blow up the existing programs that meet different needs for different students!
No one is saying blow up the existing programs; they are saying expand or add more programs to make it accessible to more students. You aren't going to get support when you are actively trying to exclude smart kids.
+1 million. It's too bad that people are on such extremes on this thread and not talking about constructive ways to improve MCPS's draft documents.
Right now the existing programs aren't serving many high school areas which is a clear issue, and part of it is the long commute times for certain areas which regional programs would help with. But the current proposal is for 6 new regional "magnets" and people who know MCPS think they only have capacity to manage 2-3 regional magnets, I think those are the type of suggestions that should be made to the Board, rather than screaming "the sky is falling" and "MCPS will never win a national award again if you make any changes at all to the status quo."
This. Can't there be some constructive dialogue about how to improve the MCPS proposal? I think the suggestion of 2-3 magnets rather than 6 regional magnets is a good one and might go a long way to ameliorate some of the stress being expressed by current parents who say that MCPS can't handle so many magnets being implemented in such a short period. I would also suggest they try to improve the selection criteria and move beyond using only a single data point on MAP-M or MAP-R to adding COGAT to select kids.
You’re both right about this idea but isn’t this the type of solution these people are paid to come up with? It’s a pretty obvious one too. Sure, I’m happy to be constructive but if this solution hasn’t been discussed yet, I would assume they don’t like it. Or is that giving them too much credit?
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.
It's not a competition though, so they aren't behind. And they are headed to top university engineering programs so they are doing just fine.
That's right, it's not a competition! So there's no need to blow up the existing programs that meet different needs for different students!
No one is saying blow up the existing programs; they are saying expand or add more programs to make it accessible to more students. You aren't going to get support when you are actively trying to exclude smart kids.
+1 million. It's too bad that people are on such extremes on this thread and not talking about constructive ways to improve MCPS's draft documents.
Right now the existing programs aren't serving many high school areas which is a clear issue, and part of it is the long commute times for certain areas which regional programs would help with. But the current proposal is for 6 new regional "magnets" and people who know MCPS think they only have capacity to manage 2-3 regional magnets, I think those are the type of suggestions that should be made to the Board, rather than screaming "the sky is falling" and "MCPS will never win a national award again if you make any changes at all to the status quo."
This. Can't there be some constructive dialogue about how to improve the MCPS proposal? I think the suggestion of 2-3 magnets rather than 6 regional magnets is a good one and might go a long way to ameliorate some of the stress being expressed by current parents who say that MCPS can't handle so many magnets being implemented in such a short period. I would also suggest they try to improve the selection criteria and move beyond using only a single data point on MAP-M or MAP-R to adding COGAT to select kids.
You’re both right about this idea but isn’t this the type of solution these people are paid to come up with? It’s a pretty obvious one too. Sure, I’m happy to be constructive but if this solution hasn’t been discussed yet, I would assume they don’t like it. Or is that giving them too much credit?
Because they're working backwards from the solution they want to end up with (the regional model), not looking at the challenges and genuinely trying to identify what the best solution is. I''m on the design team and they basically just said the only two choices were "keep the system as it is with small tweaks" or the 6 region model, and it was pretty clear that it was going to end up with the 6 region model no matter what.
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.
It's not a competition though, so they aren't behind. And they are headed to top university engineering programs so they are doing just fine.
That's right, it's not a competition! So there's no need to blow up the existing programs that meet different needs for different students!
No one is saying blow up the existing programs; they are saying expand or add more programs to make it accessible to more students. You aren't going to get support when you are actively trying to exclude smart kids.
+1 million. It's too bad that people are on such extremes on this thread and not talking about constructive ways to improve MCPS's draft documents.
Right now the existing programs aren't serving many high school areas which is a clear issue, and part of it is the long commute times for certain areas which regional programs would help with. But the current proposal is for 6 new regional "magnets" and people who know MCPS think they only have capacity to manage 2-3 regional magnets, I think those are the type of suggestions that should be made to the Board, rather than screaming "the sky is falling" and "MCPS will never win a national award again if you make any changes at all to the status quo."
This. Can't there be some constructive dialogue about how to improve the MCPS proposal? I think the suggestion of 2-3 magnets rather than 6 regional magnets is a good one and might go a long way to ameliorate some of the stress being expressed by current parents who say that MCPS can't handle so many magnets being implemented in such a short period. I would also suggest they try to improve the selection criteria and move beyond using only a single data point on MAP-M or MAP-R to adding COGAT to select kids.
You’re both right about this idea but isn’t this the type of solution these people are paid to come up with? It’s a pretty obvious one too. Sure, I’m happy to be constructive but if this solution hasn’t been discussed yet, I would assume they don’t like it. Or is that giving them too much credit?
Because they're working backwards from the solution they want to end up with (the regional model), not looking at the challenges and genuinely trying to identify what the best solution is. I''m on the design team and they basically just said the only two choices were "keep the system as it is with small tweaks" or the 6 region model, and it was pretty clear that it was going to end up with the 6 region model no matter what.
Would you please consider emailing BOE members and go to make a testimony? People (especially BOE members) need to hear from someone from the design team how the community and stakeholder feedbacks are completely ignored. Central office is pushing an agenda for the sole purpose of pushing this agenda.
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.
It's not a competition though, so they aren't behind. And they are headed to top university engineering programs so they are doing just fine.
That's right, it's not a competition! So there's no need to blow up the existing programs that meet different needs for different students!
No one is saying blow up the existing programs; they are saying expand or add more programs to make it accessible to more students. You aren't going to get support when you are actively trying to exclude smart kids.
+1 million. It's too bad that people are on such extremes on this thread and not talking about constructive ways to improve MCPS's draft documents.
Right now the existing programs aren't serving many high school areas which is a clear issue, and part of it is the long commute times for certain areas which regional programs would help with. But the current proposal is for 6 new regional "magnets" and people who know MCPS think they only have capacity to manage 2-3 regional magnets, I think those are the type of suggestions that should be made to the Board, rather than screaming "the sky is falling" and "MCPS will never win a national award again if you make any changes at all to the status quo."
This. Can't there be some constructive dialogue about how to improve the MCPS proposal? I think the suggestion of 2-3 magnets rather than 6 regional magnets is a good one and might go a long way to ameliorate some of the stress being expressed by current parents who say that MCPS can't handle so many magnets being implemented in such a short period. I would also suggest they try to improve the selection criteria and move beyond using only a single data point on MAP-M or MAP-R to adding COGAT to select kids.
You’re both right about this idea but isn’t this the type of solution these people are paid to come up with? It’s a pretty obvious one too. Sure, I’m happy to be constructive but if this solution hasn’t been discussed yet, I would assume they don’t like it. Or is that giving them too much credit?
Because they're working backwards from the solution they want to end up with (the regional model), not looking at the challenges and genuinely trying to identify what the best solution is. I''m on the design team and they basically just said the only two choices were "keep the system as it is with small tweaks" or the 6 region model, and it was pretty clear that it was going to end up with the 6 region model no matter what.
And if you are concerned about the non-disclosure agreement that you had to sign before joining the design team, I don't think you need to worry. They've never been hold accountable, and they shouldn't be able to hold accountable of an honest "whistle blower".
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.
It's not a competition though, so they aren't behind. And they are headed to top university engineering programs so they are doing just fine.
That's right, it's not a competition! So there's no need to blow up the existing programs that meet different needs for different students!
No one is saying blow up the existing programs; they are saying expand or add more programs to make it accessible to more students. You aren't going to get support when you are actively trying to exclude smart kids.
+1 million. It's too bad that people are on such extremes on this thread and not talking about constructive ways to improve MCPS's draft documents.
Right now the existing programs aren't serving many high school areas which is a clear issue, and part of it is the long commute times for certain areas which regional programs would help with. But the current proposal is for 6 new regional "magnets" and people who know MCPS think they only have capacity to manage 2-3 regional magnets, I think those are the type of suggestions that should be made to the Board, rather than screaming "the sky is falling" and "MCPS will never win a national award again if you make any changes at all to the status quo."
This. Can't there be some constructive dialogue about how to improve the MCPS proposal? I think the suggestion of 2-3 magnets rather than 6 regional magnets is a good one and might go a long way to ameliorate some of the stress being expressed by current parents who say that MCPS can't handle so many magnets being implemented in such a short period. I would also suggest they try to improve the selection criteria and move beyond using only a single data point on MAP-M or MAP-R to adding COGAT to select kids.
You’re both right about this idea but isn’t this the type of solution these people are paid to come up with? It’s a pretty obvious one too. Sure, I’m happy to be constructive but if this solution hasn’t been discussed yet, I would assume they don’t like it. Or is that giving them too much credit?
Because they're working backwards from the solution they want to end up with (the regional model), not looking at the challenges and genuinely trying to identify what the best solution is. I''m on the design team and they basically just said the only two choices were "keep the system as it is with small tweaks" or the 6 region model, and it was pretty clear that it was going to end up with the 6 region model no matter what.
And if you are concerned about the non-disclosure agreement that you had to sign before joining the design team, I don't think you need to worry. They've never been hold accountable, and they shouldn't be able to hold accountable of an honest "whistle blower".
DP. It's been reported that Taylor released them from the NDA.
Anonymous wrote:There also aren’t enough jobs for those kids that major in STEM. Seems like they’re aren’t enough entry level jobs for most college graduates these days. So what are we doing this all for?!?
Yes there are.
Check the latest data and Stanford study on the impact of AI.
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