After ELC

[Anonymous]

What comes after ELC/CES for students who don’t get admitted to the magnet program?

[Anonymous]

Back to their home school. Take the most advanced classes possible.

[Anonymous]

This is honestly an enormous weak link, but also an area for parent advocacy.

Up until about 5 years ago, middle schools offered both an advanced English class and a grade level class. The new honors for all system means that there is not only a single curriculum, but kids are not typically cohorted and every class is heterogeneous.

Similarly, HIGH was designed to deliver a magnet level curriculum at home. Schools for kids who strengths lie in analytical thinking, writing, and social studies. However, implementation was left up to individual administrators, which has meant that some schools have cohorted HIGH and some do not.

If I were the parent of a current 3rd through 5th grader, I would be putting my efforts into advocating for appropriate differentiation in English and social studies at the middle school level.

[Anonymous]

My ELC kid didn't win any magnet lotteries and went to the home middle school, as PP said. Now as a 6th grader, he is taking HIGH (historical inquiry into global humanities) and AMP (which is 7th grade "amplified" math, after doing 5/6 combined last year). The rest of the classes are sadly not enriched at all. The English curriculum is a particular bummer after the rich and interesting ELC material.

HIGH has been great and includes reading historical fiction as well as varied nonfiction material. There's also a lot of discussion and a fair amount of writing, and they are doing model UN this spring. I would make sure that your ELC kid is placed into HIGH for 6th.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is honestly an enormous weak link, but also an area for parent advocacy.

Up until about 5 years ago, middle schools offered both an advanced English class and a grade level class. The new honors for all system means that there is not only a single curriculum, but kids are not typically cohorted and every class is heterogeneous.

Similarly, HIGH was designed to deliver a magnet level curriculum at home. Schools for kids who strengths lie in analytical thinking, writing, and social studies. However, implementation was left up to individual administrators, which has meant that some schools have cohorted HIGH and some do not.

If I were the parent of a current 3rd through 5th grader, I would be putting my efforts into advocating for appropriate differentiation in English and social studies at the middle school level.

Advanced English was never an "honors" class nor was it "advanced". Everyone was in advanced English and then kids below grade level were put in on level English (if your school offered both levels). My kids' MS had both, and there was only one section of on-level per grade. Everyone else was in advanced english.

[Anonymous]

My daughter is in this situation. MAP-R scores are phenomenal but she's not in CES and she didn't get into any of the whole magnet middle schools. Her home middle school offers "Advanced English" for everyone, which is just absurd.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:This is honestly an enormous weak link, but also an area for parent advocacy.

Up until about 5 years ago, middle schools offered both an advanced English class and a grade level class. The new honors for all system means that there is not only a single curriculum, but kids are not typically cohorted and every class is heterogeneous.

Similarly, HIGH was designed to deliver a magnet level curriculum at home. Schools for kids who strengths lie in analytical thinking, writing, and social studies. However, implementation was left up to individual administrators, which has meant that some schools have cohorted HIGH and some do not.

If I were the parent of a current 3rd through 5th grader, I would be putting my efforts into advocating for appropriate differentiation in English and social studies at the middle school level.

Advanced English was never an "honors" class nor was it "advanced". Everyone was in advanced English and then kids below grade level were put in on level English (if your school offered both levels). My kids' MS had both, and there was only one section of on-level per grade. Everyone else was in advanced english.

We need to stop calling things that aren't advanced, advanced just to make average kids feel smarter than they are. We have made it such that being regular and on-level is bad, so now MCPS contorts itself to label things as advanced that actually aren't advanced at all.

This hurts kids because it makes them think they're something they're not, and this can be painful when they're faced with that reality at the high school or middle school level when they're finally faced with a class that truly does operate at an advanced level.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What comes after ELC/CES for students who don’t get admitted to the magnet program?

They disconnect magnet selection (directly, anyway), so it's the same as comes for everyone else:

Potential to be identified for the MS criteria-based magnet lotteries,

Related HIGH and/or AIM/AMP at the home school if identified either centrally for the lotteries or by the school to manage class size,

Opportunity to apply for the three MSMC program schools, which offer a theme and a few related courses,

Base curriculum for the rest, with some different elective and extracurricular options depending on school, and

Varying rigor across schools among these, from descriptions here and elsewhere, resulting in different experiences during school, varying performance-based measures for HS magnets and varying levels of preparation for HS workloads.

[Anonymous]

People have described the standard middle school curriculum with its two enriched classes. Middle School is pretty abysmal. A way to make it more interesting for an advanced kid is to include world language as an elective.

In high school there are a lot of options.

[Anonymous]

There is definitely varying rigor across schools. My DC’s ELC teacher is awful (does not know how to teach or truly help students, does not make corrections including on glaring mistakes, the list goes on) and I don’t see the difference between her and a non-ELC teacher. The quality control is lacking across schools.

But more than that I am not at all enthusiastic about what I’m seeing of the ELC curriculum either. They read more interesting books and cover somewhat more than the regular class, but that seems about it.

MS seems to be more of the same.

I received a solid education from a highly regarded school so it is painful to see how mediocre it is at the ES level here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There is definitely varying rigor across schools. My DC’s ELC teacher is awful (does not know how to teach or truly help students, does not make corrections including on glaring mistakes, the list goes on) and I don’t see the difference between her and a non-ELC teacher. The quality control is lacking across schools.

But more than that I am not at all enthusiastic about what I’m seeing of the ELC curriculum either. They read more interesting books and cover somewhat more than the regular class, but that seems about it.

MS seems to be more of the same.

I received a solid education from a highly regarded school so it is painful to see how mediocre it is at the ES level here.

And what exactly was covered for you during ES?

[Anonymous]

The MS English curriculum is TERRIBLE for advanced learners. Content is at or below grade level, and it often moves very slow--not covering anywhere near all the material in the curriculum. There is one novel and one longer writing assignment per quarter, but even those don't present really any challenges for advanced learners. They really need to create a new class that is enriched for kids who need it.

HIGH (the enriched social studies class) has some extra readings/projects on top of the core social studies class, but at least in our school isn't really all that different. Definitely nothing like CES/ELC and not a substitute for a truly challenging English class.

Parents of advanced readers/writers really should be pressuring MCPS to create an enriched English class in home schools if they want more.