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Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)
Serious Answers Only—How to Fix MCPS?
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Anonymous
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Elementary 20 kids per class, 4 classes per grade
Middle school: 5the 6th Upper middle school: 7th, 8th HS no larger than 200 per grade |
Anonymous
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If a new teacher is being pushed out before tenure it would be great to have some sort of team investigate some issues. What type of classes were they teaching? Many times new teachers are given the worst behaved students as the senior teachers get the better behaved students. Check the online system to see the write ups for behavioral infractions and what was done about it ie. Resolution. If nothing was ever done it means the teacher was never supported for success. Interview the teacher and see if they were ever asked to raise grades or pass students along.if so it means the teacher was asked to bend the rules/laws in order to make admin look good for bonus points but they discard the teacher. Make admin have serious consequences if they are so incompetent to make a supportive system to teach students and support teachers.
Teachers have to volunteer thousands of hours for a Masters, go into lifelong debt, get attacked on the job, etc. If we want schools and teachers we need to manage and support teachers like decent humans who respect education. |
Anonymous
If high schools were capped at 800 students (which:  ) then MCPS would have to have 65 high schools.
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Anonymous
1600 or so is ideal. 2500-3000+ is way to big. |
Anonymous
Why is 800 ideal? Why is 1600 ideal? Why is [any number] ideal? Ideal for what? Ideal for whom? |
Anonymous
FWIW, as someone that went to a high school with 150/grade, I think there are huge advantages to smaller high schools. It’s big enough to support a variety of extracurricular activities (and different social groups), while being small enough to make it easier for students to participate in those activities. |
Anonymous
NP - We can argue that it has been a failed experiment. There are many, many kids who would be better off in segregated classrooms, as would many other kids whose education is harmed by their disruptions/needed effort by the teacher. |
Anonymous
We removed our child from a small private in ES as the class size was way to small socially. And come HS, many of the privates don't offer a huge variety of classes or clubs because of their small size. 150 is way to small. |
Anonymous
I can’t speak for the dynamics at private schools, but 150/grade was plenty to offer a very similar set of extracurricular activities as MCPS at my public high school. That being said, I’d acknowledge it was a hit of a unicorn. Neighboring schools of similar sizes didn’t have the same opportunities- some tied to local funding and some tied to the demographics of the towns. So it is probably hard to reliably replicate that with a high school that small. But I do think grade sizes of 200-250 should be plenty big. It obviously has impacts. You end up knowing everyone in your grade, and most people at school. To fill out teams and groups, friends would need to actively recruit their peers. Lots of three-sport athletes that would also be involved with academic extracurriculars. This would lead to some conflicts between coaches, but they got used to it. All of these seemed like good things to me. |
Anonymous
A high school with 600 students, total? Your idea of "a variety of extracurricular activities and different social groups" must be different from mine. |
Anonymous
Perhaps. But I’m comparing to Northwest High School. Competitive extracurriculars were very similar, with some substitutions for what was popular in that part of the country (e.g., boys and girls hockey, but no lacrosse). Pretty much the same for competitive academic extracurriculars, like Mock Trial, Debate team, speech, academic decathlon, quiz bowl, math league, etc. There weren’t as many non-competitive clubs organized by the school. There were some at the school, and others provided by the city or private organizations. You don’t need to have a large student body to be able to fill a large number of activities. It just means that some of your three sport athletes are also in things like marching band and mock trial. |
Anonymous
Extracurriculars at a school with 600 students were very similar to extracurriculars at a school with 2,500 students? If you say so. |
Anonymous
I’m not sure why you find that surprising. There really aren’t that many competitive sports and academic teams. 600 is plenty of people. The school did have a no-cut policy, which was just as much a matter of practicality as it was a values decision. |
Anonymous
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If you struggle to think about the logistics of a high school of 600, you’d really struggle with the neighboring town’s school. The entire district, PK-12, was under 600 students.
That really was too small. They had to combine some of their sports teams with another similarly small school district. They had their own football team, but played in a 9-man conference. |
Anonymous
PP - We need IDEA. It creates important protections for disabled children. I don't want to risk going back to the days when disabled kids couldn't get a public education. However, it needs to be implemented better to discourage gaming by parents looking for an advantage for their healthy child with an academic deficit. The solution is within the Act, which allows an IEP to include supplement outside school days. I would argue requires it. Put that in every IEP to discourage parents with mild deficits. |