Is CogAT gone forever?
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Anonymous
FARMS rate school groupings, of course, and with the unknown of those individual adjustments (e.g., ESOL/EML), but you're right and have made it more approchable. I think the net was cast wide in that first year to catch as many as possible who might have been considered under normal circumstances, but whose different experiences under remote learning was presumed to result in highly variable scores. Once they chose the 85th %ile marker, it was hard to walk that back, but they used the more subtle change of any-of-these criteria to all-of-these criteria to tighten things a bit the next two years. The more disturbing thing is the implicit acknowledgement that many, many more students could benefit from magnet-type programming, without creating the spaces to fulfill that, even if delivered at the local school instead of the magnet. Even if distributing magnet opportunities across SESs, and using local norms to do so, is the right approach, it's hard to see how a student hitting the 94th %ile nationally at the beginning of 5th grade, which is better than over half of 8th-graders nationally at the end of the academic year, isn't considered ready for AIM/AMP7+, the classes in 6th grade that would start by covering 7th-grade material and go through 8th grade material in preparation for Algebra in 7th, solely because they come from a low-FARMS school. |
Anonymous
The data MCPS posts on Parentvue show that district MAP scores are about 1.5% higher than national norms. |
Anonymous
They don’t you have it almost spot on. Almost because it’sa proxy for SES group. They take the top 15 percent from each group of schools. PP who tried to make it more complicated doesn’t have a clue. |
Anonymous
Is it the district mean on the MAP reports you reference? It's possible that the difference is that slight. It also may be that the MCPS distribution is exaggerated at the ends, with many high and many low scores (or a significant number of very low scores) instead of a bell curve, resulting in a mean only slightly above the national average, but a much greater percentage hitting/exceeding 85th national %ile than a bell curve shifted only slightly to the right would dictate. |
Anonymous
The litmus was the top X% from each group, where X% is the percentage of the whole district that was at or above the 2020 NWEA norms 85th percentile. Not all of the top X% in each group made it into the lottery because there are other criteria (grades, reading level) that some of the high scorers did not meet. It's not clear exactly what the individual adjustments for ESOL/EML, 504, IEP and individual FARMS status were, but it might be that they allowed a lower-scoring student to be in the lottery. It's also not clear how many appeals were granted, or under what specific circumstances. |
Anonymous
| The Office of Shared Accountability presented their review schedule to the BOE recently. Selection criteria for the magnets and accelerated math are scheduled for review in the Spring. MCPS won't be making any changes like going back to using CogAT until after that, if they do at all. |
Anonymous
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There's still no way around the fact that there are 100 Magnet seats and over 1000 qualified applicants.
The real problem is that while MCPS allows math acceleration in middle school, which takes some pressure off the magnet in W region, it doesn't have any acceleration in CS/Science. If they had advanced science and CS classes in those schools, like they offer Geometry and Algebra II, the high SES schools would stop caring about going to the magnet. |
Anonymous
But if there weren't this artificial scarcity, there'd be nothing special about the magnet. Kidding aside, the lottery has shown that far more students are capable of doing well in these programs and MCPS would do well to greatly increase these opportunities. |
Anonymous
There is also the problem that the English class in middle school, ironically named “Advanced” English, is a total joke. |
Anonymous
Its probably more circumstantial than direct but, they widen the band so that more students "deserve" the Magnet experience but lose the lottery, raising family awareness of how inequitable the Magnet system is, which will give them cover to kill the Magnet unless the legislature gives funding to hugely expand it. |
Anonymous
That's really relevant to the STEM Magnet, but also not a big deal in general English is easy to adapt. Advanced English is challenging enough for kids who want to put the work in to do more thoughtful analysis and writing about the material they read. The problem is just that kids who don't can still coast with As. If you look at ES CES "magnets" for Literacy, the program doesn do much (aside from clustering nerds together, which is great for kids from low-nerd home schools). The teachers entertain themselves with extra activities that don't meaningful affect literacy. |
Anonymous
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Far more kids do have need for accelerated & enriched programs than MCPS allocates seats. There are plenty outside the high-SES areas, but effective identification mechanisms also are lacking, and eschewing ability-based testing like CogAT in favor of exposure-based testing like MAP simply makes that worse -- local norming only goes so far, leaving holes on the individual level while still enabling relative ease of system gaming for those who resource hoard.
It would take an appetite for increased taxes to support robust programs that are reasonably equally accessible across the county (in addition to priority shifting among the BOE, top MCPS brass) to address this. That's a County Council & state legislature issue, at heart, and one likely less supported by those in high-SES areas, who would like to have their cake and eat it too when they espouse, in essence, prioritizing programs at schools with large cohorts (when identification is more likely for their children due to the external supports their financial status affords) without funding the whole system. |
Anonymous
One can only hope it's gone forever. The last thing these kids need is more standardized testing. |
Anonymous
And these bad decisions are why The Office of Shared Accountability needs to be replaced. By not using a Nationally-normed, race-neutral exam, I feel MCPS is basically admitting 'bias' or 'discrimination' since MCPS chose not to focus on better teaching, but instead handicaps kids that are smarter and better prepared to succeed. Until MCPS comes clean regarding all details of it's selections (which is hidden under the veil of "child privacy"), we will never know. For all we know, there's someone making up names on a spreadsheet behind the curtain? There's only one thing that is certain, though - MCPS is not choosing the best of the best children for the program. |
Anonymous
Disagree by using an exam that favors those who can afford CogAT prep it unfairly skews selection to those with resources. You very well know kids hire CogAT tutors and it makes a difference. The last thing anyone needs is more of this gatekeeping. |