Blind item: Regional criteria "magnets" will be lottery
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Anonymous
It was actually 71st percentile for the highest FARMS schools (a tiny group of extremely high poverty schools, only 8 of the 100+ elementary schools at MCPS.) For the rest of the Title 1 schools and other "moderately high FARMS" schools (which still generally are majority-FARMS) it was 79th percentile. |
Anonymous
Disagree. How would it be if we made access to services for those with academic challenges lottery-based? Might you think that unfair, perhaps, because it would leave those not winning a lottery with their needs unmet? Ditto for those with need for high-level academics. Maybe if they made it such that all schools met that need equivalently well, then interest-related lotteries wouldn't matter (as much). However, their plan, as it stands, neither provides enough criteria-based seating to ensure access to those with related need nor ensures that there are equivalent opportunities associated with that need across all high schools . Fail. |
Anonymous
That doesn't make sense The only logical "highest bar" is "whatever makes a lottery not needed" |
Anonymous
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Lottery means not all kids that want to do and meet the criteria to do the program can do it.
It also implies the program itself has criteria that a lot of kids can meet and suggests it might not meet the needs of kids that are truly gifted. |
Anonymous
DP, and I think these numbers are incorrect, but regardless they are quite low. When you have lots and lots of students performing much better on the same test, I just don’t fundamentally support giving limited spots to kids who are significantly less academically prepared. Fine if you want to maybe scoop in kids in the 90th percentile from high FARMS schools instead of 95th+ elsewhere, but lower than that seems inequitable in terms of meeting educational need based on demonstrated performance. Kid with 70-something percentile is truly not demonstrating need of an accelerated or enriched special program several grade levels ahead. |
Anonymous
These are not true lotteries as when my daughter was in es she surpassed other kids with map scores before the lottery and was not chosen. Other kids whose parents were friends either the principal and teachers got in. They need to provide the opportunities at all schools. |
Anonymous
Perhaps the justification is that too many kids at the home school are behind so the school cannot properly serve those at the 70th percentile and above. But that just raises more questions if that many kids can't be properly served at their home schools |
Anonymous
That works with some schools but they don’t take enough students so you always have a few who score in the mid to high 90s who aren’t selected, and left behind with nothing. Many schools have no acceleration or enrichment. |
Anonymous
Another DP. The idea is that: 1) Innate academic ability is not assumed to be highly correlated with wealth, but roughly and variably distributed across all socioeconomic groupings. 2) Lower concentrations of wealth/higher concentrations of poverty result in conditions where there are fewer students who receive adequate supports outside of the school setting (including, but not limited to, adequate healthy food intake, adequate parental guidance, adequately similar access to outside enrichments accessed by those with greater means, etc.) to engender a cohort of easily identifiable students of that high ability. 3) Such a lack of cohort can present school/traching management challenges to allocate teaching resources to address that higher-level academic need even for those who might be identified, with programs (e.g., Title 1) meant to allocate additional resources to such schools still being inadequate to address those resource challenges well enough. 4) Without such teaching resources being at a level adequate enough to deliver teaching to those students equivalent to that which they would have if attending a school with a more manageable cohort of those identified as having higher academic ability, any exposure-related testing naturally will under-represent the innate academic abilities of highly able students in a school drawing from lower wealth/higher poverty areas. 5) FARMS rate is a rough proxy for area poverty, and local norming based on that rate might evidence similar levels of innate ability that would be the demonstration of need for accelerated/enriched programming. Though I do not subscribe to all of that listed below, criticisms might include (but, again, are not limited to): A) Whether or not innate ability is similar, academic need might be defined based on achievement, itself, or on some heuristic combining achievement with innate ability, with concern that students who are "behind" their ability-peer group are not suitable for inclusion in accelerated/enriched programming, either for their own sake (too demanding) or for those peers who are not "behind" (drain of teaching resources/limitation of pace until and unless such students can be brought up to speed). MCPS, generally, has maintained that this is not a concern, at least at the elementary and middle school levels, though one might note thay they have not employed local norming in their criteria-based high school programs admission paradigm. B) Instead of accepting an achievement gap and adjusting placement criteria via local norming, it may be better to ensure adequate differential resourcing (i.e., well beyond Title 1 levels) to schools to permit addressing of needs associated with high-level innate academic ability on an equivalent basis across the school system. MCPS has not yet taken that approach, at least to be close to the levels necessary for that equivalence, and it may be too financially challenging to do so. C) Employment of ability-related testing, rather than reliance on more exposure-relared metrics, may better identify stuudents with need for academic acceleration/enrichment. MCPS has been slow to re-introduce CogAT, and even this may suffer from biases inherent to the wealth gap. It is unlikely that they would pursue return to an identification/placement regime utilizing such a measure without extensive vetting against that bias. D) There are many free or near-free resources which might be available to those of lesser means which might supply equivalence to the outside-of-school supports accessed by those with greater means. While MCPS occasionally has noted such being available, it may be naive to expect accessing of such resources by those of lesser means on a basis equivalent to the levels of access.typically employed by those of greater means, with great impediment among the former in understanding, if not impetus. Further, it may be naive to impute equivalence, either in access (e.g., availability of a home-based computing platform, regular trips to a library, especially for younger children, etc.) or in quality, of those free/lower-cost resources to the resources/family supports accessed by those with greater means. E) Innate academic ability may not be equivalently distributed among different socio-economic groups. I have not seen MCPS consider this in depth, and doing so would be politically unpalatable, if not downright infeasible. My own experience of interactions with others, anecdotal as it might be, suggests that it would be foolish to make an assumption about that innate ability, especially in childhood, not being prevalent among those with lesser means, though more desperate conditions may make for great difficulty in bringing that to fruition; however, this does not mean that a correlation of success with inheritable capability necessarily must be out of the question. Given the feasibility issue, however, barking up this tree to examine that conjecture, which may have no fruit in the first place, is, itself, likely to be rather fruitless, and a waste of resources when other approaches to identifying and meeting the needs of our student population are much lower hanging. F) MCPS simply might expand program seating so as to avoid, to the extent practicable, the individual inequities associated with lottery-based placement. Of course, that, like many proposed solutions, would require greater investment towards associated resources (and the increased taxes to fund that). |
Anonymous
Now let's think how this would be modified/adapted to the new regional model. For Region 1, you have Whitman that is low-farm, and some others are moderate FARM. If you apply 95% threshold, do you basically hand almost the entire lottery pool to Whitman students? |
Anonymous
Whitman isn’t going to let other kids in. Maybe a token few but that’s it. |
Anonymous
You are just realizing this now when people are concerned that the DCC students will get even less with this model? |
Anonymous
Or do they leave in appreciable averages. Whitman send very to magnets or IB programs despite having the highest test scores in the county and often the state many years. It’s school wide SAT avg is comparable to the best magnet programs most years yet they place very few into them. If they are counting on a liberal mixing of students between the clusters they should anticipate not all schools are desperate to leave towards lesser options. |
Anonymous
But many will have a chance at a non-DCC school which is a huge improvement |
Anonymous
Run the numbers vs. that offered now. Also run the numbers on likely access, across schools, to a plethora of advanced courses. There are likely to be more DCC students left behind at their home schools without offerings commensurate with their capabilities in any way reasonably equivalent to the other schools in their regions, without neither a sizeable enough local cohort of high achievers nor a commitment from MCPS to ensure that equivalent access across schools. |