There is something you can do, and now is your chance. Teach your child and yourself self-esteem and not being a mental slave to a standardized test written by someone who never met your kid or your school. Anyway how do you know what reading level a score corresponds to? |
OP said their kid isn't interested. CES isn't just about high literacy. It's extremely intensified work (more than the middle school TPMS program is intensified for math/science.) Your child has to love reading and writing a lot, not just be highly able, or else they'll burn out in the class. |
Students not learning doesnt make the MCAP a bad test. Have you ever actually seen one? Go look, and tell me what's wrong with it. |
I didn’t see that OP wrote that. And please, CES is easy. My kid didn’t find it intense at all. Just a little less mind-numbing. You really need to stop scaring people off. Some of us respond because our kids are older and we’ve been through this already. |
What grade is your kid in? Are they old enough and compliant enough to make the test seriously? A low score on a computer test is a positive signal in a K-2 kid. |
HIGH has a low cutoff. OP's "above grade level" reader is qualified for HIGH. |
If you had a CES student and a middle schooler, you'd know that CES is more intense than Advanced English in middle school. |
NP. My kid is older and went through it already. I agree that it is incredibly intense. The workload was very heavy. In fact it seemed mostly focused on producing heavy workload rather than quality or depth of work. I do think it varies between centers and teachers though. |
Much more. To be honest, much more intense than 9th grade honors English too. Not familiar yet with higher grades. |
He is in 4th grade. Scores have ranged from 97th in 3rd to 85th in 4th, not sure why his performance is so inconsistent. I do read with him and he does workbooks too. |
| OP here again. My current 6th grader went through CES and I didn’t find it very intense at all. |
PP you replied to. My kids are in college and one is 13, taking classes in high school. Let me repeat: CES was easy. The usual advanced tracks in middle school, whether magnets or not, are easy. We’re far from the high magnets, and our high school offers a wide array of APs, so they didn’t apply to high school magnets. It doesn’t make any difference for college admissions anyway. What matters is taking the most advanced courses at your school and getting straight As (plus having incredible extracurriculars, which I find rather controversial since it reinjects inequity into the process, inequity they wanted to stamp out with test-optional practices, but that’s a topic for another day). I am pushing back on this idea that the CES is hard. That’s all. |
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MAP scores can and will fluctuate for most kids. Parents shouldn’t immediately be concerned about this. In the lower grades this is especially true as more students begin to catch up in reading and comprehension.
With regards to the test and reading generally, workbooks and extras are not needed unless the kid is continually declining and thus is paired with some decline in class. As someone noted in order to continue to score high, students need to develop good cognition skills. These skills are useful in all other subjects. It’s not just about reading books but discussing what is read in meaningful ways. For instance using prediction, drawing inference, comparing with other books or events, analyzing characters and their intents, etc. If you want your kid to do better generally again you don’t need workbooks you need to engage with the kid about what they are reading and ensure they engage in texts with more depth and content variety. There’s a difference in graphic novels between the Dogman series, Amulet series, and Science Comics series. Just as there is a difference The Babysitters club, I survived, Stuart Little and Harry Potter. |
It used to be before MCPS switched to "CES for all" and lowered the admission standards to the CES centers. |
Not necessarily if you are a low FARMs school and they just go with central office placements. |