DEI and magnet schools
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Anonymous
That would mean a loss of programs. There are 20+ HS. There is not enough funding to duplicate every program everywhere. |
Anonymous
The post does not say to duplicate it everywhere. It says to make something magnet level available locally where the numbers are large enough to do so and to make it available centrally in large enough numbers to cover the rest. One could just do the latter, but it may provide savings to allow the former in some instances. Funding involves choices. Over the past couple of decades, MoCo has chosen county councilmembers who do not support education enough to make funding available at levels necessary to keep the system healthy and has chosen BOE members who have deprioritized GT funding relative both to funding for other initiatives and to the population associated with GT need. |
Anonymous
| The MCPS operating budget has gone from $1 billion to $3.3 billion with almost flat enrollment. |
Anonymous
stop with the nonsense. everything you need to know for MAP is available for free at khan academy. "exposure" is irrelevant. you still need to solve problems and in fact you can solve problems you were never "exposed" to. you are this MCPS teacher who constantly attacks parents of gifted children. you are clearly not familiar with the questions on the MAP. |
Anonymous
I will go to my grave reminding folks that THIS is what MCPS promised to do for the MS programs. They moved to locally normed cut-offs, and introduced HIGH and AIM with the explicit promise that kids would receive a comparable education at their home schools with other kids who qualified. It would not have been exactly the same, but it was close enough that most families would have been willing to accept the trade-off to avoid long bus rides and having kids in different schools. From the beginning, though, MCPS insisted on tripping on its own d*** when it came to roll-out. They left implementation up to individual principals, most of whom either refused to implement the new classes or immediately made them open to every student regardless of ability. So the promise of a differentiated and accelerated MS education outside the MS magnets never arrived despite MCPS clearly telling parents they would offer such an option. The infuriating thing is that fixing this would be SO SO EASY and would not even require additional teachers. Just cohort the kids who qualified for the magnet lottery, and give them access to a curriculum that goes deeper and further. The curriculum exists but MCPS refuses to put qualified kids in the same room. |
Anonymous
| +1 The first year of HIGH and AIM were great at DC's school. The next year the principal made every IM class AIM. Every one so that became really watered down. It took another year for them to kill HIGH but they basically did by allowing parents to lobby to get their child in so it went from 2 classes to many more and the top students were no longer together and the teachers had to water down the curriculum. What was the point? |
Anonymous
What was in AIM that's not IM? I know MIM (Magnet IM) has some bonus things like a few hours of Set Theory. |
Anonymous
Has that kept the system healthy? Did the $1B? How have costs risen due to inflation? What additional expenditures have been mandated by the county, state and federal governments? Might programs like pre-K added to the MCPS scope in the interim be more costly on a per-student basis? How has the underfunding of the capital budget during the same time, and from the accumulated capital infrastructure debt before, increased ongoing operational cost due to more frequent maintenance needs, sourcing of scarcer legacy components, etc.? What amount of the current budget is due to the prior underfunding of insurance obligations and the like? The late 1980s into the 1990s saw a number of school closures/consolidations with enrollment declines. These had to be corrected with the student population rebound, but for a while there was less lumpiness in the overcrowding of schools. When was the last comprehensive boundary study to correct that? What operational savings (not to mention student experience improvements) could have come from having that happen on a more frequent basis that, instead, are reflected in the budgetary increase? What is the additional expense due to the significant increases in students on FARMS and students with EML/ELL/ESOL need? What is the difference in experience rate, encompassing population proportion and average cost of implementation, for 504 & IEP services? What less direct expense increases can be attributed to such demographic & sociological causes? Now do the same for MCPS magnet/GT education. What is the history/trend in inflation-adjusted per-pupil spend for these programs, that is, net of the cost that would be incurred for the same population in providing standard curricula? What is the history and trend in the population of highly able students? How do these compare with the spending decisions for other initiatives within MCPS? Are those other initiatives discretionary, or do they have statutory requirements? GT education in MD does, though that seems largely to be ignored by MCPS, which waves at the loose COMAR wording to claim compliance with the letter (but not the spirit) -- that seems to be a different sentiment to that given by MCPS to some of the other initiatives, though that is not to say they enjoy unfettered administrative support. I'm sure there are inefficiencies and abuses in the system. I'd like to see them corrected, too. Lower taxes sure would be nice. I get that not everyone is up for a proper case study, either, but demonizing the system based on unexamined top-line budget numbers is completely irresponsible. The budget request for 2025-26 is $3.6B, with a current student population of just under 160,000. In 1991, the MoCo Council told MCPS it wasn't going to get the funding it wanted due to a downturn in the economy. The figure was $764M vs. the $782M requested for the 91-92 school year, with a contemporaneous student population of about 103,500. On a per-pupil, inflation-adjusted basis, the FY26 request would be about 28.5% higher than the FY92 request. Do those differences mentioned above, and others like them, reasonably explain the additional 28.5%? I don't have the detailed information to know, but I don't put it anywhere outside the realm of possibility. As stated, I'd like to see better management, but I would guess that those in 1991 were saying the same. That Council has been blue for a long time, and one would think that would translate into significant support for education. They say they want these programs, but they are politicians, and they know where their bread is buttered -- the high proportion of donor money coming from age and/or wealth tends to result in influence to advocate for lower taxes, and the former often no longer have the abiding interest in education funding that they might have had when raising their own families. There also has been, as always in modern times at least, disproportional funding from the real estate industry. Back in the 60s to the mid-70s, and with effect lingering into the 80s, the benefit those saw was from providing units for the exploding suburban population of young, middle- to upper-middle-class families seeking single family homes with good education options for their children paramount. Now, there's less opportunity for that, despite the continued demand, with the closer-in areas all built out and large swathes of the county restricted from such development. The new votes they can get, and the housing development that would support it, while certainly attracted to good education, might not hold that in quite the same light as those moving to the county a couple of generations ago. There's gold in them thar hills! (If only there are changes to permit additional housing without attention to the associated financial needs of schools...and the real estate/development community has organized very well to make sure this has happened and continues happening.) Between the two, donors and electorate trends, the Council has found its way, more often than not over the past three decades, to underfund the school system, and the cumulative effect of that is what we see today. Like in the meetings over this past month, there were tears shed as BOE members in 1991 had to abandon funding for certain programs -- at that time, expansion of Kindergarten to full day was among those initiatives delayed, similar to today's VA cut and delay of pre-K expansion. Was that the right call? Should Kindergarten still be a half day? We could save money and still claim the Kindergarten enrollment in our denominator! |
Anonymous
Not nonsense. Sure, Khan is there, as are others. This does not mean a highly able student will access that where a less highly able student might due to family condition. And MAP RIT scores are recognized, quite clearly by NWEA, the organization that creates the MAP, as being highly correlated to exposure. They also clearly recommend only using it as a complement to a more ability-related metric for magnet/enriched program placement. They also recommend utilizing local norming. Also not a teacher in any traditional sense, and not a school/MCPS employee of any kind. If you take a moment to reconsider that posted, I advocate for GT education. Adequate seating with meaningful differentiation to meet the needs of the many so fortunate as to have high ability in MCPS. I don't think that those with high achievement should be excluded, but I do think that the more important need to meet is that associated with high ability. Of course, there can be plenty of overlap, there, imdividual ability can vary across domains (rather than being a monolithic "intelligence") and it also can vary across years. |
Anonymous
| All of central office knows that MCPS stands for Moran’s Corrupt Political Scam for a reason… |
Anonymous
Please look a bit more in depth. Yes there is waste but lots of the issue is that it is more expensive now to educate the same number of students as years ago. Start with simple inflation. Add to that teacher salaries as well as all staff salaries have gone up to keep up with cost of living and also to be competitive with salaries in other nearby areas. Technology cost has gone up now students all use chrome books. Pre-k programs have expanded and those require more teachers per student than classes for older kids. Montgomery County placed lots of intervention services into schools instead of in county facilities (think infants and toddlers, Pep, speech therapy, therapy services, social services and so on. Now go to aging infrastructure like all the hvac systems coming to end of life. Add aging pipes and other aging issues. These all require more maintenance costs. |
Anonymous
It was supposed to mirror the magnet curriculum. I never saw it implemented with fidelity, but the promise to parents when MCPS moved to local norming (good) and eliminated criteria like the at-home essay (good) was that highly able kids would receive a differentiated and accelerated experience in their home schools instead. As PP said, it barely lasted a year and in some schools never even started. |
Anonymous
My kid took AIM last year and the handouts they used were from IM. There was no difference as far as I could tell. |
Anonymous
AIM and IM are the same class. It's just that AIM is taken in 6th and IM, when it was offered, was taken in 7th. The "Advanced" was just that it was taken a year earlier. |
Anonymous
NWEA is making defensive documents and is, paradoxically, not the best source of information about the tests it makes. this crap you believe is their sales brochure because people don't want another IQ test. in reality, MAP-M is a test of quantitative reasoning, and MAP-R is a test of verbal reasoning. not saying it is entirely uncorrelated to exposure, but, by the time these tests start to matter, smart kids got themselves exposed to relevant content. average kids are looking at make up videos and smart ones are seeking e.g. algebra content. this is not a mystery. your supposed fight for ability vs. achievement is in fact undermining gifted kids. this is the only test we have and the charade around "exposure" is what makes it possible for the test to survive as a tool of selection. stop undermining talented kids. |