Why do people say schools in NOVA are competitive and cutthroat when people also say the education system here is bad?

[Anonymous]

thoughtful post was the one previous

[Anonymous]

Extra AAP classes are only when the school absolutely can't avoid it, and then it creates an even heavier more toxic school environment of "you're smart" vs "you're not" among students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Extra AAP classes are only when the school absolutely can't avoid it, and then it creates an even heavier more toxic school environment of "you're smart" vs "you're not" among students.

The conspiracy theories some people believe regarding AAP is mind boggling. Central office tells each school how many AAP level IV students there are, and how many non level IV students there are. Central office also tells schools what their staffing ratio is. Schools do not have the ability to restrict students from being in AAP. They do not have the ability to create additional classes beyond the ratio provided by central office.

If you want to argue the identification process is flawed, feel free--but no school is refusing kids from AAP. It's out of their hands.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The opportunities available here to the best students (TJ, governor's schools, etc.) for no cost are amazing, if you compare it to the typical school district in America.

I have children at TJ and at our base HS.

Among every high school in the USA, TJ is ranked either 1st (Niche), 5th (USNWR), or as high as 12th in other rankings. It is not an FCPS school, but rather a Virginia Governor’s School administered by FCPS. It is not truly comparable to other high schools in NOVA. TJ offers an outstanding educational experience, as do all the governors’ schools and summer academies.

My children have been in public FCPS schools since kindergarten. I have personally witnessed a continual lowering of expectations across all levels in FCPS. This problem is the result of FCPS’s repeatedly-stated primary goal. The primary goal of FCPS over the last decade is not education.

The primary goal of FCPS is: equity.

In our particular experience, the equity-driven management of FCPS results in continual watering-down of the AAP program. AAP is currently a shadow of what it once was.

Examples include the effort to replace AAP-exclusive classrooms with “pull outs.” Often, FCPS implements these pull-outs with ineffective screen-based curriculum purchased from EdTech. The past math curriculum for AAP for my children was notably more advanced than the current offering.

FCPS has also insisted on “inclusion” of more general education students in accelerated-learning classes. Ponder what happens to the pace of learning in an accelerated-learning classroom when students who learn at a slower pace are placed there, merely for the sake of checking the “inclusion” box.

The acronym “AAP” stands for Accelerated Academic Programs. But “academics” were de-emphasized by Gatehouse, with the change from the older GBRS rating to the DEI-focused “HOPE” score. Now, factors completely unrelated to academic achievement are considered for AAP admission.

There are so many other sad examples within FCPS.

FCPS continues to insist on practicing the “soft racism of lowered expectations.” They show no sign of reversing course and the quality of a HS diploma will continue to sink in the coming years.

Placing your child in a private school is the best move at this point.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Extra AAP classes are only when the school absolutely can't avoid it, and then it creates an even heavier more toxic school environment of "you're smart" vs "you're not" among students.

The conspiracy theories some people believe regarding AAP is mind boggling. Central office tells each school how many AAP level IV students there are, and how many non level IV students there are. Central office also tells schools what their staffing ratio is. Schools do not have the ability to restrict students from being in AAP. They do not have the ability to create additional classes beyond the ratio provided by central office.

If you want to argue the identification process is flawed, feel free--but no school is refusing kids from AAP. It's out of their hands.

This reply contains false information. For example: participation in AAP includes “principal placements,” which are made exclusively by the school principal at the LOCAL level, not the “central office” (ie Gatehouse).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Extra AAP classes are only when the school absolutely can't avoid it, and then it creates an even heavier more toxic school environment of "you're smart" vs "you're not" among students.

The conspiracy theories some people believe regarding AAP is mind boggling. Central office tells each school how many AAP level IV students there are, and how many non level IV students there are. Central office also tells schools what their staffing ratio is. Schools do not have the ability to restrict students from being in AAP. They do not have the ability to create additional classes beyond the ratio provided by central office.

If you want to argue the identification process is flawed, feel free--but no school is refusing kids from AAP. It's out of their hands.

This reply contains false information. For example: participation in AAP includes “principal placements,” which are made exclusively by the school principal at the LOCAL level, not the “central office” (ie Gatehouse).

Your comment does not negate the prior poster's facts. If FCPS sets the staffing ration at 30:1 and a school has 40 AAP students, they cannot create 1 AAP classroom and kick students out. They must offer 2. They can try to balance class sizes by asking if "non AAP" students want to fill the space to make it more equal class sizes across the board, but they cannot restrict kids who are qualified from accessing a level IV classroom. No one can be forced into AAP, and no one can be prevented from accessing AAP once they are identified by a gatehouse committee. There is not a "limited number of AAP spaces". If 2/3 of a 4th grade cohort qualifies as level IV, then 2/3 of the 4th grade classrooms will be AAP rooms.

[Anonymous]

I'm not in NOVA but in an area that's described similarly. I had no idea, but it's turns out that a significant portion of parents have been supplementing heavily outside of school as early as kindergarten. The slower parents began supplementing midway through elementary. Very few kids are just ending up in top level math or English because school doesn't even teach grade level material anymore. School is for working on the bottom half to reach passing levels, and most of the effort goes to the bottom 10%, who are allowed to disrupt and drag down the entire class. I didn't realize I was "supposed to" put my 8 year old in 3 hours of tutoring every single week and have her work on math workbooks every night.

Anyway, that is how things become cutthroat by middle school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Look at all the educational enrichment centers. The curriculum has been watered down from when we were kids and places like AOPS, RSM, Kumon, etc fill in the gaps.

Because the basic curriculum is watered down so much, anyone who cares about education has their average kids take honors/AP/IB classes. Everything is open enrollment now so there is a huge range of abilities. Even the College Board has admitted to norming the AP test scores to reflect the fact that kids know less than 10 years ago but they still want to get paid. Schools love to brag about how many kids are taking higher level courses but the teachers know that tons of the kids taking them shouldn’t be there. Admin gets on us if not enough kids pass so we have to make the classes easier. It’s like a housing bubble. Lots of hype, little substance.

Can you explain this part?

[Anonymous]

My high schooler is getting a great education but all the courses are honors or AP. The coursework is interesting and challenging. AP classes tend to have a lot of homework to where no other supplementation is needed. During upper elementary I booked once a week tutoring some years to fill in some gaps. It seemed to work out. There are ways to fill in gaps without it being overly stressful.

[Anonymous]

The education system here isn't bad at all. It has some room for improvement but most school districts here are fine.

There are a lot of schools in the area. Some schools are competitive; some aren't. Some kids are super academic; some aren't.

Don't listen to the anti-public-school vultures trying to sht on our schools and defund them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Look at all the educational enrichment centers. The curriculum has been watered down from when we were kids and places like AOPS, RSM, Kumon, etc fill in the gaps.

Because the basic curriculum is watered down so much, anyone who cares about education has their average kids take honors/AP/IB classes. Everything is open enrollment now so there is a huge range of abilities. Even the College Board has admitted to norming the AP test scores to reflect the fact that kids know less than 10 years ago but they still want to get paid. Schools love to brag about how many kids are taking higher level courses but the teachers know that tons of the kids taking them shouldn’t be there. Admin gets on us if not enough kids pass so we have to make the classes easier. It’s like a housing bubble. Lots of hype, little substance.

Citation?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:NOVA schools can be competitive. The kids taking AP/IB classes at the HS in out area are getting an excellent education. There are some bad teachers but that exists in every school. AP/IB classes have a mandated elements that are the same across the country, you have to teach to that standard if you want kids to do well on the AP/IB exams. The kids in our area tend to do better then the kids across the country because the area has so many parents who know the value of getting high scores and being able to skip classes in college.

There are issues at some of the HS where the regular classes are a joke. the base school my kid is supposed to attend is one where anyone who wants to go to college avoids the gen ed classes and takes all honors. The gen ed classes have many kids in them that are years behind in skills and do not care about completing school. They have been allowed to continue to the next grade because being retained is deemed to be too socially damaging for the kids. These are the kids that teachers have been forced to pass for ages. You will find this population is larger as you see a decline in the income levels at schools. There are studies showing that grades and educational quality drops once you get over a certain threshold of students living in poverty. FCPS has a decent number of ES, MS, and Hs that are considered Title 1, which means a large number of impoverished kids, and those schools tend to perform poorly.

Then you have the hyper competitive families who think that their kids need to do a ton more outside of school and push enrichment, like RSM or AoPS or fully academic summer programs. Not all the kids in those programs are there because the parents are obsessed with high stats, there are kids there because they genuinely like the material and want to be there but a large percentage are there because their parents make them attend. People have been doing this for ages, my parents sent my brothers to summer programs for smart kids in the 1980's because they needed more then they were getting at school, our HS did not have AP/IB classes at the time. It really isn't anything new. The market seems to have exploded though. I remember SAT prep being controversial when I was in HS and Sylvan being a new thing to help struggling kids. Now those are normal and the kids who want more or whose parents want more turn to RSM and AoPS.

The kids in the Honors/AP/IB track in HS are doing well and will be fine at college. They are getting an excellent education. The parents saying that they are so far behind are, many times, parents who come out of the Asian tradition were the kids are in school far longer then our kids are, there are tutoring centers all over the place, and where there are tests to take to be accepted into MS and HS across the country. It is a different tradition with a massive emphasis on education. The European schools do focus more on writing, which is the distinctive element of the IB degree, but are not as far ahead in math and science as you can get in the AP programs in the US.

I am an Indian immigrant parent. My kids did not go to AoPS or RSM etc, but I tutored them at home and enriched and accelerated them as best as I could. My kids could be contributing to the narrative that schools are very competitive.

Here is the thing - I had always imagined that k-12 education in USA will be at least better than what I grew up with in India. Which I am sure it was true when I was in school. After all, I studied sometimes in ramshackle buildings and with basic textbooks, and not much access to knowledge outside what was in the textbooks. But in those days - 30-40 years ago - in the USA or in India - at least all students were taught the 3 R's well. The older Americans are far better educated than the students nowadays. Should that not tell us something?

USA students 30 years could do even better than students around the world if they were motivated because they had access to textbooks, electricity, infrastructure, nutrition and far superior libraries and many resources to do independent projects and tinker in the garage.

But today - most of the world has access to these resources through the internet. So now there is nothing to stop a poor student in India or Ghana to learn what they want to learn online. And that is the main problem for US competitiveness. Now, there is no longer the gatekeeping of knowledge and resources that kept even sub-standard US students employed and rich as adults.

Which means that now I as a parent get a heart-attack when I see that in US schools there is - a very short school year with lots of long breaks, a lack of robust curriculum/syllabus/textbooks/tests/final exams, a lack of discipline in classroom, rampant grade inflation, lack of differentiation in students abilities and needs, and no student is held back to repeat a year if they are deficient in their studies to get intervention and intensive tutoring.

Then I compare it to what my nieces and nephews are studying in India - robotics, coding, at least 3 languages (Hindi, English, Regional Language or World Language), advanced Math, advanced Geometry/Trigonometry, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, History (India, World), Geography, music, art, pe, basic skills - and they have access to all the textbooks, documentaries, internet resources that an American student has but does not use and I frankly I get anxious. My kid will not be competitive in USA or India because the US schools are not using the resources that have been provided to them

And also now the Indian student in India gets - a longer school year (on average the Indian student will go to school for at least 2 years more from K-12 because of more school days in an academic year), discipline in the classroom, national exams, all graded tests/exams come back home for the parents to check, curricullum-syallabus-textbooks are completely mapped and so at any given point the parents know what the kids are learning... and so I get more and more stressed.

Telling the admin, parents, teachers about how US schools are falling behind and other countries are producing well educated students falls on deaf ears. Their response ranges from - "Oh, your kid will become depressed and stressed and commit suicide", "Why don't you go back to India", "childhood is for having fun and being care-free"
... I feel that I am sucked into the film "Idiocracy".

So what do I do? My kids continue to go to the public school and I teach them at home or a tutoring center so that they remain competitive globally. Which also means that I have sacrificed my leisure hours and my lifestyle to tutor my kids because their school day is a waste of time. Unfortunately, private schools are worse.

Yes, US schools are substandard and bad compared to other first world countries (and even an emerging market like India). Yes, many kids do very well because their parents are teaching them or they are getting tutored outside of schools. Especially parents who have access to education material from other countries like Singapore, Japan, UK, Switzerland, China, S Korea, India etc. They cherry pick what they want to teach their kids and go from there. And there are many people from the countries above so they know the ground reality of what the kids in these countries are learning. So, Yes, this area is very competitive (because many expats & immigrants who are well educated or know that US schools sucks get their kids educated outside the school day).

[Anonymous]

I think China, India, and similar countries are cutthroat for a different reason. The kids all grind there so they can place at top schools, get out of their country, and study in the US. The US isn't like that. If you are posting here, you're in a group where most of our kids will be fine even if they never learn another language, pick up an instrument, learn how to play chess or read music, or be able to read college level science and math textbooks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Education in NOVA (Fairfax County) is light years ahead of education in most of the USA. I grew up in an affluent area in another state, and the schools do not offer as many opportunities. There are also less services for gifted kids and less services for kids with special needs compared to NOVA.

NOVA publics can't compete with northern NJ, NYC/LI, New England, Bay area, and SoCal. Either in sheer number of kids or in direct competition. There are probably some other regions as well. That's why so few NOVA kids get into elite schools, esp since per capita spending here is at the top.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Education in NOVA (Fairfax County) is light years ahead of education in most of the USA. I grew up in an affluent area in another state, and the schools do not offer as many opportunities. There are also less services for gifted kids and less services for kids with special needs compared to NOVA.

This is not true. I grew up in an affluent New York suburb, even in the 90s the education was as good or better, and there were ample opportunities for gifted students. FCPS is coasting on a reputation it earned in the 90s, and no longer lives up to.