WAPO article on Prince George's County Schools

[Anonymous]

One thing that the article didn't mention and no one seems to point out is that if classes in PG schools are overcrowded, maybe they don't want the middle class students to attend.

I mean, if they are over crowded as it is, how would they even accommodate any more students? It's not like they're going to get more funding (the county already gets tax money from the middle class families).

Perhaps there is a disincentive to lure back the middle class families. I mean, after all, I get the impression that middle school families demand more out of the schools. Maybe the school administrators would rather not have the hassle.

I mean all of this honestly. It's not like they face consequences for having low scores or being dysfunctional. They don't have funding taken away. I haven't seen or heard of anyone being fired, ever.

If they've got over 30 kids per classroom and don't see much more funding in the pipeline, maybe they really don't want the middle class families back.

Just a thought. As it seems to me there are actually a lot of things they could do to engage middle class families (the open house thing has been mentioned a lot here).

[Anonymous]

meant middle class families, not "middle school families." sorry.

[Anonymous]

what's everyone's art like? I heard some schools art is like once a quarter (and they brag about that?) unless the PTA steps in.

[Anonymous]

23:15, that's exactly how I have felt from the outside for the last decade. It seems like they wanted to focus on the kids with more "need" with the limited resources, but now I think they have found there's a big consequence to that. Don't they get more federal money per enrolled child? So they get something with every extra child. The local school also gets more from the county for each child, as well as extra staff if the head count goes up enough.

They have tried to take away specialty programs entirely more than once, maybe as elitist? But what else is keeping the motivated families within the system?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:23:15, that's exactly how I have felt from the outside for the last decade. It seems like they wanted to focus on the kids with more "need" with the limited resources, but now I think they have found there's a big consequence to that. Don't they get more federal money per enrolled child? So they get something with every extra child. The local school also gets more from the county for each child, as well as extra staff if the head count goes up enough.

They have tried to take away specialty programs entirely more than once, maybe as elitist? But what else is keeping the motivated families within the system?

I think they've also tried redistricting. I guess the thinking is that they need to break up the high-performing schools. And then they get surprised when the parents of the high-performing kids then pull their kids out and send them to private.

My impression is that high-performing schools and programs get punished. Instead of trying to replicate and add more of those programs, they break them up.

They need to stop messing with the few programs/schools that work. And instead try to establish more of them.

It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

It kind infuriates me in the article where the county official acts like it's a mystery why middle class families with high performing students are pulling their kids from private school. Their TAG process alone answers that question.

But what the county doesn't realize is that it isn't just parents putting their kids in private school; it's parents MOVING entirely out of the county. So the tax base will shrink if they continue. Sadly, many people really don't want to move. But they read article after article about the great schools in bordering counties and then they confront roadblocks to trying to work with the PG public school system, and they end up leaving.

I really don't want this to continue to happen. I want the schools to turn around.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:23:15, that's exactly how I have felt from the outside for the last decade. It seems like they wanted to focus on the kids with more "need" with the limited resources, but now I think they have found there's a big consequence to that. Don't they get more federal money per enrolled child? So they get something with every extra child. The local school also gets more from the county for each child, as well as extra staff if the head count goes up enough.

They have tried to take away specialty programs entirely more than once, maybe as elitist? But what else is keeping the motivated families within the system?

Well, I don't think they get more federal funds for more children alone. I think they actually get more federal funds for more kids with needs. I could be wrong about this. I don't know the details. But schools are funded on the county and state level. Federal funds are tied to certain things (farms, esol, poverty). That's always been my impression.

Perhaps someone with more direct knowledge of how school funding works could chime in.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:what's everyone's art like? I heard some schools art is like once a quarter (and they brag about that?) unless the PTA steps in.

At the open house I attended I was told there was an art program that was used for all the schools on a rotational basis which works out to once a quarter. We questioned whether the PTA could just fund to have art put into the school full-time and were told that PTA funds could not be used to fund salaried positions. I did not get the sense they were proud of it at all.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
I think they've also tried redistricting. I guess the thinking is that they need to break up the high-performing schools. And then they get surprised when the parents of the high-performing kids then pull their kids out and send them to private.

My impression is that high-performing schools and programs get punished. Instead of trying to replicate and add more of those programs, they break them up.

They need to stop messing with the few programs/schools that work. And instead try to establish more of them.

It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

It kind infuriates me in the article where the county official acts like it's a mystery why middle class families with high performing students are pulling their kids from private school. Their TAG process alone answers that question.

But what the county doesn't realize is that it isn't just parents putting their kids in private school; it's parents MOVING entirely out of the county. So the tax base will shrink if they continue. Sadly, many people really don't want to move. But they read article after article about the great schools in bordering counties and then they confront roadblocks to trying to work with the PG public school system, and they end up leaving.

I really don't want this to continue to happen. I want the schools to turn around.

The lottery is for going to a TAG center. If you don't get into the TAG center then you do the TAG program in your in-bound in school. While I don't like the lottery system in general, I don't think it is unique to PG that some gifted kids are not able to go to a TAG school. In MoCo, they have highly gifted centers. If I am not mistaken, there are kids that are qualified that apply but still don't get in and continue to do a gifted pullout in their in-bound school. It is not through a lottery though it is based on an application, test scores, recommendations, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:23:15, that's exactly how I have felt from the outside for the last decade. It seems like they wanted to focus on the kids with more "need" with the limited resources, but now I think they have found there's a big consequence to that. Don't they get more federal money per enrolled child? So they get something with every extra child. The local school also gets more from the county for each child, as well as extra staff if the head count goes up enough.

They have tried to take away specialty programs entirely more than once, maybe as elitist? But what else is keeping the motivated families within the system?

I think they've also tried redistricting. I guess the thinking is that they need to break up the high-performing schools. And then they get surprised when the parents of the high-performing kids then pull their kids out and send them to private.

My impression is that high-performing schools and programs get punished. Instead of trying to replicate and add more of those programs, they break them up.

They need to stop messing with the few programs/schools that work. And instead try to establish more of them.

It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

It kind infuriates me in the article where the county official acts like it's a mystery why middle class families with high performing students are pulling their kids from private school. Their TAG process alone answers that question.

But what the county doesn't realize is that it isn't just parents putting their kids in private school; it's parents MOVING entirely out of the county. So the tax base will shrink if they continue. Sadly, many people really don't want to move. But they read article after article about the great schools in bordering counties and then they confront roadblocks to trying to work with the PG public school system, and they end up leaving.

I really don't want this to continue to happen. I want the schools to turn around.

The TAG thing really makes no sense to me either. In theory it should be cheaper to educate the TAG kids as you can have a higher student/teacher ratio and meet proficiency on the tests with no problem, right? I think another issue with the TAG placement is that they've made the criteria for inclusion pretty broad which means they have to lottery because they have too many kids meeting cutoffs on the tests. The problem to me is that the kid who is just making cutoff via test score and doing pretty well in their zoned school is in less need of a true TAG center than the kid who is hitting 99th percentile across the board and has a profoundly gifted label on them based on other testing and has no cohort at all in the zoned school. If they don't have the resources to deal with the TAG group (and a look at the Glenarden Woods waitlist numbers tells me a lot of kids aren't getting seats) as it is defined right now then maybe they need to tweak the criteria or rank in some way so that the kids who really do need the Center end up there.

I get that adding more immersion or Montessori programs is tough because it isn't easy to find certified teachers who are native speakers or Montessori certified to boot, but adding more TAG programs should not be hard. Adding more specialty programs that center on arts shouldn't be hard - I know multiple music/art teachers who are on horrible cobbled together schedules in PGCPS being split between multiple schools. Any of them would be thrilled to have a true home school to teach from. Adding another STEM magnet program shouldn't be hard either and might stop the outflow of really good students who get waitlisted at Roosevelt and end up in private.

I was talking to a friend last week about how our neighborhood school really doesn't "look" like our neighborhood at this point. On our block there are 6 kids who are K-6 age (our zoned school's age group) and NONE are at the neighborhood school. 6 kids split among 4 private schools. 4 at 2 relatively close parochial schools, my child at a MoCo private, another at a DC private. 4 of the 6 were TAG lottery losers, including my child. That's a major problem. We'll try again for middle school. At least Roosevelt is ranked so I feel like my daughter is largely in control of her own destiny there and not crossing fingers in a lottery again. It's frustrating too because once your child is out and in private, if you've found a good school that they like, they don't want to change schools and I can't blame them. But they never should have had to leave the public system in the first place.

We didn't pick private for some big philosophical reason like commitment to the Waldorf method or something. I think that is a difference between PGCPS and MoCo. MoCo loses kids to privates too but with the families we know that is usually a philosophical difference (they want progressive ed so they send them to Green Acres or Lowell) or they want the name brand school and all that entails (networking, a perceived better shot at an Ivy, etc.). In PG people go private because they feel like the neighborhood school either can't meet their child's basic educational needs (especially TAG kids) or because there is a concern about the neighborhood school being an unsafe environment (especially true come middle school+). Those people could be retained or won back I think, but PGCPS doesn't really seem to be trying to do that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I think they've also tried redistricting. I guess the thinking is that they need to break up the high-performing schools. And then they get surprised when the parents of the high-performing kids then pull their kids out and send them to private.

My impression is that high-performing schools and programs get punished. Instead of trying to replicate and add more of those programs, they break them up.

They need to stop messing with the few programs/schools that work. And instead try to establish more of them.

It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

It kind infuriates me in the article where the county official acts like it's a mystery why middle class families with high performing students are pulling their kids from private school. Their TAG process alone answers that question.

But what the county doesn't realize is that it isn't just parents putting their kids in private school; it's parents MOVING entirely out of the county. So the tax base will shrink if they continue. Sadly, many people really don't want to move. But they read article after article about the great schools in bordering counties and then they confront roadblocks to trying to work with the PG public school system, and they end up leaving.

I really don't want this to continue to happen. I want the schools to turn around.

The lottery is for going to a TAG center. If you don't get into the TAG center then you do the TAG program in your in-bound in school. While I don't like the lottery system in general, I don't think it is unique to PG that some gifted kids are not able to go to a TAG school. In MoCo, they have highly gifted centers. If I am not mistaken, there are kids that are qualified that apply but still don't get in and continue to do a gifted pullout in their in-bound school. It is not through a lottery though it is based on an application, test scores, recommendations, etc.

That is correct, the HGCs in MoCo are ranked. The problem with missing out on the TAG program is that while you technically still get TAG services in the in-bound school, what that looks like varies a lot school to school. Our next door neighbor's DD was in this situation at our school. Her pull out services were for her and 2 other kids who were TAG identified but in other grades because the entire TAG cohort at the school either went to the Center or left public come 2nd grade when not getting into the center. She was miserable. She had no cohort at all at her school. The pull out was not all day so most of the day she was doing nothing because she'd finish stuff so quickly and the teacher was understandably focused on the rest of the class and working with them. The pull out services weren't comprehensive enough to keep her really engaged in school but they were obvious enough that they just served to alienate her from classmates as "different". She's now at a private. Again, pull out is great and appropriate for some TAG kids, but it isn't a good fit for the kids who are profoundly gifted. They NEED the center or they just end up pariahs a lot of times and bored with school to boot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:23:15, that's exactly how I have felt from the outside for the last decade. It seems like they wanted to focus on the kids with more "need" with the limited resources, but now I think they have found there's a big consequence to that. Don't they get more federal money per enrolled child? So they get something with every extra child. The local school also gets more from the county for each child, as well as extra staff if the head count goes up enough.

They have tried to take away specialty programs entirely more than once, maybe as elitist? But what else is keeping the motivated families within the system?

I think they've also tried redistricting. I guess the thinking is that they need to break up the high-performing schools. And then they get surprised when the parents of the high-performing kids then pull their kids out and send them to private.

My impression is that high-performing schools and programs get punished. Instead of trying to replicate and add more of those programs, they break them up.

They need to stop messing with the few programs/schools that work. And instead try to establish more of them.

It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

It kind infuriates me in the article where the county official acts like it's a mystery why middle class families with high performing students are pulling their kids from private school. Their TAG process alone answers that question.

But what the county doesn't realize is that it isn't just parents putting their kids in private school; it's parents MOVING entirely out of the county. So the tax base will shrink if they continue. Sadly, many people really don't want to move. But they read article after article about the great schools in bordering counties and then they confront roadblocks to trying to work with the PG public school system, and they end up leaving.

I really don't want this to continue to happen. I want the schools to turn around.

The TAG thing really makes no sense to me either. In theory it should be cheaper to educate the TAG kids as you can have a higher student/teacher ratio and meet proficiency on the tests with no problem, right? I think another issue with the TAG placement is that they've made the criteria for inclusion pretty broad which means they have to lottery because they have too many kids meeting cutoffs on the tests. The problem to me is that the kid who is just making cutoff via test score and doing pretty well in their zoned school is in less need of a true TAG center than the kid who is hitting 99th percentile across the board and has a profoundly gifted label on them based on other testing and has no cohort at all in the zoned school. If they don't have the resources to deal with the TAG group (and a look at the Glenarden Woods waitlist numbers tells me a lot of kids aren't getting seats) as it is defined right now then maybe they need to tweak the criteria or rank in some way so that the kids who really do need the Center end up there.

I get that adding more immersion or Montessori programs is tough because it isn't easy to find certified teachers who are native speakers or Montessori certified to boot, but adding more TAG programs should not be hard. Adding more specialty programs that center on arts shouldn't be hard - I know multiple music/art teachers who are on horrible cobbled together schedules in PGCPS being split between multiple schools. Any of them would be thrilled to have a true home school to teach from. Adding another STEM magnet program shouldn't be hard either and might stop the outflow of really good students who get waitlisted at Roosevelt and end up in private.

I was talking to a friend last week about how our neighborhood school really doesn't "look" like our neighborhood at this point. On our block there are 6 kids who are K-6 age (our zoned school's age group) and NONE are at the neighborhood school. 6 kids split among 4 private schools. 4 at 2 relatively close parochial schools, my child at a MoCo private, another at a DC private. 4 of the 6 were TAG lottery losers, including my child. That's a major problem. We'll try again for middle school. At least Roosevelt is ranked so I feel like my daughter is largely in control of her own destiny there and not crossing fingers in a lottery again. It's frustrating too because once your child is out and in private, if you've found a good school that they like, they don't want to change schools and I can't blame them. But they never should have had to leave the public system in the first place.

We didn't pick private for some big philosophical reason like commitment to the Waldorf method or something. I think that is a difference between PGCPS and MoCo. MoCo loses kids to privates too but with the families we know that is usually a philosophical difference (they want progressive ed so they send them to Green Acres or Lowell) or they want the name brand school and all that entails (networking, a perceived better shot at an Ivy, etc.). In PG people go private because they feel like the neighborhood school either can't meet their child's basic educational needs (especially TAG kids) or because there is a concern about the neighborhood school being an unsafe environment (especially true come middle school+). Those people could be retained or won back I think, but PGCPS doesn't really seem to be trying to do that.

Thank you for your explanation. That was really helpful.

I do believe PGCPS could win back people, but I agree that they have to try. I think part of the answer is more TAG schools and more charter schools. It's so obvious that people want to go to those schools, and it's also pretty obvious that it isn't that those schools "steal" kids from the regular neighborhood schools, because the reality is that when parents can't get their kids into the charter/TAG schools, they go private or move (unless they have a good inbound school, and there are some good inbound elementary schools; it gets trickier with middle school).

But again, I kind of feel like the attitude of the school board is that they don't have an incentive really to lure people back. They actually keep getting more funding *because* they are failing. And from the recent audit of federal stimulus funds that were given to PG schools, they aren't using that funding appropriately. The status quo works for them. They don't have to add more staff or facilities. They get special grant money and funds because of their failure.

I hate to say that, but the more I learn about it all, that's the conclusion I reach. I am curious to see what Baker does, because the advantage of having the county intervene is that Baker has more of an incentive to improve the schools, because he's trying to lure people to the county (middle class families, businesses, et cetera), and schools are a big part of that equation. The school board is too insular and narrowly focused.

I also feel like the jest of the commentary in the article is that middle class students are seen as a way to help the low-performing students. And I think that is the attitude that drives parents with means of high-performing students away. They don't want their kids to be seen as a tool to fix societal/cultural problems among low SES communities. They want the school to be just as committed to giving their kid the best education possible as it is to bringing up to speed the kids that are left behind.

[Anonymous]

I agree 12:01 that there needs to be participation and pressure put on by stakeholders, not just the school board. I think maybe we are seeing this a little bit now, though I'm skeptical that the Baker move will do much of anything. UMD getting involved with the new charter is a big deal. I'd love to see them coordinate with PGCPS to do a true lab school, but this is a good first step. The University has a huge interest in turning the schools around because they lose out on faculty (both in hiring and retention) because the schools have such a bad reputation. A lot of profs WANT to live in a college town, want to walk to campus, want to be part of the community, but that doesn't happen much at UMD and it is almost entirely due to the schools. UMD hasn't done much historically to get involved but maybe they are finally realizing they should have a dog in this fight. If the new charter is successful, maybe that paves the way for more collaboration.

I think residents, even those with kids in private, could get more organized and exert a bit of pressure too. The perception that the schools are terrible drives down everyone's property values. That ends up impacting the schools too. Better schools = higher tax revenues. I can't imagine that PGCPS wants to keep the schools in a bad state because there are seriously diminishing returns with that model. Home values go down instead of up. Tax revenues go down, so funding does take a hit eventually I think.

The other problem is the superintendent job is sort of an administrative death sentence. Experienced people aren't going to want to come in to a totally dysfunctional system and then have that failure on their record, so the people targeting the job tend to be people promoting up from a non-super job (unproven) or people coming from a super job in a much much smaller district who have no experience with the sort of issues PGCPS faces, at least not on that scale. I'm not sure what the solution is there either, but it isn't good that the job has turned into a revolving door.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:23:15, that's exactly how I have felt from the outside for the last decade. It seems like they wanted to focus on the kids with more "need" with the limited resources, but now I think they have found there's a big consequence to that. Don't they get more federal money per enrolled child? So they get something with every extra child. The local school also gets more from the county for each child, as well as extra staff if the head count goes up enough.

They have tried to take away specialty programs entirely more than once, maybe as elitist? But what else is keeping the motivated families within the system?

I think they've also tried redistricting. I guess the thinking is that they need to break up the high-performing schools. And then they get surprised when the parents of the high-performing kids then pull their kids out and send them to private.

My impression is that high-performing schools and programs get punished. Instead of trying to replicate and add more of those programs, they break them up.

They need to stop messing with the few programs/schools that work. And instead try to establish more of them.

It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

It kind infuriates me in the article where the county official acts like it's a mystery why middle class families with high performing students are pulling their kids from private school. Their TAG process alone answers that question.

But what the county doesn't realize is that it isn't just parents putting their kids in private school; it's parents MOVING entirely out of the county. So the tax base will shrink if they continue. Sadly, many people really don't want to move. But they read article after article about the great schools in bordering counties and then they confront roadblocks to trying to work with the PG public school system, and they end up leaving.
I really don't want this to continue to happen. I want the schools to turn around.

I am not a PG county resident, but I read your threads for insight just in case DH convinces me. My DH has been trying to get me to move into the county for four years. His argumen tis that we could get a really beautiful house and room for his own personal man-cave for a lot less money. However, my counter argument to him is what I bolded in your statement. Any money saved on a beautiful home would be spent on private education. Too much hassle. So, we stay in our little house in the city and send our kid to a great charter school and pay DC taxes on our 240k HHI. It's not as high as many people on DCUM, but it isn't chomp change either.

[Anonymous]

I am not a PG county resident, but I read your threads for insight just in case DH convinces me. My DH has been trying to get me to move into the county for four years. His argumen tis that we could get a really beautiful house and room for his own personal man-cave for a lot less money. However, my counter argument to him is what I bolded in your statement. Any money saved on a beautiful home would be spent on private education. Too much hassle. So, we stay in our little house in the city and send our kid to a great charter school and pay DC taxes on our 240k HHI. It's not as high as many people on DCUM, but it isn't chomp change either.

I think for some people, though, the math still makes PG a better deal, as in the cost of private + housing is still a lot less than the cost of housing in MOCO, for example. But even then, I think people get scared away by the stigma, which is ridiculous, because personally, I love my neighborhood in PG.

Sometimes I think perhaps PG is just too big. It might make more sense to break it up, but I'm sure this would be met with resistance for a number of reasons.

[Anonymous]

With the cost of privates going up each year, it is not cost effective to live in the county and pay private school tuition, especially for more than one kid.

I did a little research on Holy Trinity and the tuition alone is 1200 a month for one child.