FCPS school decline

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

There are always parents on here that claim the five paragraph essay has gone away and it’s one of the reasons FCPS and our children’s education is declining. The five paragraph essay has not gone away. It is still the expected/desired outcome for multiple language arts units in 4-6th grade. If your students are not writing a five paragraph essay, there are probably three reasons for that.

1) their individual ELL or SPED level is not at a place where they can manage a five paragraph essay.
2) the teacher did not do it because they ran out of time in the unit.
3) the student complained and procrastinated needlessly and never got beyond paragraph two or three.

My FCPS AAP student was not assigned a five paragraph essay in 4-6th grade (and in fact was not given any formal writing instruction--or punctuation, or grammar, or spelling instruction--until we moved them out of FCPS for 7th grade). This was a well regarded albeit overcrowded LIV AAP center. The emphasis was math, math, math.

And my AAP student did get those things… at an average school.

I think this does happen. Lower performing school teachers know they can’t get away with cutting stuff. More affluent schools think they can get away with it and the parents will just teach the kids instead.

This is why I never understand why parents think the center is better. Our AAP kid at a Local Level 4 got spelling, grammar and writing instruction.

Our center does a lot more writing than the LLIV. It just depends. Our LLIV has a lot of AAP students but the school purposely doesn't cater to them or any student in language arts.