MCPS High School Magnet Decisions
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Anonymous
My point exactly. All the more reason these folks want to paint the kids who did as somehow inferior. |
Anonymous
| You gotta stop projecting your own insecurities. |
Anonymous
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This has nothing to do with inferior or superior, so lets stop with that. The question is whether the distribution of SMCS admits which used to skew heavily in favor of TPMS is the same or not. Yes, TPMS does well to prepare students but so do many of the high performing MS like Cabin John, Hoover, Frost etc.
I suppose we will now better soon enough. |
Anonymous
Sometimes it is the truth. There are kids who have MAP M of 280+ at 5th grade didn’t get picked for Takoma Park but their classmates who have MAP M of 230-240 get picked. You can call their parents sour grapes but they do feel the magnet selection lottery is not fair. |
Anonymous
This was the case for our DS in 5th grade. He scored 290 on his MAP-M. I don't recall what his MAP-R was, but I think it was pretty decent. Was placed in the lottery but was not invited to any of the magnet middle schools, while his peers of much lesser scores got in. Fast forward 3 years and DS got into all the HS magnets he had applied for. He doesn't keep in contact with the kids who went to Takoma/Eastern so do not know if they were invited. I think at the HS level, scores and essays will shine through and so kids are hopefully given a chance. Glad it's not lottery at the HS level. |
Anonymous
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Same story here. DC did not get into MS magnets but peers with lower scores did. Now, that is not to say the peers were not deserving - they absolutely were and are great kids with great MAP scores.
Fast forward 3 years, DC is accepted into the HS magnet of their choice and some of their peers from TPMS/Eastern didn't get selected. I sincerely hope that MCPS keeps the HS magnet selection free of lottery and continues the "review of portfolio approach" that they are doing. |
Anonymous
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I do agree HS magnet selection should be multidimensional there aren't enough data points right now. They need to add the full Cogat back. There are just too many kids with similar stats and looking at essays is really arbitrary depending on who is on the committee and their biases.
They haven't released who is on the committee recently but a few years ago they claimed it was diverse but there was zero representation of one major racial minority group among more than 20 people on different committees if I remember correctly. MCPS needs to be more transparent. |
Anonymous
Np. Its an interesting experiment though. Map M is a test of exposure, not ability. Lots of kids get prep through AOPS of RM and get a 280, and yet we like to then think its our kids' innate brilliance. I don't mean this unkindly, because I am guilty of the same. One of my kids had zero enrichment and their map M score went up about 30 points from 6th through 8th grade. Meanwhile my kid who did get enrichment went up about 45 points. They started at nearly identical scores. Of course this is an N of 1, but i've never felt like my second kid is naturally smarter or anything. They're both smart but not brilliant. Which is how most of the kids in SMCS are. Anyway, back to TPMS and the lottery. It would be great to track kids who got in by the lottery but would not have otherwise (just do a cutoff at 97 percentile) and see how they fare. Are they significantly different from 1) the high scorers at TPMS and 2) the high scorers at other schools who didn't make the lottery. The second question is the more interesting one - can the magnet program make up for gaps pre 6th grade, even in the 85th percentile? And if there's no significant difference in #2, that's an argument for maintaining the lottery because it's doing exactly what it should. |
Anonymous
They need to go back to having kids write essays in person and do tests in person. The system is so game-able with AI writing essays, people having infinite time on the map etc. |
Anonymous
What you said are all speculations. I disagree that a student of MAP M that’s 50 points higher than their classmates at 5th grade is not more brilliant. It is an ability to be able to score so much higher than their classmates at 5th grades. There are kids consistently scoring extremely high in every single MAP test and considered as best math students of the entire grade by their peers and teachers and win math competitions but did not win the lottery. The lottery system is not doing any service to these smart kids. It needs to have a more discriminatory power to form a pool if lottery has to be used. |
Anonymous
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PP I get that you understandably upset. I do think it's a shame that outliers are no longer given a fair shot at the MS magnets, but I also suspect your child is doing just fine and will not be at a disadvantage in life due to not winning the lottery.
Even before the lottery, so this was years ago, we know of two really top math kids who were DC's classmates who got in to TPMS and both turned it down. They are upperclassmen now and still great at math. Not being at TPMS did not hurt them in the least. They are still better at math than DD who did go to TPMS! FWIW one is a boy and the other is a girl. |
Anonymous
Nope, sorry. MAP is a test you can study for - it adapts to what you know. If the material has never been presented to you, you are at a disadvantage. Many parents I know provide enrichment to their kids - this is super common among Asian Americans. My own kid went up 22 points from Fall to Spring after 2 months of AOPs. A little bit of exposure can go a long way. Its quite different from Cogat, which gets closer (maybe) to a test of native logical ability. But even for that, studying helps. I agree that it's not fair to very smart kids, but the real solution is opening up a whole lot more spots (maybe closer to home), rather than stopping lotteries altogether. And I say this as someone with a bit of stake in this. I attended the Blair SMCS in the 90s, back when it was an in-person exam - it was transformative for me. My 8th grader is now headed to a high school magnet themselves after not getting a spot in middle school (were not selected from the lottery). So i get people's frustrations, but my kid didn't really need a magnet middle school. I'm UMC, I'm in STEM, and I'm on their case, and (now) provide enrichment, etc etc. They were fine w/o the magnet MS, and would have been fine in high school too if they hadn't gotten in, because the biggest factor is what's happening (or not happening) at home. That's literally the point of the lotteries - for the school to provide support/enrichment when kids with potential don't get it at home. Also, what's this obsession? It's not a race. Because your kid figured out multivariate at age 15 doesn't mean he's going to be any more successful than someone who took it at 17. There's a particular alum from my class that has a famous physics lab underneath him now that you'd all be killing yourselves for your child to get into, and he was struggling big time in Functions, whereas for some other people it was a breeze, and they aren't anywhere near as successful as that guy. Hard work and passion are far more important than one's map score at age 13. |
Anonymous
I could already tell from your posts that you are one of those racist posters even before you mentioned race. The kids that we know that prep are mostly Russian or Eastern European. They are WHITE. Almost every kid we know in RSM is white. |
Anonymous
I feel like this PP is missing some fundamental social skills. Read the room. No one wants to read your incredibly verbose posts about yourself and could you have just a little empathy for the other poor poster you're arguing with? You're not even arguing anything important, just promoting yourself. |
Anonymous
Ummm.. Who is a racist here? |