Superintendent's Recommendation for Richard Montgomery ES #5 Boundaries

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I would like to provide evidence that contradicts the previous posters who claim that FARMS performance does not depend on where they go to school. I also did a ‘quick glance’ at the PARCC scores and here is what I found, verify for yourself:

2017 PARCC Results - English Grade 5 – Met Expectations
http://reportcard.msde.maryland.gov/

Non-FARMS FARMS TOTAL
Richie Park 65.5 34.8 57.1
Beall 58.4 39.1 49.1
College Gardens 52.3 38.9 50.7
Twinbrook 38.4 27.3 31.4

From this is becomes apparent that FARMS students have a poorer performance when they are located in a high FARMS school (Twinbrook). In addition, Non-FARMS students do significantly worse when in a high FARMS school.

The FARMs cutoff for a family of 3 is about 38k a year. So a family of 3 making 40k and one making $250k are both considered non-FARM. The difference in non-FARMS performance could just be attributable to the fact that there are a lot more 250k families living in the non-Twinbrook clusters. I'd be interested to see this data broken out by actual household income and/or parent's educational level, but I doubt that's available.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
This is from the National Reading Panel's final product "Preventing Reading Difficulties." I was a party to these disscusions then...

"In principle, low SES could potentially carry risk for reading difficulty for an individual child and for entire groups of children. That is, low SES is an individual risk factor to the extent that among children attending the same schools, youngsters from low-income families are more likely to become poorer readers than those from high-income families. Low SES is also a group risk factor because children from low-income communities are likely to become poorer readers than children from more affluent communities. Because the former are more likely to attend substandard schools, the correlation between SES and low achievement is probably mediated, in large part, by differences in the quality of school experiences. It is thus not very surprising that the strength of the correlation between SES and achievement is stronger when the unit of analysis is the school than when the unit of analysis is the individual child (Bryk and Raudenbush, 1992, on multilevel measures of school effects).
When the average SES of a school (or district) and the average achievement level of the students attending that school are obtained for a large sample of schools, a correlation between SES and achievement can be calculated using the school as the unit of analysis. In a meta-analytic review of the findings for 93 such samples, White (1982) found that the average size of the correlation was .68, which is substantial and dovetails with the conclusion of the section below that attending a substandard school (which is usually one whose students tend to be low in both SES and achievement) constitutes a risk factor for the entire group of children in that school."

The following paragraph is critical... " "When achievement scores and SES are measured individually for all children in a large sample, however, the strength of the association between SES and achievement is far lower. In White's (1982) meta-analysis, for instance, the average correlation between reading achievement and SES across 174 such samples was .23. Similarly, the correlation was .22 in a sample of 1,459 9-year-old students whose scores were obtained through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) evaluations (Walberg and Tsai, 1985). In other words, within a given school or district, or across many districts within a country, SES differences among children are relatively weak predictors of achievement. Thus, all else being equal, coming from a family of low SES (defined according to income, education, and occupation of the parents) does not by itself greatly increase a child's risk for having difficulty in learning to read after school income level has been accounted for."

This logic seems circular. Are the kids performing poorly because the school is substandard (in terms of curriculum, resources, etc) - or is the school considered substandard because kids are performing poorly (which could be attributed to a number of other factors unrelated to the school)? Montgomery County elementary schools pretty much have the same curriculum, and the high FARMS schools generally get more resources, which would lead me to believe that poor student performance in Montgomery County at least is less related to the "quality" of the individual school vs factors related to the students themselves. What evidence is there that, a high SES student would perform any worse at Twinbrook vs Beall for instance. In fact, that student may benefit more at Twinbrook with things like smaller class sizes.

I think a non FARMS, high achieving student can do well at a high FARMS school as long as the school can provide a learning environment that meets their needs plus it has a sufficient number of kids to support a good and similar/like peer group. My kid's school is 45% FARMS and it has both of these things. But i doubt that a school that is extremely challenged, let's say 75% FARMS will be able to provide this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would like to provide evidence that contradicts the previous posters who claim that FARMS performance does not depend on where they go to school. I also did a ‘quick glance’ at the PARCC scores and here is what I found, verify for yourself:

2017 PARCC Results - English Grade 5 – Met Expectations
http://reportcard.msde.maryland.gov/

Non-FARMS FARMS TOTAL
Richie Park 65.5 34.8 57.1
Beall 58.4 39.1 49.1
College Gardens 52.3 38.9 50.7
Twinbrook 38.4 27.3 31.4

From this is becomes apparent that FARMS students have a poorer performance when they are located in a high FARMS school (Twinbrook). In addition, Non-FARMS students do significantly worse when in a high FARMS school.

The FARMs cutoff for a family of 3 is about 38k a year. So a family of 3 making 40k and one making $250k are both considered non-FARM. The difference in non-FARMS performance could just be attributable to the fact that there are a lot more 250k families living in the non-Twinbrook clusters. I'd be interested to see this data broken out by actual household income and/or parent's educational level, but I doubt that's available.

Do you mean that data for Rockville specifically? Or do you mean the dozens of studies from around the country that have looked exactly at that question? The impacts of SES are basically flat between $40K-250K. So there are little differences in achievement in early reading and math. Most of the action is between $0-38K.

[Anonymous]

There's been a fair amount of discussion going on on the Hungerford neighborhood email listserve to try to coordinate a response to the Board of Ed this week. But in the interest of getting input from the entire RM community, a public Facebook group has been created.

If you live in the RM cluster feel free to join the conversation over there:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/fairnessineducation/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would like to provide evidence that contradicts the previous posters who claim that FARMS performance does not depend on where they go to school. I also did a ‘quick glance’ at the PARCC scores and here is what I found, verify for yourself:

2017 PARCC Results - English Grade 5 – Met Expectations
http://reportcard.msde.maryland.gov/

Non-FARMS FARMS TOTAL
Richie Park 65.5 34.8 57.1
Beall 58.4 39.1 49.1
College Gardens 52.3 38.9 50.7
Twinbrook 38.4 27.3 31.4

From this is becomes apparent that FARMS students have a poorer performance when they are located in a high FARMS school (Twinbrook). In addition, Non-FARMS students do significantly worse when in a high FARMS school.

The FARMs cutoff for a family of 3 is about 38k a year. So a family of 3 making 40k and one making $250k are both considered non-FARM. The difference in non-FARMS performance could just be attributable to the fact that there are a lot more 250k families living in the non-Twinbrook clusters. I'd be interested to see this data broken out by actual household income and/or parent's educational level, but I doubt that's available.

Do you mean that data for Rockville specifically? Or do you mean the dozens of studies from around the country that have looked exactly at that question? The impacts of SES are basically flat between $40K-250K. So there are little differences in achievement in early reading and math. Most of the action is between $0-38K.

I'll take either, but for this particular discussion I'd say data for Montogmery County specifically is more relevant. If you have some links to the national data I'd love to look at it. I have a hard time believing that there is little difference in this area in student performance between a family making $40 k and one making $250k, less because of the actual income level vs the correlation between income level and parent education level.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I guess my question is, why is that part of Rockville poor compared to north of it?

Because housing is still relatively affordable in the Twinbrook area.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess my question is, why is that part of Rockville poor compared to north of it?

Because housing is still relatively affordable in the Twinbrook area.

Though that's begging the question, really. WHY is Twinbrook still relatively affordable? It's got a great location between two Metro stations, and the lots are good-sized (for people who want that). The houses are small, but you can add on or do a tear-down.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
This is from the National Reading Panel's final product "Preventing Reading Difficulties." I was a party to these disscusions then...

"In principle, low SES could potentially carry risk for reading difficulty for an individual child and for entire groups of children. That is, low SES is an individual risk factor to the extent that among children attending the same schools, youngsters from low-income families are more likely to become poorer readers than those from high-income families. Low SES is also a group risk factor because children from low-income communities are likely to become poorer readers than children from more affluent communities. Because the former are more likely to attend substandard schools, the correlation between SES and low achievement is probably mediated, in large part, by differences in the quality of school experiences. It is thus not very surprising that the strength of the correlation between SES and achievement is stronger when the unit of analysis is the school than when the unit of analysis is the individual child (Bryk and Raudenbush, 1992, on multilevel measures of school effects).
When the average SES of a school (or district) and the average achievement level of the students attending that school are obtained for a large sample of schools, a correlation between SES and achievement can be calculated using the school as the unit of analysis. In a meta-analytic review of the findings for 93 such samples, White (1982) found that the average size of the correlation was .68, which is substantial and dovetails with the conclusion of the section below that attending a substandard school (which is usually one whose students tend to be low in both SES and achievement) constitutes a risk factor for the entire group of children in that school."

The following paragraph is critical... " "When achievement scores and SES are measured individually for all children in a large sample, however, the strength of the association between SES and achievement is far lower. In White's (1982) meta-analysis, for instance, the average correlation between reading achievement and SES across 174 such samples was .23. Similarly, the correlation was .22 in a sample of 1,459 9-year-old students whose scores were obtained through the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) evaluations (Walberg and Tsai, 1985). In other words, within a given school or district, or across many districts within a country, SES differences among children are relatively weak predictors of achievement. Thus, all else being equal, coming from a family of low SES (defined according to income, education, and occupation of the parents) does not by itself greatly increase a child's risk for having difficulty in learning to read after school income level has been accounted for."

This logic seems circular. Are the kids performing poorly because the school is substandard (in terms of curriculum, resources, etc) - or is the school considered substandard because kids are performing poorly (which could be attributed to a number of other factors unrelated to the school)? Montgomery County elementary schools pretty much have the same curriculum, and the high FARMS schools generally get more resources, which would lead me to believe that poor student performance in Montgomery County at least is less related to the "quality" of the individual school vs factors related to the students themselves. What evidence is there that, a high SES student would perform any worse at Twinbrook vs Beall for instance. In fact, that student may benefit more at Twinbrook with things like smaller class sizes.

I think a non FARMS, high achieving student can do well at a high FARMS school as long as the school can provide a learning environment that meets their needs plus it has a sufficient number of kids to support a good and similar/like peer group. My kid's school is 45% FARMS and it has both of these things. But i doubt that a school that is extremely challenged, let's say 75% FARMS will be able to provide this.

I tend to agree, but I wonder if this manifests itself more starting in Middle school (or later elementary school) and into High School vs Elementary school. In K-3, is the peer group really having that great an impact on individual student performance?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess my question is, why is that part of Rockville poor compared to north of it?

Because housing is still relatively affordable in the Twinbrook area.

Though that's begging the question, really. WHY is Twinbrook still relatively affordable? It's got a great location between two Metro stations, and the lots are good-sized (for people who want that). The houses are small, but you can add on or do a tear-down.

Because higher SES see the poor elementary school scores and neighborhood demographics and decide they'd rather live in College Gardens or similar. So it's a vicious circle. Same phenomenon in the East Rockville neighborhood.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess my question is, why is that part of Rockville poor compared to north of it?

Because housing is still relatively affordable in the Twinbrook area.

Though that's begging the question, really. WHY is Twinbrook still relatively affordable? It's got a great location between two Metro stations, and the lots are good-sized (for people who want that). The houses are small, but you can add on or do a tear-down.

Because higher SES see the poor elementary school scores and neighborhood demographics and decide they'd rather live in College Gardens or similar. So it's a vicious circle. Same phenomenon in the East Rockville neighborhood.

But what about people who can't afford College Gardens? And/or have kids in middle/high school? (They could get in to RMIB through the so-called "back door" that one poster has an idee fixe about!)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess my question is, why is that part of Rockville poor compared to north of it?

Because housing is still relatively affordable in the Twinbrook area.

Though that's begging the question, really. WHY is Twinbrook still relatively affordable? It's got a great location between two Metro stations, and the lots are good-sized (for people who want that). The houses are small, but you can add on or do a tear-down.

Because no one wants to live in a town that mainly speaks Spanish.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess my question is, why is that part of Rockville poor compared to north of it?

Because housing is still relatively affordable in the Twinbrook area.

Though that's begging the question, really. WHY is Twinbrook still relatively affordable? It's got a great location between two Metro stations, and the lots are good-sized (for people who want that). The houses are small, but you can add on or do a tear-down.

Because higher SES see the poor elementary school scores and neighborhood demographics and decide they'd rather live in College Gardens or similar. So it's a vicious circle. Same phenomenon in the East Rockville neighborhood.

But what about people who can't afford College Gardens? And/or have kids in middle/high school? (They could get in to RMIB through the so-called "back door" that one poster has an idee fixe about!)

A UMC family should be able to afford something in the RM cluster outside of Twinbrook. For those who have kids in middle/high school, it probably comes down to the neighborhood demographics and housing stock. Sure, you can teardown/renovate in Twinbrook but at that point, why not just spend the money to buy in an area where there are more folks in your SES strata? Not saying that you don't have UMC families living/moving to Twinbrook, but obviously not enough to lead to some wholesale change in school test scores and neighborhood demographics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There's been a fair amount of discussion going on on the Hungerford neighborhood email listserve to try to coordinate a response to the Board of Ed this week. But in the interest of getting input from the entire RM community, a public Facebook group has been created.

If you live in the RM cluster feel free to join the conversation over there:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/fairnessineducation/

Wait, wait. Your school was built in a lower/middle income neighborhood and you are upset that it has 42% FARMS? What about Twinbrook? Were you speaking out on their behalf and their high FARNS rate of 68% during the past year? No. And guess what? Twinbrook didn't want their school disrupted. They don't complain about their FARMS. They like their community. So you sitting here telling the board they need to now come up with other options and better your FARMS percentage lower than 40% by bussing in kids farther away and then moving kids close to your school to another location is insane. Let it go already.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
A UMC family should be able to afford something in the RM cluster outside of Twinbrook. For those who have kids in middle/high school, it probably comes down to the neighborhood demographics and housing stock. Sure, you can teardown/renovate in Twinbrook but at that point, why not just spend the money to buy in an area where there are more folks in your SES strata? Not saying that you don't have UMC families living/moving to Twinbrook, but obviously not enough to lead to some wholesale change in school test scores and neighborhood demographics.

An upper-middle-class family can, but a middle-class family can't. That's the whole point of Twinbrook being comparatively affordable.

What's more, while I'm always reading on DCUM about Twinbrook as a place where people would just as soon murder you as look at you, when I walk around Twinbrook (at least Twinbrook south of Veirs Mill), what I see is nice walkable streets with nice little houses, nice biggish yards, and people pushing babies and walking dogs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I guess my question is, why is that part of Rockville poor compared to north of it?

Because housing is still relatively affordable in the Twinbrook area.

Though that's begging the question, really. WHY is Twinbrook still relatively affordable? It's got a great location between two Metro stations, and the lots are good-sized (for people who want that). The houses are small, but you can add on or do a tear-down.

Because no one wants to live in a town that mainly speaks Spanish.

Twinbrook is not a town.

Also, when you say "no one wants to," you mean, "I don't want to", right? Evidently plenty of people do want to live there, including people who speak Spanish.