CES letters?

[Anonymous]

If you really want to know you can rank the elementary schools by FARMS percentage and divide into thirds. It may not be exact but it will give you a good sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If you really want to know you can rank the elementary schools by FARMS percentage and divide into thirds. It may not be exact but it will give you a good sense.

I don’t even know if they’ve confirmed there are still 3 tiers. This exercise will not get you actual info.

[Anonymous]

if we got into lottery pool, when do we hear back?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:if we got into lottery pool, when do we hear back?

Every third grader should have received a letter late last week indicating whether your child was in the pool and, if so, whether your child won the lottery and gained a seat at the local CES center. It should also be loaded to ParentVue eventually, but you should have received a hard copy in the mail last week.

[Anonymous]

The big question is, what if your kid was placed in the pool and didn't get a spot at a CES. Letter says they will receive enrichment at home ES. Our home ES does not offer the ELA curriculum. What will enrichment look like?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The big question is, what if your kid was placed in the pool and didn't get a spot at a CES. Letter says they will receive enrichment at home ES. Our home ES does not offer the ELA curriculum. What will enrichment look like?

If your school doesn't have the Enriched Literacy Curriculum (ELC), students will get enrichment via Benchmark Advanced. Basically, the kind of enrichment they are likely getting this year in 3rd grade with Benchmark Advanced, Junior Great Books, etc. It obviously depends on the individual school and each teacher/classroom, which is why it would be great if MCPS rolled out the ELC curriculum to more schools, since that is a whole suite of targeted enrichment in ELA designed for kids who need advanced work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:if we got into lottery pool, when do we hear back?

The deadline for acceptances in the first round is April 22. So there won't be a second round of lottery picks until after that, maybe 2-3 weeks after if I had to guess. But kids may be notified off the wait pool all the way into August, basically until the fall semester begins.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son (who is Black) was in the 95th percentile on MAP-R at a "focus" school, was placed in the lottery, did not get in the regional CES. Not sure how or if this matches the anecdotes already gathered in this thread.

I'll admit to a little pang because I was in "GT" classes when I was a kid and I have a love/hate relationship with that label. But staying in his home school is probably a better move for him, and I feel confident that his needs will be met.

You should appeal this decision.

WHY. Why should this parent appeal?

I'm a flaming progressive that would be happy to have race be a consideration, but it's not.

So what is there to appeal? A 95th percentile kid WAS put in the lottery pool, but then wasn't randomly selected? Just like tons of other 90th, 95th and 99th percentile kids, because there are more of them than slots available?

Thus...?

I would like to believe it is an absolutely fair lottery game. Your case support it.

There is a race consideration, it's just not explicit because that would be unlawful. By locally norming students' scores, MCPS made it easier for kids at high FARMS schools to qualify for the pool than kids from low FARMS schools. Because FARMS rates correlate so closely with how many underrepresented minority students attend a school, it was the best MCPS could do under the law to make the pool more racially diverse and less white. Was about time, especially in light of the prior conversations above about how many (mostly white/asian) parents used to game the system by paying for tutors and prep classes to make sure their kids score high on the entrance tests.

I wonder if there's a case for disparate impact racial discrimination based on the local norming?

Local morning is considered a best practice for G&T program selection, but in the case of CES has almost no impact since children in all but a few cases are competing against similar SES schools.

Yeah I mean, fine if they want to use local norming to find students in lower SES school environments who would benefit from and succeed in a CES type environment. I just don’t quite get the logic of using norming to lower a student’s score and erect barriers for a high performing student from a higher SES school. Why is the child with a 95tb percentile having their “standardized” test averaged downward and gaslighted/denied enrichment because you needed to norm other kids’ scores upward when those students are not headed to the same regional CES anyway?

Look at it this way. The kids getting "normed" out of the pool were the edge cases anyway. It's not the 95th percentile kids dropping out of the pool - it's the 86th percentile kids in the highest SES schools. Those kids woudn't have even been in the pool under the old system, so it's the same difference in the end.

Are you saying that kids from high SES schools who scored in the 96th percentile on the national scale (before MCPS drove down/locally normed their score to the 84th percentile on the MCPS high SES scale) would never have been considered for the program in years past? I didn't realize the bar was that high to qualify before they started using local norming and the lottery.

Not PP, but there's a different way to look at this. We all know regional CES draws from a certain predetermined number of ESs. So Pyle kids are not competing for the same spots as Frost kids who are not competing for the same spots as Newport Mill kids. They each have separate a CES. Each CES has a certain number of spots to give out. If we looked at how many CES invitations are offered to each school, I would not be surprised to find it's more or less a similar number across all the ESs, I would guess in the range of 6-8 spots per school. So while the Pyle or Frost families may be upset that more of their kids don't get spots (and that their corresponding threshold MAP percentile may be higher than some others), really there's no way around the fact that there are a limited number of seats at their CES and it's not going to get any bigger. So in the end, the Pyle students are not competing against either the Frost students or the Newport Mill students. They are competing against kids in their own cluster and the other clusters that feed into their specific CES. The local norming is only there to allow lower SES schools to send a similar number of kids to their CES, which is NOT the CES that draws from Pyle or Frost.

Well this is not 100% true. There are mid-tier SES schools that feed into the CES for Pyle at least.

Yes, that's a good point. I shouldn't have said that local norming is ONLY there to allow lower SES schools to send a similar number of kids to their CES. Within a cluster, local norming may help a Title I or Focus school send a similar number of students to a CES vs. a higher SES school in the same cluster. For instance, within the RM cluster, local norming may help even out the number of kids in the lottery pool for Twinbrook (Title I) vs. College Gardens (higher SES). My data on Twinbrook and College Gardens may be a bit dated, but you get the picture.

My point is that each ES feeding into the CES for Pyle is probably getting a similar number of CES seats. And I don't think MCPS is going to change that seat allocation any time soon. So all the debate on DCUM over "local norming" is a big red herring. Your school is getting "x" number of seats. It's similar to the number of seats given to other elementary schools. If your child scores among the highest in their school AND gets the requisite As, they stand a better chance of being chosen.

[Anonymous]

Kind of an offshoot but it seems a lot of people are following this thread so I thought I would ask. Does anyone have any information about how we proceed if we got a CES spot? I know in past years there was an orientation at the school PRIOR to the acceptance deadline so families and kids could make informed decisions. Even last year there was a zoom orientation prior to the acceptance deadline. This year in that Parent Information Session in January, they stated there would be no orientations at all and you could contact the Principal of the school if you wanted more info. However, my husband heard from another dad that CCES is having an orientation between now and the April 22 deadline.

Have people who were offered a slot heard any more about next steps? I can't believe MoCo would expect us to uproot our children to a new building and program without so much as a zoom orientation. I did e-mail the person listed on the website FAQ in charge of handling curriculum questions, but I haven't heard back. Any info anyone has would be much appreciated. Our CES site is Pine Crest.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son (who is Black) was in the 95th percentile on MAP-R at a "focus" school, was placed in the lottery, did not get in the regional CES. Not sure how or if this matches the anecdotes already gathered in this thread.

I'll admit to a little pang because I was in "GT" classes when I was a kid and I have a love/hate relationship with that label. But staying in his home school is probably a better move for him, and I feel confident that his needs will be met.

You should appeal this decision.

WHY. Why should this parent appeal?

I'm a flaming progressive that would be happy to have race be a consideration, but it's not.

So what is there to appeal? A 95th percentile kid WAS put in the lottery pool, but then wasn't randomly selected? Just like tons of other 90th, 95th and 99th percentile kids, because there are more of them than slots available?

Thus...?

I am the parent who was being asked to appeal, and as this commenter noted, I don't have any grounds to appeal. There's simply not enough space for everyone (which is a different issue, but that's the way things are now). My son's school does have the ELC, and he'll also be with friends and teachers who know and love him. I believe there's a sufficient peer group at his school to adequately challenge him. And philosophically, I think there should be more enrichment opportunities as a student's home school, anyway.

(I'd also like to think he'd still have been in the lottery if he went to a "richie-rich" school, but who knows.)

I'm trying to steer myself away from being obsessed with labels (even though I acknowledge that bit of disappointment when I got the letter.) I was happy to throw my information into the mix just for conversation, but this is now a 17-page thread about third graders. The kids that we are talking about (kids who made it into the lottery) are clearly going to be okay whether they get into the CES or not, because their MAP-R scores demonstrate that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son (who is Black) was in the 95th percentile on MAP-R at a "focus" school, was placed in the lottery, did not get in the regional CES. Not sure how or if this matches the anecdotes already gathered in this thread.

I'll admit to a little pang because I was in "GT" classes when I was a kid and I have a love/hate relationship with that label. But staying in his home school is probably a better move for him, and I feel confident that his needs will be met.

You should appeal this decision.

WHY. Why should this parent appeal?

I'm a flaming progressive that would be happy to have race be a consideration, but it's not.

So what is there to appeal? A 95th percentile kid WAS put in the lottery pool, but then wasn't randomly selected? Just like tons of other 90th, 95th and 99th percentile kids, because there are more of them than slots available?

Thus...?

I am the parent who was being asked to appeal, and as this commenter noted, I don't have any grounds to appeal. There's simply not enough space for everyone (which is a different issue, but that's the way things are now). My son's school does have the ELC, and he'll also be with friends and teachers who know and love him. I believe there's a sufficient peer group at his school to adequately challenge him. And philosophically, I think there should be more enrichment opportunities as a student's home school, anyway.

(I'd also like to think he'd still have been in the lottery if he went to a "richie-rich" school, but who knows.)

I'm trying to steer myself away from being obsessed with labels (even though I acknowledge that bit of disappointment when I got the letter.) I was happy to throw my information into the mix just for conversation, but this is now a 17-page thread about third graders. The kids that we are talking about (kids who made it into the lottery) are clearly going to be okay whether they get into the CES or not, because their MAP-R scores demonstrate that.

Who knows? I do! He wouldn't have qualified for the lottery, and therefore wouldn't be eligible for the ELC at his home school, with a score in the 95th percentile at a "richie-rich" school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Kind of an offshoot but it seems a lot of people are following this thread so I thought I would ask. Does anyone have any information about how we proceed if we got a CES spot? I know in past years there was an orientation at the school PRIOR to the acceptance deadline so families and kids could make informed decisions. Even last year there was a zoom orientation prior to the acceptance deadline. This year in that Parent Information Session in January, they stated there would be no orientations at all and you could contact the Principal of the school if you wanted more info. However, my husband heard from another dad that CCES is having an orientation between now and the April 22 deadline.

Have people who were offered a slot heard any more about next steps? I can't believe MoCo would expect us to uproot our children to a new building and program without so much as a zoom orientation. I did e-mail the person listed on the website FAQ in charge of handling curriculum questions, but I haven't heard back. Any info anyone has would be much appreciated. Our CES site is Pine Crest.

Your CES principal should email you soon about an info session (probably via zoom) to take place before April 22.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son (who is Black) was in the 95th percentile on MAP-R at a "focus" school, was placed in the lottery, did not get in the regional CES. Not sure how or if this matches the anecdotes already gathered in this thread.

I'll admit to a little pang because I was in "GT" classes when I was a kid and I have a love/hate relationship with that label. But staying in his home school is probably a better move for him, and I feel confident that his needs will be met.

You should appeal this decision.

WHY. Why should this parent appeal?

I'm a flaming progressive that would be happy to have race be a consideration, but it's not.

So what is there to appeal? A 95th percentile kid WAS put in the lottery pool, but then wasn't randomly selected? Just like tons of other 90th, 95th and 99th percentile kids, because there are more of them than slots available?

Thus...?

I am the parent who was being asked to appeal, and as this commenter noted, I don't have any grounds to appeal. There's simply not enough space for everyone (which is a different issue, but that's the way things are now). My son's school does have the ELC, and he'll also be with friends and teachers who know and love him. I believe there's a sufficient peer group at his school to adequately challenge him. And philosophically, I think there should be more enrichment opportunities as a student's home school, anyway.

(I'd also like to think he'd still have been in the lottery if he went to a "richie-rich" school, but who knows.)

I'm trying to steer myself away from being obsessed with labels (even though I acknowledge that bit of disappointment when I got the letter.) I was happy to throw my information into the mix just for conversation, but this is now a 17-page thread about third graders. The kids that we are talking about (kids who made it into the lottery) are clearly going to be okay whether they get into the CES or not, because their MAP-R scores demonstrate that.

Who knows? I do! He wouldn't have qualified for the lottery, and therefore wouldn't be eligible for the ELC at his home school, with a score in the 95th percentile at a "richie-rich" school.

Assuming you are correct...lucky us, I guess. It makes some sense for limited enrichment dollars to be spent at schools with children for whom enrichment might otherwise be hard to come by, and that is the case at a focus school.

But I doubt a teacher at a "richie-rich" school would have my son in a corner reading "see Spot run" simply because he was in the 95th percentile on the MAP-R and not the 99th. If I felt he wasn't sufficiently challenged, I'd take it up with her.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son (who is Black) was in the 95th percentile on MAP-R at a "focus" school, was placed in the lottery, did not get in the regional CES. Not sure how or if this matches the anecdotes already gathered in this thread.

I'll admit to a little pang because I was in "GT" classes when I was a kid and I have a love/hate relationship with that label. But staying in his home school is probably a better move for him, and I feel confident that his needs will be met.

You should appeal this decision.

WHY. Why should this parent appeal?

I'm a flaming progressive that would be happy to have race be a consideration, but it's not.

So what is there to appeal? A 95th percentile kid WAS put in the lottery pool, but then wasn't randomly selected? Just like tons of other 90th, 95th and 99th percentile kids, because there are more of them than slots available?

Thus...?

I am the parent who was being asked to appeal, and as this commenter noted, I don't have any grounds to appeal. There's simply not enough space for everyone (which is a different issue, but that's the way things are now). My son's school does have the ELC, and he'll also be with friends and teachers who know and love him. I believe there's a sufficient peer group at his school to adequately challenge him. And philosophically, I think there should be more enrichment opportunities as a student's home school, anyway.

(I'd also like to think he'd still have been in the lottery if he went to a "richie-rich" school, but who knows.)

I'm trying to steer myself away from being obsessed with labels (even though I acknowledge that bit of disappointment when I got the letter.) I was happy to throw my information into the mix just for conversation, but this is now a 17-page thread about third graders. The kids that we are talking about (kids who made it into the lottery) are clearly going to be okay whether they get into the CES or not, because their MAP-R scores demonstrate that.

You sound nice and reasonable and a great parent, so this isn't personally directed at you, but here's what I don't like about the dismissiveness of "this is a 17 page thread about third graders" and "they're clearly going to be ok" attitude. You are really lucky that your school has ELC and a peer group. Our home school does not have ELC and has made it very clear for the past 4 years that enrichment is the very furthest from their priorities. My son came home a few weeks ago with an ALPHABET connect the dots worksheet. I have seen my son go from curious, bright, excited to learn, to bored and antsy. I get really frustrated when people dismiss my concerns with "he will obviously be OK no matter what" because I feel like people define OK as like....will be able to get into a good college? But I'm not planning college for my 8 year old. My priority right now is having him educated the way that a typical child gets to be educated every day, just by virtue of their learning style and level. My kid is "OK" at his home school in the sense that he gets A's without trying, but not in the sense that he is actually learning to do hard things and work through problems. I think it does a huge disservice to kids to not meet their needs because we assume they will be OK. They spend the majority of their daily hours in school, and assuming they should be fine with sitting in school year after year not being challenged and not have it affect their wellbeing at all, does not seem right to me. It sounds like your kid will be fine without CES, so that is really great, but I think some kids might really need it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My son (who is Black) was in the 95th percentile on MAP-R at a "focus" school, was placed in the lottery, did not get in the regional CES. Not sure how or if this matches the anecdotes already gathered in this thread.

I'll admit to a little pang because I was in "GT" classes when I was a kid and I have a love/hate relationship with that label. But staying in his home school is probably a better move for him, and I feel confident that his needs will be met.

You should appeal this decision.

WHY. Why should this parent appeal?

I'm a flaming progressive that would be happy to have race be a consideration, but it's not.

So what is there to appeal? A 95th percentile kid WAS put in the lottery pool, but then wasn't randomly selected? Just like tons of other 90th, 95th and 99th percentile kids, because there are more of them than slots available?

Thus...?

I am the parent who was being asked to appeal, and as this commenter noted, I don't have any grounds to appeal. There's simply not enough space for everyone (which is a different issue, but that's the way things are now). My son's school does have the ELC, and he'll also be with friends and teachers who know and love him. I believe there's a sufficient peer group at his school to adequately challenge him. And philosophically, I think there should be more enrichment opportunities as a student's home school, anyway.

(I'd also like to think he'd still have been in the lottery if he went to a "richie-rich" school, but who knows.)

I'm trying to steer myself away from being obsessed with labels (even though I acknowledge that bit of disappointment when I got the letter.) I was happy to throw my information into the mix just for conversation, but this is now a 17-page thread about third graders. The kids that we are talking about (kids who made it into the lottery) are clearly going to be okay whether they get into the CES or not, because their MAP-R scores demonstrate that.

You sound nice and reasonable and a great parent, so this isn't personally directed at you, but here's what I don't like about the dismissiveness of "this is a 17 page thread about third graders" and "they're clearly going to be ok" attitude. You are really lucky that your school has ELC and a peer group. Our home school does not have ELC and has made it very clear for the past 4 years that enrichment is the very furthest from their priorities. My son came home a few weeks ago with an ALPHABET connect the dots worksheet. I have seen my son go from curious, bright, excited to learn, to bored and antsy. I get really frustrated when people dismiss my concerns with "he will obviously be OK no matter what" because I feel like people define OK as like....will be able to get into a good college? But I'm not planning college for my 8 year old. My priority right now is having him educated the way that a typical child gets to be educated every day, just by virtue of their learning style and level. My kid is "OK" at his home school in the sense that he gets A's without trying, but not in the sense that he is actually learning to do hard things and work through problems. I think it does a huge disservice to kids to not meet their needs because we assume they will be OK. They spend the majority of their daily hours in school, and assuming they should be fine with sitting in school year after year not being challenged and not have it affect their wellbeing at all, does not seem right to me. It sounds like your kid will be fine without CES, so that is really great, but I think some kids might really need it.

Thanks for not flaming me. I think you sound like a nice and reasonable parent too and what you're asking for is not too much. I strongly believe that enrichment opportunities should be available at all schools. I didn't know (because I hadn't checked) whether the ELC was at my child's school until I looked it up after posting in this thread. I was disappointed to see how relatively few schools offer it. Just because I think it should be offered to less affluent schools FIRST doesn't mean I think it should be offered to less affluent schools ONLY.

But I feel like trying to "game" the CES system or crack the code of how to get admitted, and fixating on 99th vs 95th percentiles etc isn't going to fix the bigger problem of more kids needing rich curricula where they are. (I'm not saying YOU'RE trying to game the CES system at all, just speaking more broadly.) Then again, this is a thread about CES letters and that's what folks are here to talk about -- no one needs my moderating!