Serious Answers Only—How to Fix MCPS?

[Anonymous]

Treat and pay principals and office workers 25 % less than teachers. That would encourage people to teach. Also, make a zero tolerance policy for fraud and coverups. This would allow us to run the education system fairly fir the students with less stress and burnout for teachers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only reason why the Magnet program is strapped for seats is because they're in the far corners of the county and artificially limited by choice. Crown is opening and could be a real magnet school, like TJ in VA (#5 in the Nation).

Also it's a self-serving misrepresentation that the Magnet Program had to go lottery because of covid. They went lottery the year before covid, imho, to avoid lawsuits. I believe it's also the reason why MCPS in the same year didn't use Nationally-administered aptitude testing for GT identification.

What timeline are you working with to say the lottery happened before the pandemic? Wasn't the selection process already done (or all the data collected, anyway) by March of 2020 when things shut down? Wasn't that where they had decided to try to take only outliers for CES and cohort large groups at their home schools?

They said they couldn't do CogAT remotely in 2020-21, and that that and uncertainty about how representative MAP scores/grades might be due to the disruption was why they had to go with a big-net-plus-lottery approach. Of course, they may have been thinking about a lottery before that, but I don't think they had yet conducted one for the criteria-based magnets, only the interest-based ones (language immersion, consortia).

That's my recollection, anyway. Or had they done a lottery for the criteria-based MS programs but not yet the CESs?

I agree that most magnets are artificially limited. Certainly versus both numbers capable and interest. There may be some personnel constraints, but it doesn't look like MCPS has even tried to keep up.

The large group cohorts in their home schools started in 2018. Not sure if they do still, though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Treat and pay principals and office workers 25 % less than teachers. That would encourage people to teach. Also, make a zero tolerance policy for fraud and coverups. This would allow us to run the education system fairly fir the students with less stress and burnout for teachers.

MCPS doesn't have the guts to do this. They just meekly apologize after a person or entity has had to go through great lengths to gather and present irrefutable evidence of MCPS's incompetence or failure which is then brought to light via the media or a lawsuit. And then, their remedy is a vague, toothless promise to do better in the future or the offer the bad acting personnel more training.

A zero-tolerance approach would require people to actually be held accountable and be punished or fired. I think the unions prevent that from being a reality, unfortunately.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Treat and pay principals and office workers 25 % less than teachers. That would encourage people to teach. Also, make a zero tolerance policy for fraud and coverups. This would allow us to run the education system fairly fir the students with less stress and burnout for teachers.

MCPS doesn't have the guts to do this. They just meekly apologize after a person or entity has had to go through great lengths to gather and present irrefutable evidence of MCPS's incompetence or failure which is then brought to light via the media or a lawsuit. And then, their remedy is a vague, toothless promise to do better in the future or the offer the bad acting personnel more training.

A zero-tolerance approach would require people to actually be held accountable and be punished or fired. I think the unions prevent that from being a reality, unfortunately.

There is a difference between having an zero tolerance approach to fraud and coverup vs being able to fire people immediately without proper investigation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Treat and pay principals and office workers 25 % less than teachers. That would encourage people to teach. Also, make a zero tolerance policy for fraud and coverups. This would allow us to run the education system fairly fir the students with less stress and burnout for teachers.

MCPS doesn't have the guts to do this. They just meekly apologize after a person or entity has had to go through great lengths to gather and present irrefutable evidence of MCPS's incompetence or failure which is then brought to light via the media or a lawsuit. And then, their remedy is a vague, toothless promise to do better in the future or the offer the bad acting personnel more training.

A zero-tolerance approach would require people to actually be held accountable and be punished or fired. I think the unions prevent that from being a reality, unfortunately.

There is a difference between having an zero tolerance approach to fraud and coverup vs being able to fire people immediately without proper investigation.

Except I never advocated for firing anyone without proper investigation, so this is a distraction and deflection from the point I was making.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Treat and pay principals and office workers 25 % less than teachers. That would encourage people to teach. Also, make a zero tolerance policy for fraud and coverups. This would allow us to run the education system fairly fir the students with less stress and burnout for teachers.

MCPS doesn't have the guts to do this. They just meekly apologize after a person or entity has had to go through great lengths to gather and present irrefutable evidence of MCPS's incompetence or failure which is then brought to light via the media or a lawsuit. And then, their remedy is a vague, toothless promise to do better in the future or the offer the bad acting personnel more training.

A zero-tolerance approach would require people to actually be held accountable and be punished or fired. I think the unions prevent that from being a reality, unfortunately.

There is a difference between having an zero tolerance approach to fraud and coverup vs being able to fire people immediately without proper investigation.

Or having 6 investigations so you can pick the one whose conclusions match you agenda

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The only reason why the Magnet program is strapped for seats is because they're in the far corners of the county and artificially limited by choice. Crown is opening and could be a real magnet school, like TJ in VA (#5 in the Nation).

Also it's a self-serving misrepresentation that the Magnet Program had to go lottery because of covid. They went lottery the year before covid, imho, to avoid lawsuits. I believe it's also the reason why MCPS in the same year didn't use Nationally-administered aptitude testing for GT identification.

What timeline are you working with to say the lottery happened before the pandemic? Wasn't the selection process already done (or all the data collected, anyway) by March of 2020 when things shut down? Wasn't that where they had decided to try to take only outliers for CES and cohort large groups at their home schools?

They said they couldn't do CogAT remotely in 2020-21, and that that and uncertainty about how representative MAP scores/grades might be due to the disruption was why they had to go with a big-net-plus-lottery approach. Of course, they may have been thinking about a lottery before that, but I don't think they had yet conducted one for the criteria-based magnets, only the interest-based ones (language immersion, consortia).

That's my recollection, anyway. Or had they done a lottery for the criteria-based MS programs but not yet the CESs?

I agree that most magnets are artificially limited. Certainly versus both numbers capable and interest. There may be some personnel constraints, but it doesn't look like MCPS has even tried to keep up.

The large group cohorts in their home schools started in 2018. Not sure if they do still, though.

Was that cohorting yet a result of keeping kids from those schools there instead of sending them to the CES, or was it just a parallel endeavor? There was a particular time when they proposed a shift, not to take from across HGC/CES catchments based only on the rank-order of students, but based on that rank-ordering, but skipping over those who were not true outliers within their home schools, going to the next down the list to find outliers with, say, lower CogAT scores (given at the time) than those skipped, but clearly differentiated from the remainder of their home school's population.

In any case, that was not a lottery system. It still was a rank-ordered approach. I think the lottery for CES and criteria-based MS magnets only came after the start of the pandemic.

[Anonymous]

They need to hire a superintendent that will make some big changes and the board needs to stand by them. MCPS is 10 years behind in curriculum and systems for talent development.

[Anonymous]

Pay the board full time salaries?? Are you kidding?? More bloat and more mediocre people. Hells no.

[Anonymous]

Get rid of Brian Hull and April Key for starters

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pay the board full time salaries?? Are you kidding?? More bloat and more mediocre people. Hells no.

You expect excellent oversight from people who are part-time and getting paid $25,000? Are you serious? Would YOU do that job for that compensation?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Get rid of Brian Hull and April Key for starters

April Key for sure, she has made HR even worse than it was before the scandal!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Get rid of Brian Hull and April Key for starters

April Key for sure, she has made HR even worse than it was before the scandal!

Brian Hull can go too. MCPS has suffered a host of embarrassing operational blunders under his watch including:
- The abysmal mishandling of the EBP fund: https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1182968.page
- Mishandling of HR: April Key and HR used to roll into him. After Beidleman and the OIG complaint, they took it away from him
- Massive and countless security failures: The newly appointed chief safety officer Pam Wheeler-Taylor jumped ship after a few months on the job because of what a mess MCPS's safety and security department was.

[Anonymous]

The twist is that the union goes after and fires new teachers because they do it how they were trained in university and not the crazy mcps data maninipulation trick way.

[Anonymous]

I don't know how they can blame and fire teachers when they don't have a curriculum or books.