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Has the Coalition for TJ (or any other groups) considered another lawsuit?
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Anonymous
I agree, and their argument just doesn't hold up. Sure, kids whose parents have spent $20k on test prep do well on tests, but hardly matters since the kids being selected now are the very top students and typically surprass the prepsters before graduating. |
Anonymous
Total Score Possible for students that are not ELL, FARMS, or have an IEP is 900: 300 points for GPA 300 points for SPS 300 points for PSE ELL +30 points experience factor points FARMS +30 points experience factor points Special Education +30 points experience factor points Total possible for students with all 3 experience factors is 990. |
Anonymous
Let me try to push back one more time on the issue of "prepping." I think we have to distinguish test prep from academic enrichment. Test prep for a test like the SHSAT is maybe 12-15 hours total over 6 weeks plus a few practice exams. It costs about $300-$500 and there is free test available to anyone that cannot afford it. Anything beyond that 12-15 hours is studying. The kids at curie aren't prepping for the TJ test from 1st grade through 8th grade. They are studying. If your aversion to prepping is that some people don't want to do it, that seems like a pretty poor reason to ignore one of the best tools we have for determining academic ability. Academic ability is very much something that can be developed and improved with effort and diligence, there is evidence that this extra effort and diligence accounts for most if not all of the achievement gap between asian students and white students. Those kids develop real skills and ability through effort and diligence at places like Curie. Do we negate that effort and diligence in an attempt try and suss out "natural ability?" https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1406402111 As for recommendations, I think anytime you add subjectivity to the formula, you are creating avenues for bias to seep into the process. It also frequently measures personality rather than ability. Kids that SEEM smart rather than kids that actually ARE smart. I generally think this is a bad thing. We know that test scores are more predictive of college performance at selective colleges than any other factor. We know that income doesn't actually seem to affect test scores very much among styudents at highly selective colleges. TJ was and IMHO should be a highly selective school. Not everyone gets to go. |
Anonymous
They have a shot. They always had a shot. |
Anonymous
Some schools are over-represented. The top 5 out of 23 middle schools constitute almost 50% of the entering class at TJ. But lets get past that and assume that we have to have some sort of geographic diversity as long as there is a woke school board helming FCPS. We should be selecting the best students from each of those geographic areas and that means testing. The governor's school program isn't about identifying the kids with the most potential. There is no way to measure that. All you can measure is current cognitive ability and academic achievement. Clearly, the current method is not capturing the "best and brightest" |
Anonymous
They won at trial. They lost on appeal. And SCOTUS didn't grant Cert while Alito filed a dissent to the rejection of cert. A fairly rare thing that indicates that Alito thinks he thinks the appellate court decision would have been overturned. |
Anonymous
Nobody spent $20K on test prep. Don't be ridiculous. PSAT scores down 120 points at TJ and pretty much ONLY TJ. NMSF down 50% at TJ SOL advance pass down across the board at TJ The math department at TJ had to send out an email to the math 4 class telling them their final exam test results were the worst they have ever seen. |
Anonymous
Aside from GPA, what are the acronyms you are using? |
Anonymous
Could it be the TJ math faculty that is actually failing? Once faced with students that are not propped up by outside “enrichment,” their math program is maybe not up to snuff? |
Anonymous
Either that outside enrichment is as hollow and meaningless as you claim and the current students are really better than previous students (as you claim) or that outside enrichment was in fact enriching them. The fact of the matter is that too many of those kids were getting a very thin understanding of their math courses at their middle schools. Some middle schools teach a very superficial version of some subjects because there simply isn't a critical mass of students that are prepared to tackle a more in depth curriculum. That is why you end up with feeder schools. And if the math program at TJ is really as shoddy as you think then why are you trying so goddam hard to get racial proportionality at the school? |
Anonymous
They’ve sent out that same email before. |
Anonymous
We are trying to get smart kids from all over the county, even kids who weren’t lucky enough to be born into affluent families, attend feeder schools, or get outside enrichment. |
Anonymous
You are projecting a lot on me. I’m really just curious if the kids at TJ are really so great because of TJ or whether they are really learning most things outside of school (at their parents’ expense). One of my kids took Algebra and Geometry in middle with no enrichment and transferred to a rigorous private (outside of DMV) for HS and had to retake Geometry and struggled in Algebra 2. I think the middle school teaching of those courses was inadequate. Was my kid not mature enough? Most likely. Kid is in a respected STEM PhD program now so I think it worked out (and did not matter that they “only” went to Calc 1 in high school). I think the social pressure to push your kid ahead in AAP and FCPS is not healthy and I’ll admit, I fell for it to my kid’s detriment. |
Anonymous
This is not an unreasonable question. Several of the math teachers DD or her friends have had seem to lean toward the “figure it out” method rather than direct instruction at a fast pace. |
Anonymous
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“ Those kids develop real skills and ability through effort and diligence at places like Curie. Do we negate that effort and diligence in an attempt try and suss out "natural ability?"
Well I’d say yes. I think the effort should be to pick the most math and science oriented kids who are mainly relying on the schools for those subjects not give a leg up mainly to families that decided to investment in years of outside math prep (or “studying”/classes - whatever you want to call it) to accelerate their kids beyond the school’s various pathways for that. I just am of the view that a kid who is great at math and in accelerated classes (such as geometry in 8th) should not be disadvantaged for not having done outside prep / classes. |