Teacher “recommendation”/input necessary for AAP admissions, but not allowed for TJ admissions
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Anonymous
+1 No outside tests. All kids get SOL “prep” already. |
Anonymous
Why spend six, maybe seven figures developing and maintaining a new test? The PSAT already works just fine, and it’s good practice for the SAT. Your local library has everything you need to study for it, and they’ll need those skills eventually regardless of which school they attend. I don’t think that’s too high a bar. People are overrating how much prep you need for the PSAT. If you don’t have the bandwidth to take a few practice tests then maybe TJ isn’t for you. |
Anonymous
Consider this: There is good PSAT prep that is free and widely available. Yes the paid stuff might provides more hand holding but a smart poor kid using Khan will beat out an above average rich kid using princeton review. Any SOL prep is going to be specifically geared towards the TJ admissions process and come with a price tag. There will be assymetrical advantages for that rich kid I'm not fighting you on teacher recommendations. I think they are racially biased but better than nothing. Studies confirm that there is bias, frequently unintentional bias. But we willl never have perfect inequality. Anecdote: When my kid was in elementary school we did zero extracurricular academic work. He read books, played little league, did tae kwon do and went to cub scouts, he was already a pretty busy kid. We got 2nd grade teacher that everyone seemed to think was a good teacher. At our first parent teacher conference, she basically accused us of drilling him in math at home to produce artificially inflated math performance that didn't reflect a "deep" understanding of math. That was when it clicked that everyone that said she was a great teacher was white. In her mind asian exceptionalism was the result of tiger parents and white exceptionalism was the result of genuine giftedness. |
Anonymous
Turning the SOL into a high stakes exam is probably not a good thing. OTOH, it would make fcps look better as more kids get advanced pass. |
Anonymous
No need for a new test at all. Just keep the SOLs. They will add some insight into content mastery. PSAT or other external test adds too much of a hurdle. |
Anonymous
DP. Why do you think PSAT would be too much of a hurdle? It's hardly a hurdle at all since it requires very little prep of any kind. If they universally administered it in 8th grade, they would probably unearth a few gifted kids in lower SES schools who didn't have TJ on their radar at all. Anecdotally, I would have been that kid. My parents and teachers viewed me as a regular above average kid. School even kicked me out of the gifted program in 6th grade because I had a bad day on the ITBS test used. I took the SAT in 8th grade, along with many classmates, and I was the kid who got a 1300+ (before renorming, so this was like 98th percentile of high schoolers) as an 8th grader taking it completely blindly. My DD easily will be a NMSF and put in almost no prep. She just spent a few hours total looking at a cheap book from amazon. Several classmates did extensive prep. Their scores aren't high enough even for commended. PSAT and SAT don't seem like they ought to be a good filter for talent, but somehow they are. |
Anonymous
Point is why would we need the PSAT? They already take the SOL - why not just use that? |
Anonymous
The test prep industry would start prepping for the SOL. We have no evidence that the SOL is resistant to prep. We do know that the PSAT is about as resistant to prep as any test possibly can be, and we know that there are a lot of free prep materials. I'm also not sure that I would want schools to focus even more on focused prep for the SOLs rather than teaching the content. That being said, now that there are 4 years of data with the new admissions process, it should be pretty easy for FCPS to investigate any common threads among the kids who washed out of TJ or are in the bottom 1/4 of the class. If they can find a decent correlation between the 7th and 8th grade SOL scores and tendency to struggle at TJ, then using SOL scores would make sense. |
Anonymous
SOLs are a great place to start if we want to add any metrics. Agree that they should look at SOL scores of kids already there to assess how useful they may be. All kids already take SOLs. All kids already receive many hours of “prep”. SOLs would be the most fair option. |
Anonymous
It seems like a good place to start. |
Anonymous
The reason people are resisting the SOL is mostly because it will trigger SOL prep and SOL prep is not as easy to come by as PSAT prep. OTOH, SOL prep is substantive learing and is merit based so I have no problem with it, however, it will widen the gap between those that are able and willing to make investments in human capital and those who are not willing or able. |
Anonymous
Not everyone prepared for for SAT. May people don't go to non-trade college. Everyone who wants to go to X I would do well to prepare for the X admissions test. This is not the gotcha you think it is. |
Anonymous
| TJ is for kids who are smarter than their MS teachers. |
Anonymous
This assumes that nobody reacts to using SOLs as a merit filter. |
Anonymous
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I wish we hadn't gotten away from the teacher recommendations conversation here.
I think we have to get them back but that it has to be done intelligently and with an eye toward minimizing 1) the load on middle school teachers to write them and 2) the impact of experience in recommendation writing on the evaluation of the applicant. That is to say, you don't want to have a kid whose application is negatively impacted because their rec didn't come from Vern Williams or Eugene Huang. My thought process would be to design them to be used to evaluate applicants from the same school against each other to help determine that top 1-1.5% (I am strongly pro-reform but in favor of a 1% threshold while still considering underrepresented school status as part of the holistic evaluation). You use a Likert scale, but you ask the teachers to evaluate each of the students based on how they fit in the context of their current class and, in some rare cases, in the history of their student population. And the metrics you ask them to evaluate on go well beyond the standard evaluation of content area knowledge and include things like "intellectual curiosity", "contributions to the classroom", "collaborative instincts", and the like. And lastly, you afford each teacher the opportunity to write on an open-ended basis about a maximum of, say, three students - and with the ability to do so either positively or negatively (to spare TJ from, for example, a problematic parent or a student who is a strongly suspected cheater). As I've said before, it is absurd to attempt to select the most worthy students from a school with no input from the classroom teachers at that school - and while we're at it, there should be an affordance for the Student Services department to write on behalf of a small group of students as well. |