FCPS potential changes to AAP

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If I understand the AAP program, the kids selected for it are suppose to be the top 1% of kids in the county based on the NNAT, CogAT, GBRS, and work samples? If the number of kids who qualify are so skewed that one ethnicity/race has a larger proportion represented in that 1%, then there is an issue with the selection process. No race/ethnicity is smarter then another.

The larger issue is that the socio economic divide makes it harder for the 1% of kids whose parents are not as well off and educated to be able to compete with the 1% of kids whose parents are educated and/or well off. There is no easy answer to that problem but setting quotas is not going to deal with the issues.

The other problem is that kids parents prep their kids for tests that they should not be prepped for. And kids whose parents spend more time reading to them, doing workbooks with them, and the like have an advantage. Nevermnd the kids whose parents send them to prep centers to prepare for the test.

When it gets down to it, AAP should only include a little more then 1% of the student population, if you accept that because of a highly educated work force that lives in the area there are more people who are potentially in that top 1%, and not the increasingly large number of kids that it is accepting. If we are going to argue that the program should be larger, then drop the test score needed to the top 10%.

But you don’t deal with this issue by developing quotas.

You must not know much about, for example, IIT and how freaking competitive it is. If the world was all one big country, then sure, all persons should be equal test performers. But that is not real life. People often need serious skills to come here to work from abroad.

[Anonymous]

which will please people whose property values/ school rankings go down when the bulk of AAP kids go to a center in a different neighborhood, and also keep some schools from becoming Title I.

It can actually have the opposite effect.

Some centers were designated as centers years ago in part to attract more higher SES students. It worked.

By placing "level iv" services in other schools, people stop opting to go to those centers over the course of a few years.

This recently happened in the past few years to Forest Edge, which lost a lot of students from Forestville and Aldrin, and is now Title I.

[Anonymous]

But— a lot of this law is in the context of college admissions, where there a set number of seats. AAP is different, because every qualified kid is supposed to be admitted. Unlike Harvard, a URM getting admission does not take a seat from some other, possibly more qualified kid. Your UMC white kid will still be admitted, whether or not the YS model is used to identify additional URM kids.

Umm.. no.

25% is a statistical measure.

It's not like they are saying they want 5 kids of X race per class of 20 . They want 25% of AAP according to OP. That means, possibly, admitting less kids per class of Y race.
Or, it could mean admitting a LOT fo X race and continuing to admit "your UMC white kid." Then class sizes could be bigger.

They already do this anyway. It's nothing new. It's apparent if you are in a center and have friends at other schools who share scores. Otherwise they wouldn't require name, race, and school on the cover page that gets submitted. It would be a blind admission based on a number. And it's not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

which will please people whose property values/ school rankings go down when the bulk of AAP kids go to a center in a different neighborhood, and also keep some schools from becoming Title I.

It can actually have the opposite effect.

Some centers were designated as centers years ago in part to attract more higher SES students. It worked.

By placing "level iv" services in other schools, people stop opting to go to those centers over the course of a few years.

This recently happened in the past few years to Forest Edge, which lost a lot of students from Forestville and Aldrin, and is now Title I.

FE was already heading toward Title 1. This made people keep their kids at the base local level IV.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

But— a lot of this law is in the context of college admissions, where there a set number of seats. AAP is different, because every qualified kid is supposed to be admitted. Unlike Harvard, a URM getting admission does not take a seat from some other, possibly more qualified kid. Your UMC white kid will still be admitted, whether or not the YS model is used to identify additional URM kids.

Umm.. no.

25% is a statistical measure.

It's not like they are saying they want 5 kids of X race per class of 20 . They want 25% of AAP according to OP. That means, possibly, admitting less kids per class of Y race.
Or, it could mean admitting a LOT fo X race and continuing to admit "your UMC white kid." Then class sizes could be bigger.

They already do this anyway. It's nothing new. It's apparent if you are in a center and have friends at other schools who share scores. Otherwise they wouldn't require name, race, and school on the cover page that gets submitted. It would be a blind admission based on a number. And it's not.

I think they're going to add numbers from low SES/race x from low income schools. This won't affect center eligible kids since local level does not require them to be eligible. This will get around the whole testing mess. If you increase AAP participation by increasing race x/low SES numbers they'll meet the percentages.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

But— a lot of this law is in the context of college admissions, where there a set number of seats. AAP is different, because every qualified kid is supposed to be admitted. Unlike Harvard, a URM getting admission does not take a seat from some other, possibly more qualified kid. Your UMC white kid will still be admitted, whether or not the YS model is used to identify additional URM kids.

Umm.. no.

25% is a statistical measure.

It's not like they are saying they want 5 kids of X race per class of 20 . They want 25% of AAP according to OP. That means, possibly, admitting less kids per class of Y race.
Or, it could mean admitting a LOT fo X race and continuing to admit "your UMC white kid." Then class sizes could be bigger.

They already do this anyway. It's nothing new. It's apparent if you are in a center and have friends at other schools who share scores. Otherwise they wouldn't require name, race, and school on the cover page that gets submitted. It would be a blind admission based on a number. And it's not.

The below is a quote from the OP. I read this as saying that the the goal is that 25% or more of each subgroup, not 25% of total AAP.More than four groups are listed, so it can’t be 25% of AAP. There are places for any child who qualifies, so no group is taking the places of another group.

It sounds more to me that the end goal is for more than 25% of all FCPS students to eventually be in AAP, if the goal for each subgroup to be 25% or more.

Setting targets that each measured demographic subgroup (Asian, Black, Hispanic, White, Economically Disadvantaged, English Language Learners, and Students with Disabilities) would be at or above 25% participation in AAP by 2022-24 and would be at equal percentages of participation by 2028-2030

.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

But— a lot of this law is in the context of college admissions, where there a set number of seats. AAP is different, because every qualified kid is supposed to be admitted. Unlike Harvard, a URM getting admission does not take a seat from some other, possibly more qualified kid. Your UMC white kid will still be admitted, whether or not the YS model is used to identify additional URM kids.

Umm.. no.

25% is a statistical measure.

It's not like they are saying they want 5 kids of X race per class of 20 . They want 25% of AAP according to OP. That means, possibly, admitting less kids per class of Y race.
Or, it could mean admitting a LOT fo X race and continuing to admit "your UMC white kid." Then class sizes could be bigger.

They already do this anyway. It's nothing new. It's apparent if you are in a center and have friends at other schools who share scores. Otherwise they wouldn't require name, race, and school on the cover page that gets submitted. It would be a blind admission based on a number. And it's not.

I think they're going to add numbers from low SES/race x from low income schools. This won't affect center eligible kids since local level does not require them to be eligible. This will get around the whole testing mess. If you increase AAP participation by increasing race x/low SES numbers they'll meet the percentages.

They can dumb down AAP and they’ll just have more weak AAP centers like Glasgow, which places very few kids into TJ. This is about Democratic politicians kowtowing to the NAACP and other black and Hispanic advocacy groups. It has nothing to do with educational quality.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

But— a lot of this law is in the context of college admissions, where there a set number of seats. AAP is different, because every qualified kid is supposed to be admitted. Unlike Harvard, a URM getting admission does not take a seat from some other, possibly more qualified kid. Your UMC white kid will still be admitted, whether or not the YS model is used to identify additional URM kids.

Umm.. no.

25% is a statistical measure.

It's not like they are saying they want 5 kids of X race per class of 20 . They want 25% of AAP according to OP. That means, possibly, admitting less kids per class of Y race.
Or, it could mean admitting a LOT fo X race and continuing to admit "your UMC white kid." Then class sizes could be bigger.

They already do this anyway. It's nothing new. It's apparent if you are in a center and have friends at other schools who share scores. Otherwise they wouldn't require name, race, and school on the cover page that gets submitted. It would be a blind admission based on a number. And it's not.

I think they're going to add numbers from low SES/race x from low income schools. This won't affect center eligible kids since local level does not require them to be eligible. This will get around the whole testing mess. If you increase AAP participation by increasing race x/low SES numbers they'll meet the percentages.

They can dumb down AAP and they’ll just have more weak AAP centers like Glasgow, which places very few kids into TJ. This is about Democratic politicians kowtowing to the NAACP and other black and Hispanic advocacy groups. It has nothing to do with educational quality.

If FCPS has kowtowed to any groups, it is the AAP parents (including those whose kids don't belong in AAP) and the Fairfax County Association of the Gifted (FCAG). AAP has ballooned to the point of being a joke. There are many white and asian students who don't belong in what was supposed to be a 'gifted' program. FCPS moved the goal posts such that parents can push their students into the program so that they don't have to be around the 'undesirables".

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If I understand the AAP program, the kids selected for it are suppose to be the top 1% of kids in the county based on the NNAT, CogAT, GBRS, and work samples? If the number of kids who qualify are so skewed that one ethnicity/race has a larger proportion represented in that 1%, then there is an issue with the selection process. No race/ethnicity is smarter then another.

Bzzzzzzzt, WRONG. Try again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

But— a lot of this law is in the context of college admissions, where there a set number of seats. AAP is different, because every qualified kid is supposed to be admitted. Unlike Harvard, a URM getting admission does not take a seat from some other, possibly more qualified kid. Your UMC white kid will still be admitted, whether or not the YS model is used to identify additional URM kids.

Umm.. no.

25% is a statistical measure.

It's not like they are saying they want 5 kids of X race per class of 20 . They want 25% of AAP according to OP. That means, possibly, admitting less kids per class of Y race.
Or, it could mean admitting a LOT fo X race and continuing to admit "your UMC white kid." Then class sizes could be bigger.

They already do this anyway. It's nothing new. It's apparent if you are in a center and have friends at other schools who share scores. Otherwise they wouldn't require name, race, and school on the cover page that gets submitted. It would be a blind admission based on a number. And it's not.

I think they're going to add numbers from low SES/race x from low income schools. This won't affect center eligible kids since local level does not require them to be eligible. This will get around the whole testing mess. If you increase AAP participation by increasing race x/low SES numbers they'll meet the percentages.

They can dumb down AAP and they’ll just have more weak AAP centers like Glasgow, which places very few kids into TJ. This is about Democratic politicians kowtowing to the NAACP and other black and Hispanic advocacy groups. It has nothing to do with educational quality.

They can boast that AAP is offered everywhere with local level 4. They will most likely do away with centers in the future. Critical mass will be there because they'll open it up to more students, but wary parents will buy elsewhere.

[Anonymous]

I don’t understand why FCPS want to increase more student in AAP since many parents already complaining AAP now has been watering. If FCPS believe there is so high percentage of kids can go to AAP it only means the GE is too easy, they should consider putting some AAP Level curriculum to GE.

It is not helping the kids by put them in AAP because they are minority but CogAT is not over 97%. they won’t catch up to the AAP and always in the bottom of the class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t understand why FCPS want to increase more student in AAP since many parents already complaining AAP now has been watering. If FCPS believe there is so high percentage of kids can go to AAP it only means the GE is too easy, they should consider putting some AAP Level curriculum to GE.

It is not helping the kids by put them in AAP because they are minority but CogAT is not over 97%. they won’t catch up to the AAP and always in the bottom of the class.

because Democrats are more interested in racial equity than actual talent

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I thought only kids with a 135 IQ or above should be in level IV?

Huh? I've had three kids in AAP and I don't know any of their IQs. How would I?

[Anonymous]

I thought NNAT score was basically an IQ estimate or close proxy? So that's how you'd know.

[Anonymous]

18:58 is right, there's no cap being implied for any race/group... the stated goal is 25% "or more" of all Asian kids in FCPS would be in the AAP program, and that 25% "or more" of all Latino kids in FCPS would be in the AAP program, and so forth for each group. This in no way implies that "only 25% of AAP kids can be of status/group ____" as some poster(s) seemed to think.

The bigger concern is that >25% of FCPS kids would be in the AAP program... that's moving in the wrong direction.

Or just call it tracking with AAP being the new "advanced track" if that's what you want to turn it into by making it that large of a cohort... and then develop a new pullout program for the kids who really need it (top 1-3% or whatever) and would otherwise be underserved due to the expansion/watering down of AAP... could call it AAAP.