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Thoughts on Montgomery County vs VA schools
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Anonymous
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I've lived on both sides of the river and when we were house hunting we looked all over. In this area we looked at our job commute, the feeder school, and what we could buy for the money in the feeder school and commute.
City of Falls Church - very highly rated. Small school district and low teacher/student ratio when we were looking. However, for our price range we could afford nothing. Fairfax County - huge variety in schools - covers a big area geographically. Where we were looking we would see houses in our price range that could go to any of three different high schools in sort of the Annandale and Falls Church (Fairfax County, not City of) - and huge difference in test scores between the three schools. Our fear was we could be redistricted. We could get more house for the money but to get in the cluster we wanted for the budget we had we had to go just outside the Beltway. Considered Vienna/Rt 66 but couldn't deal with the HOV (Route 50 is THE way in if you can't take 66 in the morning). Arlington - if I could have picked anywhere else, I would have gone for Arlington. It's a smaller school district, they have some really amazing magnet schools including a Montessori elementary at Drew Elementary School and the HB-Woodlawn program which emphasizes independent study, self-motivation and self-discipline etc. - the opposite of my memories of public school for sure. Since Arlington isn't that big - even if you ended up in magnet program, the commute probably would not be that far from your home. Arlington is also very diverse. Now the downside - there is a North Arlington/South Arlington divide. North Arlington is expensive. I had looked there at a beautiful neighborhood I passed every day to visit my then boyfriend/now husband when I was taking a back way to MD (Chain Bridge Road). Sigh. But since he wanted to live in MD, I couldn't convince him to live in a 1 bathroom, tiny colonial which would have been all that we could have afforded. My kids haven't started public school yet in Montgomery County. I've unfortunately already experienced some of the school bureacracy so I am not as excited as I once was. I wish I were in a school pyramid that offered a magnet program at the home school so I would have a good shot at the kids having something other than just reading and math emphasized but oh well. Lots of my friends are MoCo graduates and they have done well in life. |
Anonymous
Wow, that's fascinating. Thank you for posting. Such a difference. What are they trying to test in the MD tests? It seems more a test of reading comprehension than of the actual math skills. Not that reading comp isn't important, but why do it this way? |
Anonymous
Everyday Math is what happened |
Anonymous
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Arlington County Public Schools ALL THE WAY!
They are great! |
Anonymous
As much fun as it would be to blame EDM, that is probably not the case since FCPS also uses EDM. |
Anonymous
The MD test is also very much a test of students' writing ability. Check out the scoring guide for the test -- I'm looking at the scoring rubric for question 8, a probability question. http://mdk12.org/assessments/k_8/itemprop/msa_math_4_024.html The question itself seems like a perfectly reasonable question to ask 4th graders. But the way the answers are scored seems CRAZY to me. Kids get credite for two parts of the question. ONE point for answering the question correctly (Knowledge of Probability) and up to 2 points for being able to explain how they got the answer (Process of Mathematics) If you care, take a look at the four possible student answers. Student #1 gave a perfectly correct response (1 point) even breaking the answer (3) down into which colors were needed (not required). His answer clearly showed he understood how to do the problem -- you coudln't give that answer if you didn't understand how to do probability, in my opinion. But wasn't able to explain how he got the answer. So he only scores 1 out of threes correct. By comparison, student #4, who did NOT give the correct answer (he described how many straws should be in the bag total, not how many should be added ) managed to come up with some explanation of how to do the problem (using a picture) -- so he got 2 out of three points. That's great, I guess -- but he scored better than the kid who actually answered the question correctly. That bothers me. |
Anonymous
Everyday Math is what happened You know, I don't think it has anything to do with Everyday Math. There seems to be a significant difference of philosophy between the folks who wrote the MD state "voluntary" curriculum, and designed the MSA tests, and the folks who came up with the VA state Standards of Learning and wrote those SOL tests. The VA folks seemed to be heavily influenced by E. D. Hirsch and ideas on having clear, specific standards, a common core curriculum, and mastering basic facts. Here's a recent article by Hirsch: http://archive.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/issues/winter09_10/hirsch.pdf I'm trying to figure out what philosophy is beind the MD state curriculum (I'm not very impressed with it right now, especially the social studies part) and the Brief Constructed Response idea on the MSAs. Here's a link describing how the MD MSA s were designed and who decided what is a pass and a fail: http://mdk12.org/assessments/k_8/index.html |