Anyone else educated by FCPS and sees the decline?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why can’t we just admit that the schools are failing and then look to the root cause?

It may not be the teachers? It may not be the students? Maybe we need a path to ESL competency before you can be mainstreamed.

There is a lot of judgment involved in declaring a school “failing.” The right-wingers just want to set a high bar and declare schools “failures” to generate anti-immigrant sentiments.

Of course, there should be a focus on the best way to try and bring up kids who aren’t necessarily going to perform like native English speakers on standardized tests, but that doesn’t have to involve labeling schools as “failing.” That stigmatizes a bunch of people trying to do their best.

DP. I’d categorize them as failing because the school board is focusing its efforts on those poor performing schools, hell bent on fixing them with the boundary moves. The school board is leading the charge in making these kids feel like $#%* by emphasizing that they need other more successful kids to join the schools to bring those scores up.

I don't think PP wants the boundary changes. That could keep certain schools accredited. They want schools denied accreditation, so that it triggers provisions that give parents at those schools the option to attend other schools until the state has determined that appropriate remediation has occurred. It doesn't happen often in FCPS, but it occurred years ago at Dogwood ES in Reston. That puts its own strains on the system - if a large number of Justice HS families, for example, were to declare they wanted to another school, does FCPS have to give them the option to attend schools that are already overcrowded?

If they claim all local performing schools are over crowded, then they'll have a problem with VDOE and the department of education. Transfer to a better performing school is a remedy that the district is required to provide

Then maybe the Feds and the state government should provide FCPS with additional money to expand its schools. My point stands: unfunded mandates put an additional strain on the system.

If FCPS didn't draw their lines so carefully to clump poor kids together, then it wouldn't be a problem

This is a fake argument. The concentration of poverty at certain schools reflects the concentration in certain areas of aging garden apartments that, over time, filled up with poorer residents. Langley's boundaries may be gerrymandered to keep out the poor, but that's an exception.

West Springfield?

Very compact and hardly gerrymandered.

To the extent boundaries appear gerrymandered, more often the effect is to add diversity to an UMC school. Think of the Timber Lane island in Falls Church that's assigned to McLean HS or the island off Janna Lee Avenue in Alexandria that is assigned to Fort Hunt ES.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why can’t we just admit that the schools are failing and then look to the root cause?

It may not be the teachers? It may not be the students? Maybe we need a path to ESL competency before you can be mainstreamed.

There is a lot of judgment involved in declaring a school “failing.” The right-wingers just want to set a high bar and declare schools “failures” to generate anti-immigrant sentiments.

Of course, there should be a focus on the best way to try and bring up kids who aren’t necessarily going to perform like native English speakers on standardized tests, but that doesn’t have to involve labeling schools as “failing.” That stigmatizes a bunch of people trying to do their best.

DP. I’d categorize them as failing because the school board is focusing its efforts on those poor performing schools, hell bent on fixing them with the boundary moves. The school board is leading the charge in making these kids feel like $#%* by emphasizing that they need other more successful kids to join the schools to bring those scores up.

I don't think PP wants the boundary changes. That could keep certain schools accredited. They want schools denied accreditation, so that it triggers provisions that give parents at those schools the option to attend other schools until the state has determined that appropriate remediation has occurred. It doesn't happen often in FCPS, but it occurred years ago at Dogwood ES in Reston. That puts its own strains on the system - if a large number of Justice HS families, for example, were to declare they wanted to another school, does FCPS have to give them the option to attend schools that are already overcrowded?

If they claim all local performing schools are over crowded, then they'll have a problem with VDOE and the department of education. Transfer to a better performing school is a remedy that the district is required to provide

So this would allow free transport and guaranteed admission to Langley HS from a lower performing or “failing” school for example? Other districts in other state do in fact provide such a service, as compelled by court rulings.

I think you'll be hard pressed to find a court ruling that says, in this scenario, a student has a right to free transport and guaranteed admission to Langley.

More likely, what FCPS would have to offer is the option to transfer to another school that is accredited, with transportation provided. When Dogwood was not meeting the benchmarks years ago, my recollection is that families zoned to Dogwood had the option to transfer to Crossfield or Sunrise Valley ES. It's not like they could elect to go to Churchill Road or any other school of their choosing.

Closest available could get interesting. If Carl Sandberg and Whitman as both failing, then Hayfield is going to get very overcrowed if parents take advantage

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think the education of my oldest who has graduated in high school and was in AAP since 3rd grade has been much better what I received in the 1990s. We did no tutoring and ended up at a T25 university in a demanding major and doing well.

The education of my younger child who is 8 years behind her sibling and not in AAP has been a joke. No writing instruction in our McLean ES and her math class is only 20 mins a day and in a class of 30 kids. No homework is given. The disrupted weeks of school w/o 5 days do not help. She scored borderline for reading/math intervention on the Fall VGAs, so missed out on getting extra help at school. After hearing from her principal that she was doing much better than her peers and that I should not worry, I was done. We started supplementing with a private writing tutor and daily math practice at home using a textbook. I also stopped volunteering at school entirely since that the school does not welcome the presence of parents. It is clear that academics especially for general education students is not a priority at our ES.

I’m hoping that the honors classes in MS will be step up, but not holding my breath.

My advice to parents who have students in FCPS is to build into your budget a tutoring line item of $300-$600 per month during the school year. Just do it. Think about it as an assessment on your property taxes or something, but don’t fail your child by thinking FCPS will take care of their education.

Good parents can’t leave it all up to the schools these days, so good on you.

All my parents did was make sure we could read before kindergarten, read to us at night and kept books in the house.
That’s not enough these days.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One data point:

My child in Honors 9th grade English at Langley is reading an abridged version of the Odyssey. It’s about 1/3 the length of the original book and the language is simplified.

I read the full book when I was in 9th grade in FCPS and her older cousin also read the full book about 10 years ago in another FCPS high school.

Then have your child read the full book at home. Fairfax County has libraries.

Don’t count on the schools to do as well by your children as they did by you. It’s all about supplementation, homeschooling and private school these days.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I care enough to compensate for the general decline in my kids education. This will result in a larger gap between them and their peers who relied on public education alone. Many folks were doing this anyway. The gap is just going to grow larger.

All by design.

The people who have made sure that the gaps are as large as possible will continue to bang on about how they need more money, more programs and earlier and earlier “education” to close the gaps caused by systemic inequality, counting on many people not being aware that they created and perpetuate what systemic inequality there is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am beginning to welcome our new equity overloads. As standards continue to lower, my kids, with our support, will continue to distance themselves.

Parents who didn’t care enough to support their kids during inequitable times will continue to not care and those in the middle will just get dumber.

I can fill in the gaps for my kids and know they will be ok academically. But I do not welcome a dumber society bc it impacts all of us. Dumb people vote.

We know what can be unburdened by what has been. I don’t know about you but I grew up in a middle class neighborhood, people took great pride in their lawns. There is so much more that unites us than what divides us.
Things are looking up and together we can dream a future unburdened by what has been. Some people want to take us back to the past of phonics, reading novels and getting zero credit for zero work.
Together, we will not fall out of coconut 🌴 trees or apple trees, we will get canned mango and make the best Christmas mango pie ever….

How dare we speak merry Christmas!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why can’t we just admit that the schools are failing and then look to the root cause?

It may not be the teachers? It may not be the students? Maybe we need a path to ESL competency before you can be mainstreamed.

There is a lot of judgment involved in declaring a school “failing.” The right-wingers just want to set a high bar and declare schools “failures” to generate anti-immigrant sentiments.

Of course, there should be a focus on the best way to try and bring up kids who aren’t necessarily going to perform like native English speakers on standardized tests, but that doesn’t have to involve labeling schools as “failing.” That stigmatizes a bunch of people trying to do their best.

DP. I’d categorize them as failing because the school board is focusing its efforts on those poor performing schools, hell bent on fixing them with the boundary moves. The school board is leading the charge in making these kids feel like $#%* by emphasizing that they need other more successful kids to join the schools to bring those scores up.

I don't think PP wants the boundary changes. That could keep certain schools accredited. They want schools denied accreditation, so that it triggers provisions that give parents at those schools the option to attend other schools until the state has determined that appropriate remediation has occurred. It doesn't happen often in FCPS, but it occurred years ago at Dogwood ES in Reston. That puts its own strains on the system - if a large number of Justice HS families, for example, were to declare they wanted to another school, does FCPS have to give them the option to attend schools that are already overcrowded?

If they claim all local performing schools are over crowded, then they'll have a problem with VDOE and the department of education. Transfer to a better performing school is a remedy that the district is required to provide

Then maybe the Feds and the state government should provide FCPS with additional money to expand its schools. My point stands: unfunded mandates put an additional strain on the system.

If FCPS didn't draw their lines so carefully to clump poor kids together, then it wouldn't be a problem

This is a fake argument. The concentration of poverty at certain schools reflects the concentration in certain areas of aging garden apartments that, over time, filled up with poorer residents. Langley's boundaries may be gerrymandered to keep out the poor, but that's an exception.

West Springfield?

Very compact and hardly gerrymandered.

To the extent boundaries appear gerrymandered, more often the effect is to add diversity to an UMC school. Think of the Timber Lane island in Falls Church that's assigned to McLean HS or the island off Janna Lee Avenue in Alexandria that is assigned to Fort Hunt ES.

Ironic that timberlane/mclean attendance island probably gets sacrificed and moved to fchs as part of this process.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why can’t we just admit that the schools are failing and then look to the root cause?

It may not be the teachers? It may not be the students? Maybe we need a path to ESL competency before you can be mainstreamed.

There is a lot of judgment involved in declaring a school “failing.” The right-wingers just want to set a high bar and declare schools “failures” to generate anti-immigrant sentiments.

Of course, there should be a focus on the best way to try and bring up kids who aren’t necessarily going to perform like native English speakers on standardized tests, but that doesn’t have to involve labeling schools as “failing.” That stigmatizes a bunch of people trying to do their best.

DP. I’d categorize them as failing because the school board is focusing its efforts on those poor performing schools, hell bent on fixing them with the boundary moves. The school board is leading the charge in making these kids feel like $#%* by emphasizing that they need other more successful kids to join the schools to bring those scores up.

I don't think PP wants the boundary changes. That could keep certain schools accredited. They want schools denied accreditation, so that it triggers provisions that give parents at those schools the option to attend other schools until the state has determined that appropriate remediation has occurred. It doesn't happen often in FCPS, but it occurred years ago at Dogwood ES in Reston. That puts its own strains on the system - if a large number of Justice HS families, for example, were to declare they wanted to another school, does FCPS have to give them the option to attend schools that are already overcrowded?

If they claim all local performing schools are over crowded, then they'll have a problem with VDOE and the department of education. Transfer to a better performing school is a remedy that the district is required to provide

Then maybe the Feds and the state government should provide FCPS with additional money to expand its schools. My point stands: unfunded mandates put an additional strain on the system.

If FCPS didn't draw their lines so carefully to clump poor kids together, then it wouldn't be a problem

This is a fake argument. The concentration of poverty at certain schools reflects the concentration in certain areas of aging garden apartments that, over time, filled up with poorer residents. Langley's boundaries may be gerrymandered to keep out the poor, but that's an exception.

West Springfield?

Very compact and hardly gerrymandered.

To the extent boundaries appear gerrymandered, more often the effect is to add diversity to an UMC school. Think of the Timber Lane island in Falls Church that's assigned to McLean HS or the island off Janna Lee Avenue in Alexandria that is assigned to Fort Hunt ES.

They moved UMC, primarily single-family homes, out of Lee (Lewis) to West Springfield. Same thing happened to Annandale. No reason they could not reverse those changes. This isn't bussing kids across the county, just moving folks on the edges of both school boundaries.

[Anonymous]

Yes, the golden years of FCPS have passed. And I'm not an empty nester, I say this from the perspective of a millennial 1990s/2000s FCPS alum who is now raising children in FCPS. It will be interesting to see how far FCPS scores tumble over the next couple years as english language learners previously exempted from standardized testing for 11 semesters now can delay only 3.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/09/23/mass-immigration-is-destroying-this-top-public-school-district/

The situation is far worse than when it was discussed in this 2017 thread:

https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/678608.page

[Anonymous]

Fcps admits its the changing demographic. Probably because of undocumented immigration

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One data point:

My child in Honors 9th grade English at Langley is reading an abridged version of the Odyssey. It’s about 1/3 the length of the original book and the language is simplified.

I read the full book when I was in 9th grade in FCPS and her older cousin also read the full book about 10 years ago in another FCPS high school.

Then have your child read the full book at home. Fairfax County has libraries.

Don’t count on the schools to do as well by your children as they did by you. It’s all about supplementation, homeschooling and private school these days.

Colleague with kids in MCPS says the same general trends discussed here about FCPS also are true there. His oldest was MCPS all the way. Next bailed at MS for private, youngest was moved to private after 2nd grade. They watched the decline in their own kids. Neighbors here are reporting the same for FCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One data point:

My child in Honors 9th grade English at Langley is reading an abridged version of the Odyssey. It’s about 1/3 the length of the original book and the language is simplified.

I read the full book when I was in 9th grade in FCPS and her older cousin also read the full book about 10 years ago in another FCPS high school.

Then have your child read the full book at home. Fairfax County has libraries.

Don’t count on the schools to do as well by your children as they did by you. It’s all about supplementation, homeschooling and private school these days.

Colleague with kids in MCPS says the same general trends discussed here about FCPS also are true there. His oldest was MCPS all the way. Next bailed at MS for private, youngest was moved to private after 2nd grade. They watched the decline in their own kids. Neighbors here are reporting the same for FCPS.

Only the small township based school districts of the northeast and other parts of the U.S. appear to be largely immune from such trends. Of course, the problem there is funding problems for the poorer towns with more diverse housing types.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One data point:

My child in Honors 9th grade English at Langley is reading an abridged version of the Odyssey. It’s about 1/3 the length of the original book and the language is simplified.

I read the full book when I was in 9th grade in FCPS and her older cousin also read the full book about 10 years ago in another FCPS high school.

Then have your child read the full book at home. Fairfax County has libraries.

Don’t count on the schools to do as well by your children as they did by you. It’s all about supplementation, homeschooling and private school these days.

Colleague with kids in MCPS says the same general trends discussed here about FCPS also are true there. His oldest was MCPS all the way. Next bailed at MS for private, youngest was moved to private after 2nd grade. They watched the decline in their own kids. Neighbors here are reporting the same for FCPS.

Only the small township based school districts of the northeast and other parts of the U.S. appear to be largely immune from such trends. Of course, the problem there is funding problems for the poorer towns with more diverse housing types.

It's amazing what happens when you draw lines to exclude poor kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One data point:

My child in Honors 9th grade English at Langley is reading an abridged version of the Odyssey. It’s about 1/3 the length of the original book and the language is simplified.

I read the full book when I was in 9th grade in FCPS and her older cousin also read the full book about 10 years ago in another FCPS high school.

Then have your child read the full book at home. Fairfax County has libraries.

Don’t count on the schools to do as well by your children as they did by you. It’s all about supplementation, homeschooling and private school these days.

Colleague with kids in MCPS says the same general trends discussed here about FCPS also are true there. His oldest was MCPS all the way. Next bailed at MS for private, youngest was moved to private after 2nd grade. They watched the decline in their own kids. Neighbors here are reporting the same for FCPS.

Only the small township based school districts of the northeast and other parts of the U.S. appear to be largely immune from such trends. Of course, the problem there is funding problems for the poorer towns with more diverse housing types.

It's amazing what happens when you draw lines to exclude poor kids.

So too is what happens when you ignore borders and allow a flood of poorly educated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One data point:

My child in Honors 9th grade English at Langley is reading an abridged version of the Odyssey. It’s about 1/3 the length of the original book and the language is simplified.

I read the full book when I was in 9th grade in FCPS and her older cousin also read the full book about 10 years ago in another FCPS high school.

Then have your child read the full book at home. Fairfax County has libraries.

Don’t count on the schools to do as well by your children as they did by you. It’s all about supplementation, homeschooling and private school these days.

Colleague with kids in MCPS says the same general trends discussed here about FCPS also are true there. His oldest was MCPS all the way. Next bailed at MS for private, youngest was moved to private after 2nd grade. They watched the decline in their own kids. Neighbors here are reporting the same for FCPS.

Many think equity is about bringing up all kids to some basic, albeit low, level of competency using school resources in ways that address individual needs to get there. IMO that’s only partly true. The other part of the equation, I suspect, is that school districts expect attentive parents to cover down on the education of their more privileged students in lieu of the district itself providing those resources. In effect, capable families are also the resources in this equity equation. that way more taxpayer dollars can go toward the bottom.

Unfortunately, school districts can never replicate the support that motivated families provide and the gaps will actually grow. AAP-like programs will continually be reduced in rigor and merit to provide “advanced” opportunities for the lower SES students. And parents who are paying attention will continue to advance their academic support of their own children.