Achievement gap continues to grow between high- and low-income schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree and HGC are just a scam to increase lower performing school's grades. Your kid needs to get up earlier, deal with long commute rides to and from and not get home until after 4pm. Plus they are the outsiders of the school. Go in at 4th and never fit it in. My friend's child left mid year due to playground bullying and missing his neighborhood friends. It isn't ideal. But I agree that the ones who are almost at the top suffer the most. We pulled my oldest to private school on 70% financial aid. Best thing we ever did. I wanted to believe in MCPS but after 4 years of constant decline and supplementing at home, we looked for a change and it worked. I agree the gap continues to widen because the average kid's families are getting fed up and moving, leaving for private, parochial or homeschooling.

And you have enrollment data to support this, right? Enrollment at MCPS is dropping? Enrollment in private schools in the area is booming?

MCPS enrollment will never drop because they build more homes, condos, townhouses and apartments to overcrowd the schools every year. But yes homeschooling has gone up the last 10 years and all the privates have massive wait lists. Not sure about parochial. [/quote

Right - I am among the countless middle class families that finally gave up on MCPS. Most of my neighbors went parochial. For every one of our children that left the system, I'm sure they were replaced by children in the neighboring apartment complex. Enrollment is certainly going up, but at least where I'm from, middle class participation is on the decline. That may not be the case in the green zone, but things are getting bad enough in certain parts of the red zone. I may not have hard data, but I've seen it in action. MCPS turns a blind eye to this trend. Caring about what will bring middle class families back to declining red zone schools should be part of their plan, but it's not. I think MCPS has lost its way.

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+1 The sad part about this is the middle class pay the most in taxes towards education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Have you been in a dcc elementary neighborhood recently. There are many middle class families moving in esp close in. Homes are selling and rents are through the roof. Any family paying between 2-3 k for a two bedroom apartment is middle class

I have. We left. The families were middle class. They weren't the ones attending our neighborhood elementary. Silver spring has much looser zoning regulations than places like Bethesda, which means you can have middle class neighborhoods adjacent to large areas of low income housing. So yes, lots of middle class families who could afford parochial.

However, I don't think that the solution to this problem is segregating poor people even more than they are already segregated, in Montgomery County.

I absolutely agree. Not saying the zoning is wrong. I'm saying it explains why you can have the optic of a middle class area, but the local schools don't tell the same story. And when schools become overwhelmed by kids with extra needs and Farms rates and Esol rates get really high (I'm talking > 80% in some of these schools), many middle class families are going to move on to alternatives if there aren't incentives to encourage them to attend their assigned school. Which brings us back to the earlier point, which was that MCPS is unlikely to dump money into programs that would serve that purpose. I don't blame middle class families from seeking out true diversity rather than swallowing MCPS's story that a school with great her than 80% FARMs reflects SES diversity (that's not diverse -it's very high poverty). They could at least try to be better sales people. I wish we could have attended our local school, but I was not interested in sending my children to a school where all studies tell us they would be better off in a school with more balanced demographics. I have the resources to choose a school not overwhelmed by poverty and language challenges, and that's what I've done. That's what a lot of red zone families with resources are doing. It's sad, but it makes sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I agree and HGC are just a scam to increase lower performing school's grades. Your kid needs to get up earlier, deal with long commute rides to and from and not get home until after 4pm. Plus they are the outsiders of the school. Go in at 4th and never fit it in. My friend's child left mid year due to playground bullying and missing his neighborhood friends. It isn't ideal. But I agree that the ones who are almost at the top suffer the most. We pulled my oldest to private school on 70% financial aid. Best thing we ever did. I wanted to believe in MCPS but after 4 years of constant decline and supplementing at home, we looked for a change and it worked. I agree the gap continues to widen because the average kid's families are getting fed up and moving, leaving for private, parochial or homeschooling.

And you have enrollment data to support this, right? Enrollment at MCPS is dropping? Enrollment in private schools in the area is booming?

Overall enrollment data won't tell you this. There are new enrollments all the time. Shifting some kids to private, parochial or homeschool is a real response to schools who are not serving the needs of all the students. I'm not sure we have the data but I'm sure you don't have any to disprove it either. Others move to other school districts and I think that's the point of the article - families with children who are high performers are going to seek out another school if their original MCPS school isn't serving their needs. This is less the case with the lower performers because many of their families cannot afford to move and/or are already having their needs met so there is no point in moving.

[Anonymous]

Right - I am among the countless middle class families that finally gave up on MCPS. Most of my neighbors went parochial. For every one of our children that left the system, I'm sure they were replaced by children in the neighboring apartment complex. Enrollment is certainly going up, but at least where I'm from, middle class participation is on the decline. That may not be the case in the green zone, but things are getting bad enough in certain parts of the red zone. I may not have hard data, but I've seen it in action. MCPS turns a blind eye to this trend. Caring about what will bring middle class families back to declining red zone schools should be part of their plan, but it's not. I think MCPS has lost its way.

I keep saying this but feel like it falls on deaf ears. How is MCPS so clueless? The middle class is always the key to stability. The economy is most problematic when the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. MCPS seems to be playing along with this. Resources should be allocated to children who need it. However, when MCPS policy ignores the hard working kid who is doing well, they have changed the pace of learning. This new grading system doesn't help any either. When these kids in the middle (or upper middle) slow down to wait for those who are struggling, they either adopt a consistently lower standard or most likely - their family finds some way to get them out of that environment. The rest of the school suffers because these kids are the backbone of the school. These are kids who have the ability and the resources to do well but still need some attention from MCPS to do so. The highly gifted are swept away and the struggling kids get extra help. The middle are ignored and sink to the bottom or find a way out. Everyone loses with this new trend.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

If you tested American graduates of MIT and Cal Tech I'm sure you would think that US math education is the best in the world. India has a billion+ people, the ones that are here are cream of the crop. When you test all Indians they do very poorly; significantly worse than the US.

I know many of these graduates are Indians and Asians!

Indians ARE Asians. I am not Indian.

[Anonymous]

The academic achievement gap between the different race groups, the gap between the red zone and green zone schools, and the gap between middle class kids ans FARM kids. Which gap concerns you the most? What if mcps starts a reverse magnet program? Busing the poorest neighborhood kids, the low 20% kid from a heavily Farm/ESOL school to a school in the green zone for ES level. The kids will have a choice of staying on for MS and HS.
The gap between the schools will be reduced immediately, the red zone school will have more resource for middle class kids, and the green zone kids will see kids whose primary concerns are not the P or I on their report cards, the poor kids will feel the pressure to study hard.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The academic achievement gap between the different race groups, the gap between the red zone and green zone schools, and the gap between middle class kids ans FARM kids. Which gap concerns you the most? What if mcps starts a reverse magnet program? Busing the poorest neighborhood kids, the low 20% kid from a heavily Farm/ESOL school to a school in the green zone for ES level. The kids will have a choice of staying on for MS and HS.
The gap between the schools will be reduced immediately, the red zone school will have more resource for middle class kids, and the green zone kids will see kids whose primary concerns are not the P or I on their report cards, the poor kids will feel the pressure to study hard.

I wonder how the people in Bethesda/Potomac would react if MCPS proposed to do this.

[e34m20]

The only way you are ever going to excel in school is if the parents and students take their studies seriously. That goes for everything in life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The academic achievement gap between the different race groups, the gap between the red zone and green zone schools, and the gap between middle class kids ans FARM kids. Which gap concerns you the most? What if mcps starts a reverse magnet program? Busing the poorest neighborhood kids, the low 20% kid from a heavily Farm/ESOL school to a school in the green zone for ES level. The kids will have a choice of staying on for MS and HS.
The gap between the schools will be reduced immediately, the red zone school will have more resource for middle class kids, and the green zone kids will see kids whose primary concerns are not the P or I on their report cards, the poor kids will feel the pressure to study hard.

I wonder how the people in Bethesda/Potomac would react if MCPS proposed to do this.

And here lies the problem - for some reason, the county is dead set on keeping western MC snowflake village. The high income families appear to have much more influence that the middle class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think one of the peopel who commented on the artilce said it best. you can put a donkey in a stable but it doesn't make them a race horse.

You can put a race horse on a mountain pass and it will break unlike a mule.

It works both ways.

In DC where you have intelligent parents (some with grad degrees from good programs), but due to the COL, don't make enough to get in the right 'pyramid' - what do you do with their bright children who come from a family that values education?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
MCPS enrollment will never drop because they build more homes, condos, townhouses and apartments to overcrowd the schools every year. But yes homeschooling has gone up the last 10 years and all the privates have massive wait lists. Not sure about parochial.

I'm waiting for data. Thanks.

Our MC parochial has a mass waiting list. Thank you 2.0.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
MCPS enrollment will never drop because they build more homes, condos, townhouses and apartments to overcrowd the schools every year. But yes homeschooling has gone up the last 10 years and all the privates have massive wait lists. Not sure about parochial.

I'm waiting for data. Thanks.

Our MC parochial has a mass waiting list. Thank you 2.0.

DD's BFF is in a MC parochial school. The BFF probably gets better reading and arts instruction, and more PE. But her math instruction is definitely behind DD's math instruction at MCPS.

[Anonymous]

Is there a map for green vs. red zone? SOrry if it has been posted up thread, don't want to wade through all the pages.....

[Anonymous]

Just curious, what are the PPs defining as "middle class"? Something tells me they define themselves as middle class, and like every other subset of MoCo, they have convinced themselves that MCPS is out to get them specifically.

Oh, and to the people at the beginning of this thread extolling their childhood experiences in wonderfully inclusive public schools in small New England towns, please give me a break. I grew up in one of those too, and if you think the differentials between the richest and poorest there were anywhere near what they are here, you're delusional.

MoCo is just too big and too diverse to do everything right. It does a lot of things well, in my view. Achieving a common racial and economic balance in its schools is not one of them. But I think that's a problem that is really bigger than the schools themselves. And what can the county really do at this point - you can't retroactively mandate economic diversity, and sorry, busing is just not a practical solution given the size and distances (and of course all the other problems that were associated with big busing programs historically.)

I don't have a solution, but I do agree there is a big problem. I don't think it's unique to this area, it just plays out differently in other areas (including in those lovely NE towns, where the better school systems always command a premium for home prices.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The academic achievement gap between the different race groups, the gap between the red zone and green zone schools, and the gap between middle class kids ans FARM kids. Which gap concerns you the most? What if mcps starts a reverse magnet program? Busing the poorest neighborhood kids, the low 20% kid from a heavily Farm/ESOL school to a school in the green zone for ES level. The kids will have a choice of staying on for MS and HS.
The gap between the schools will be reduced immediately, the red zone school will have more resource for middle class kids, and the green zone kids will see kids whose primary concerns are not the P or I on their report cards, the poor kids will feel the pressure to study hard.

Chapter 220, Milwaukee's bussing social experiment, did just this. Millions of dollars and a decade later, the bussed inner city students did not perform better on tests, applications, gpa, pregnancy rates, or anything. The "achievement gap" did not statistically significantly reduce. The suburban sports teams did better tho... And the schools got rowdier...