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Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
FCPS comprehensive boundary review
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Anonymous
Worse — many tagged as failing around here are not actually failing but it bolsters the ops of supposedly good schools. |
Anonymous
Let's do a thought experiment. Starting point the year 2000. Numbers just made up for the thought experiment. School A has scores of 85% passing. School B has scores of 90% passing. Transient population. Seemingly very little difference. Year 2005. Word spreads that School B does slightly better than School A on scores, so new community members move to school B zone. Now School A drops to 80% passing, while School B stays at 90% passing. Year 2010. Word spreads that School B now does even better than School A, so even more new community members move to School B. School A passing rate drops to 70% and enrollment falls, increasingly made up of families new to the country...School B continues to hum along at 90% passing. Year 2015. Great Schools shows a disparity in rankings between Schools A and B. Even more new community members move to School B, while less fortunate immigrants are not able to make that choice. Scores drop at School A to 60% passing while School B continues to pass at 90%. Year 2020. Now the problem is a glaring disparity to the point where people absolutely have no intention of ever sending their kids to School A. Enrollment number continues to fall and become even poorer at School A. Passing rate at School A drops to 50%. School B continues to pass at 90%. None of this is necessarily the fault of the school or teachers at School A. They are dealing with a completely different population. It demonstrates that a disparity like this doesn't pop up overnight but happens over years. Fairfax and its transient population have MADE these schools what they are. |
Anonymous
I’d question why a school in the US funded by tax payers decided to focus resources on the kids hopelessly behind and slow the American kid’s classes to accommodate them |
Anonymous
Some schools have been negatively impacted in the past 10-15 years by the county and voter decisions already while others have profited at their expense. |
Anonymous
Regardless of what made them bad schools, they are still bad schools. The reason has less to do with transient populations and more to do with county zoning concentrating poverty |
Anonymous
Kids already at McLean don't want to go to Langley. The schools are rivals. But the families of the younger kids at Spring Hill ES, which is a split feeder to Langley/McLean, who are zoned for McLean now likely would be happy to get moved there. Those kids are in the Tysons "attendance island." Spring Hill splits about 65-70% to Langley and 30-35% to McLean now. As to whether moving those kids to Cooper/Langley, considered in conjunction with the additional growth planned in that part of Tysons, would play into the SB's potentially moving part of Great Falls from Langley to Herndon is a question best left to others. |
Anonymous
| What a garbage email. There are zero takeaways listed. |
Anonymous
| Why can’t they grandfather HS families and have neighborhoods start fresh. WayWAY harder to switch during HS. What’s the rationale for this? |
Anonymous
| Spite |
Anonymous
| This is not going to help any of the students. The higher academic ones are going to be uprooted and grades will likely go down. And the lower performing are going to feel hopeless and throw in the towel. What a shit show. |
Anonymous
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It would be "nice" to believe that all we have to do to help failing students is to throw in a bunch of high achievers.
Sadly, it does not work that way. There are two ways to reduce the achievement gap--from the top or from the bottom. Sadly, the SB is choosing to lower the top. Equity. It takes hard work to close it from the bottom. Much easier to cover it up. |
Anonymous
When they've done a limited boundary change on a one-off basis, they have provided for both generous grandfathering (so a HS change would get phased in starting with rising 9th graders and everyone else would be allowed to stay at their current school through graduation) and continued transportation. So, for a number of years, they were running bus routes through the same neighborhoods to two different schools. If they change enough boundaries, they won't have enough transportation resources to run so many bus routes. They could grandfather, but not provide transportation, but that raises equity issues in their minds because more privileged families would find it easier to arrange for their kids' transportation. So they've balked to date on providing any firm assurances about grandfathering in connection with the ongoing county-wide study. Their thinking is that if they provided assurances in advance about grandfathering, they are limiting the scope of eventual boundary changes in advance of the study, which they don't want to do. So they prefer to leave people in limbo. Rachna Sizemore-Heizer is primarily responsible for this, because she was in charge of the Governance Committee when Policy 8130 was updated, but most of the other School Board members went along with it. To me, it's a bit silly, because if they really come out and propose boundary changes with no grandfathering of existing high school students, people are going to go ballistic and the School Board members won't be able to appear in public for years to come without scores of parents and kids coming up to question their judgment. But maybe they like the power trip that comes with leaving people up in the air. It just seems amazingly lacking in common sense. |
Anonymous
Haha check out the deportation thread. We are bending over backwards to reach accreditation of these title 1 schools and many with illegal parents. |
Anonymous
| I think we all know this, but worth repeating....this entire thread is conjecture. Well 99% of it. |
Anonymous
Requiring e-verify to register a student would be such an easy solution |