What is the real reason MCPS uses Lottery for Middle School Magnet Program
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Anonymous
Why would people come on the internet to lie to parents about such important matters? MCPS has not published any information about how they conduct local norming. |
Anonymous
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+1 or lottery formulation either.
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Anonymous
Those type of schools are not being discussed on this thread. We are discussing schools that kids had to get in through testing and now are being made lottery schools. The quality of cohort is bound to drop. It is just math. |
Anonymous
Well if previously most of the TPMS students were in the 99% and the lottery now draws from 85%+m 1/15 of this year's magnet students are similar to year's past. However, I'm told the new cohort is doing great! |
Anonymous
Lesser than 1/15 given normal distibution. It is all great though. |
Anonymous
Now I'm curious. Who says "it's all great"? Wondering if this is the same poster that lied about MCPS publishing the distribution info. |
Anonymous
I don't know about any data but MCPS stated it was a lottery. This means selections are random and close to an even distribution. I realize some posters have this wacky conspiracy theory that a lottery isn't a lottery but are unable to provide a shred of evidence for that. |
Anonymous
Normal distibution = Gaussian Distribution. Also known as bell curve. It is not even. Have you done middle school math? |
Anonymous
I don't know about any data but whatever you say is conspiracy theory..amazing clarity of thinking, my friend. |
Anonymous
I was being sarcastic. Obviously nothing great about a race to the bottom! |
Anonymous
If you pay close attention, they don’t say it’s a pure lottery. They say it’s a lottery based on “locally normed” scores and provide no information on how they compose the lottery pool, for example, to ensure gender balance. No one has conspiracy theories about anything. All people are asking for is more information and transparency from MCPS about this process. MCPS refuses to provide that information, which I think they have an obligation to. And then there’s people like you variously trying to shame/convince people that either it’s wrong for them to know/want to know, they are stupid for not understanding some unstated thing that everyone else does, or that as you explicitly state, they are crazy conspiracy theorists. Bottom line is that there is no transparency from our government about the allocation of government resources. The government trying to keep secret the criteria for whether you qualify for receiving a benefit or other public resources is not and should not be acceptable to anyone. |
Anonymous
+1. MCPS is a Public School system accountable to the taxpayer. There are no secrets that should be kept from the public. |
Anonymous
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At least NYC'S g and t tried to serve everyone who scored above 90%. Giving a lottery option for harder classes isn't any different from DC's lottery system for all schools: you get lucky or you don't.
While I commend mcps for having their heart in the right place, and wanting to help all students excel, our experience with a bright kid pushed into "normal" classes at TPMS was dismal. (We missed the application deadline for magnet because we moved into the county too late.) There are some students who need to be challenged in school. It's not any different from needing an IEP. What has always confused me about the MCPS magnet is this insistence that it has to be exclusive. Why? Doesn't cost more to have more advanced classes, either at a central school or at multiple locations. It wouldn't cost the county more to provide all learners who scored above 85% with an advanced curriculum. The old system was bad because the applications were arbitrary and favored the UMC. (The year we missed the deadline I looked at the application and it relied heavily on recommendations and awards won, extracurricular interests, etc. Hallmarks of a middle class.) It was later changed to a pure test-based system--better in some ways, but due to the limited number of seats, missing out on providing opportunities to any kids who got less than straight A's, or less than 99%. Now, I know many parents of straight A 99% achievers will chime in here to explain to me how their children are truly truly special and deserve a tranche above all others, and perhaps that's true: but I can tell you from my experience of being one, that bright kids who get B's also benefit from challenging classes. In fact, some of them may need them, because if they aren't challenged they don't engage at all. For us it was significant when our kid stopped falling asleep in English class because English started being actually interesting to them. Like night and day. Gifted education shouldn't be as arbitrary as a lottery. Ever. It also shouldn't only be reserved only for the highest scorers. Moco has pivoted from one bad selection process to another bad selection process, when the simple solution would have been to meet the needs of all the students. |
Anonymous
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+1 to the above. There are a LOT of kids who would benefit from current GT programming, not just the top 1-2%. Not every GT kid should be getting all As to demonstrate their need (or getting all As once in GT classes) -- there just needs to be a reliable and equitable way to identify those who would benefit. However, there is an artificial scarcity of available GT seats. This needs to change.
There may be a few (perhaps in the top 1%, but not necessarily, depending on the overall profileof their peers), who would not benefit only from typical GT programming, but are so greatly gifted in one or multiple subjects that they need extraordinary measures (grade advancement is one option, but shouldn't be the only one) to address their learning needs. If a magnet is the venue in which such measures are best managed, then that should be the nature of the magnet, both in terms of population served and classes offered to meet the need. It is a terrible and inequitable situation that not all schools offer access to GT programming addressing the needs of the many, many who would benefit from acceleration/enrichment. There are courses, to be sure, but they are not uniformly available, and they do not employ the level of rigor and enrichment necessary to challenge these students. This makes families scratch and claw for magnets -- their children may not be suited to that environment (when properly configured to address the needs of the greatest outliers), but their alternative is to be underserved, themselves. Again, this needs to change. Conducting a lottery under pandemic conditions, where measures available were highly uncertain, may have been necessary. Conducting them in the current environment calls into question whether MCPS is committed to identifying/meeting GT need or is not truly interested indoing so, despite law and policy requiring it. As far as the MCPS local norming methodology feeding that lottery goes, the post on page 23 describes it to some extent (look for "MCPS makes things clear as mud..."), but MCPS needs to step up and provide that in a clear, more detailed and official mammer. Anyone posting here that they have done so without linking to a website where that could easily be confirmed is being disingenuous. Regarding the percentile versus a normal distribution/gaussian distribution/bell curve, the curve is what is typically seen in raw score data -- a few outliers at either end building towards a bulge in the middle. Not all raw data fits such a curve, though, and there are alternate distributions (with different shapes) that might be expected depending on the item being measured and the undelying characteristics of a population being studied. Some, bit not all, of these distributions can be run through a transfrom (e.g., logarithmic transform) that result in more of a bell shape; these, then, might be analyzed by statistical tools developed for gaussian distributions, keeping in mind that a reverse of the transform/analysis would need to be conducted to speak in terms of the original/raw measurements. A population percentile, OTOH, is just what it sounds like. 85th percentile means that 15% of the population studied exceeded that particular score (or, probabilistically, that score would be representative of an individual compared to whom one would expect 15% of the population to do better). 99th percentile, generally, (100th percentile is never reported, as there is the consideration that some individual might always score higher) represents the top 1% of scores. Or 1/15 of the top 15% of scores. A raw score in the 99th percentile may be way out there on the curve, and that may be what confused the earlier poster suggesting the top 1% were somehow less than 1/15th or the top 15%. |
Anonymous
Professor, you are too making too many points in one post in the age of inattention. We should expand magnet offerings to many more kids instead of having this artificial scarcity...agreed 100%. |