AAP Criteria

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Both sides are correct. I'm the PP with the AART who said that each year, around 5 kids from their school get rejected who should have been accepted. Alongside those 5 kids are 25 kids who belonged in AAP and got in. The 5 wrongfully rejected kids generally get in on appeal, get in the following year, or get principal placed.

It stinks when your kid is one of the ones who has to deal with appeals or applying the next year when they should have been admitted. By the end of third grade, after two rounds of applications and appeals, the number of kids who belong in AAP but keep getting rejected is very small.

Every year, our school sends less than 5 kids to the center. While I don't think our school is the norm, I don't think we're an extreme outlier either. In a class of 75-100 2nd graders, sending 25 or 30 kids seems like a lot.

15-20% of FCPS 2nd graders kids are admitted into AAP. Your school on average should have 11-20 kids get accepted into AAP. If it's only 5 per grade, then your school must be a lower SES one or be drastically underperforming.

My kids' school has 6 classrooms per grade level and around 150 kids. It is expected that 22-30 kids would be admitted to AAP using the 15-20% rate.

I thought it was 10% were accepted for 3rd grade and then the number grows in later years due to Principal Placement and kids applying in later grades. Our school has about 90 second graders and the AART said about 8-10 kids are accepted into AAP each year. Only 5 or so go to the Center, there is a mix of Gen Ed and Language Immersion kids who stay, but mainly LI kids stay.

Just because a small number of kids move to the Center doesn't mean that that is the number of kids accepted. There are parents who choose to keep their kids at the base school even when it doesn't have AAP. There are different reasons for that, sometimes it is language immersion but many times it is because parents simply prefer the kid at the base school. We have kids return from the Center to our Base every year, they cannot rejoin the LI program but the kids just don't like the Center for whatever reason and they come back to the base school.

The AAP equity report showed that 16% of the second grade cohort was centrally selected for AAP in the year studied. The 10% figure is the percent of ALL kids in K-6th who are AAP eligible per the central committee. They use K, 1st, and 2nd populations to obscure the percentage of 3rd-6th graders in AAP.

Seems like a nonsensical metric to use all kids to come up with 10%

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:High SES... DS is a 1st grader, 160 NNAT; 99% in math and reading for Iready - Q1 and Q2....Grade accelerated - skipped Kindergarten.... just waiting for Cogat .... how many kids are in 3rd grade AAP class at center school - Churchill Rd Elementary School in McLean?

That’s our school and they said that they have 28 in the 3rd grade AAP - and they only have 1 class this year.

[compram]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:High SES... DS is a 1st grader, 160 NNAT; 99% in math and reading for Iready - Q1 and Q2....Grade accelerated - skipped Kindergarten.... just waiting for Cogat .... how many kids are in 3rd grade AAP class at center school - Churchill Rd Elementary School in McLean?

That’s our school and they said that they have 28 in the 3rd grade AAP - and they only have 1 class this year.

Thanks for the info

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here's how it works. 100-200 people, comprising AAP teachers, school counselors, AARTs, and more are split into small groups to review files. The criterion for getting in is that over half of the people reviewing your child's file vote that the child should be admitted. The files are viewed holistically, meaning that the same panel might reject someone with high scores and then accept someone with low scores if something else in the file convinced them that kid #2 belongs in AAP but kid #1 doesn't.

But no notes or comparisons that would be subject to ferpa or foia, because they really don't want anyone to see the sausage making

It's no different than what goes on in magnet school admissions, or TJ, or private high schools, or colleges (state or private). I'm not sure why people think there's a strict formula to use. It is no different than a job interview, or anything else in life where a bunch of people apply, but some make it and others don't. Every year a ton of parents are up in arms about "why" their kid was rejected. There is NO single answer. The reviewers who touched your kid's file didn't believe he/she belonged in AAP in comparison to the other files they reviewed. That is the essence of the "holistic" review. Trying to find the silver bullet on AAP admissions is just futile. Collectively, we waste a lot of time on this on a yearly basis.

The problem with holistic admissions is that it can easily be abused. The history of so-called holistic admissions in the U.S. is rather sordid and actually starts with anti-semitism. Basically, lots of schools used to have test-based admissions and Jews were out performing. To address this, holistic admissions was introduced. Holistic admissions, while it sounds nice in theory, often ends up perpetuating very human biases and is a way of eliminating transparency and oversight.

Agreed. Except in our era, "holistic" has evolved further to include diversity, equity, and other considerations which are necessarily subjective. For what it's worth, DS was accepted into AAP with NNAT = 150, COGAT = 138, had perfect GBRS, but I still feel as though we were at the mercy of his teacher/AART choosing the right work samples, and the committee looking at it in the same way as the school level people. These last two steps have more to do with staff's skills and talents and less to do with my DS's. I am acutely aware that it could have worked out differently.

I actually don't have any issues with holistic admissions as a principle and I'm all for including subjective measures given that objective measures have their limitations. I personally think including factors like diversity and equity are good, even if my own children don't personally benefit. Some might argue that their kids are harmed because certain factors are taken into account that don't help their kids, but I think most kids who are close to getting into AAP (but don't) will be fine. Not being in AAP won't have any real negative consequences in the long-term. My beef is with the lack of transparency. As it stands, the system is set up to avoid transparency and putting things into a committee is a way to protect people from being blamed. If you're going to include those subjective measures, then be transparent about it and live with the potential blowback.