Is anyone happy with MCPS?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an avid reader of this forum as I try to figure out where to send our kids to school for kindergarten.

But reading these threads are really starting to seriously worry me.

Our neighborhood is about 50/50 public private. Nearly all the public parents are happy with their kids’ ES and HS experiences (mixed on MS), and all the private parents are happy with their kids’ schools, too.

Are the public school parents in my neighborhood just settling, or is this forum wildly anti-public school and not reflective of how most people feel about MCPS?

While this forum can be extra, I actually disagree that it’s anti-public school. From my experience, there are a lot of legitimate complaints voiced here. However, if you’re in a neighborhood where half of families send their kids to private, you’ll probably be fine because your public school demographics will reflect the benefits of high household incomes.

My child is in upper elementary that is a step right below Title I (focus school, I think?). The teachers have been caring and the school administration seems responsive and organized, but it’s clear that more resources are needed to support all students and different needs. Many students are not on grade level. On the other end, my kid is regularly bored with reading in class, but I don’t think the school has the capacity to differentiate and has to stick to the provided curriculum.

Meanwhile the central administration has spent the whole academic year talking about this regional plan (which in my opinion, favors the already successful, resourced high schools) without a peep about how to address gaps and be more innovative in earlier grades, where an academic foundation is built.

I’m happy with my kid’s education 50-75% of the time but hoping to expand our options in the future.

It is definitely anti-MCPS

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do the half of the neighborhood that send their kids to private school do so because it's just part of the lifestyle (ie it's a richer area and a normal thing for them) or do they do so because they don't like the local schools?

At one point to a certain degree, I think everyone is happy at their local schools and appreciate the teacher and staff at their schools. I do think a lot of it is that they don't know what they don't know. ie some differences in how schools do things and offer.

Although more recently I do hear some people point out (when we talk to each other in person) issues with their school.

I think one of the key things is that with the MCPS schools that our kids go/went to you really have to stay on top of things and make sure to advocate for your kids. Otherwise MCPS will automatically try to default things by denying additional services or other paths for your kids. In some ways looking back, this has always been the case even when we were in school. In our point of view, if you just leave things in MCPS's hands, your kid might move through the grades and graduate but I'm not sure if your child would be at a level that you're okay with. We do know some families where they have no issues with it.

If our family was just starting out school now, I would most likely look elsewhere outside of Montgomery County. But a lot of it is due to Montgomery County in general and what you're getting for for the money. If we were staying in the same home/place and contemplating between our local MCPS school and private school, we'd probably be inclined to stick with the local public school. Although being in one of the areas potentially affected by the proposed boundary changes, private school has crossed my mind recently. For public vs private, a lot of it would depend on what are your local schools.

My neighborhood is maybe 75% MCPS. Of the private school parents I speak to, none of them are doing it for lifestyle. It’s all because MCPS is subpar.

For us, we have a high IQ kid with dyslexia and ADHD. We spoke with her neuropsychologist and an MCPS special Ed professional. Both urged private school. We’ve been very happy but wish we could’ve made public school work.

Wow, it surprised me that MCPS SPED staffer would urge private. That sounds disturbing and possibly illegal … they aren’t allowed to sough off their responsibility to provide services.

It's because it's a troll.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Do the half of the neighborhood that send their kids to private school do so because it's just part of the lifestyle (ie it's a richer area and a normal thing for them) or do they do so because they don't like the local schools?

At one point to a certain degree, I think everyone is happy at their local schools and appreciate the teacher and staff at their schools. I do think a lot of it is that they don't know what they don't know. ie some differences in how schools do things and offer.

Although more recently I do hear some people point out (when we talk to each other in person) issues with their school.

I think one of the key things is that with the MCPS schools that our kids go/went to you really have to stay on top of things and make sure to advocate for your kids. Otherwise MCPS will automatically try to default things by denying additional services or other paths for your kids. In some ways looking back, this has always been the case even when we were in school. In our point of view, if you just leave things in MCPS's hands, your kid might move through the grades and graduate but I'm not sure if your child would be at a level that you're okay with. We do know some families where they have no issues with it.

If our family was just starting out school now, I would most likely look elsewhere outside of Montgomery County. But a lot of it is due to Montgomery County in general and what you're getting for for the money. If we were staying in the same home/place and contemplating between our local MCPS school and private school, we'd probably be inclined to stick with the local public school. Although being in one of the areas potentially affected by the proposed boundary changes, private school has crossed my mind recently. For public vs private, a lot of it would depend on what are your local schools.

My neighborhood is maybe 75% MCPS. Of the private school parents I speak to, none of them are doing it for lifestyle. It’s all because MCPS is subpar.

For us, we have a high IQ kid with dyslexia and ADHD. We spoke with her neuropsychologist and an MCPS special Ed professional. Both urged private school. We’ve been very happy but wish we could’ve made public school work.

Wow, it surprised me that MCPS SPED staffer would urge private. That sounds disturbing and possibly illegal … they aren’t allowed to sough off their responsibility to provide services.

DP

PP may have been consulting a SPED staffer privately.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an avid reader of this forum as I try to figure out where to send our kids to school for kindergarten.

But reading these threads are really starting to seriously worry me.

Our neighborhood is about 50/50 public private. Nearly all the public parents are happy with their kids’ ES and HS experiences (mixed on MS), and all the private parents are happy with their kids’ schools, too.

Are the public school parents in my neighborhood just settling, or is this forum wildly anti-public school and not reflective of how most people feel about MCPS?

While this forum can be extra, I actually disagree that it’s anti-public school. From my experience, there are a lot of legitimate complaints voiced here. However, if you’re in a neighborhood where half of families send their kids to private, you’ll probably be fine because your public school demographics will reflect the benefits of high household incomes.

My child is in upper elementary that is a step right below Title I (focus school, I think?). The teachers have been caring and the school administration seems responsive and organized, but it’s clear that more resources are needed to support all students and different needs. Many students are not on grade level. On the other end, my kid is regularly bored with reading in class, but I don’t think the school has the capacity to differentiate and has to stick to the provided curriculum.

Meanwhile the central administration has spent the whole academic year talking about this regional plan (which in my opinion, favors the already successful, resourced high schools) without a peep about how to address gaps and be more innovative in earlier grades, where an academic foundation is built.

I’m happy with my kid’s education 50-75% of the time but hoping to expand our options in the future.

It is definitely anti-MCPS

Being critical of MCPS does not mean you are "anti-MCPS." It means you expect better of the system and are willing to hold it accountable.

People who are TRULY anti-MCPS would be advocating for charters, homeschooling and private. There is a small contingent who do tout private over MCPS, but the overwhelming majority of posters in this forum are current or former MCPS parents and staff sharing their experiences with the system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an avid reader of this forum as I try to figure out where to send our kids to school for kindergarten.

But reading these threads are really starting to seriously worry me.

Our neighborhood is about 50/50 public private. Nearly all the public parents are happy with their kids’ ES and HS experiences (mixed on MS), and all the private parents are happy with their kids’ schools, too.

Are the public school parents in my neighborhood just settling, or is this forum wildly anti-public school and not reflective of how most people feel about MCPS?

While this forum can be extra, I actually disagree that it’s anti-public school. From my experience, there are a lot of legitimate complaints voiced here. However, if you’re in a neighborhood where half of families send their kids to private, you’ll probably be fine because your public school demographics will reflect the benefits of high household incomes.

My child is in upper elementary that is a step right below Title I (focus school, I think?). The teachers have been caring and the school administration seems responsive and organized, but it’s clear that more resources are needed to support all students and different needs. Many students are not on grade level. On the other end, my kid is regularly bored with reading in class, but I don’t think the school has the capacity to differentiate and has to stick to the provided curriculum.

Meanwhile the central administration has spent the whole academic year talking about this regional plan (which in my opinion, favors the already successful, resourced high schools) without a peep about how to address gaps and be more innovative in earlier grades, where an academic foundation is built.

I’m happy with my kid’s education 50-75% of the time but hoping to expand our options in the future.

This would kind of depend. We know some neighborhoods in Montgomery County where the majority of the people send their kids to private schools because their neighborhood is a pocket of the overall area feeding into the school.

The specific elementary school I have in mind has a FARMS rate of about 52 percent with about 455 students. And it has crossed my mind how much the school demographics would change if people in that neighborhood sent their kids to the local school.

So it's not necessarily a guarantee that just because a particular neighborhood has most of the residents send their kids to a private school, that it means the local public school would generally be wealthy too.

[Anonymous]

I'm overall happy with the majority of the teachers, who are responsible, caring and professional.

I'm quite bothered by changing the curriculum every few years, esp. when some curriculum is praised a lot (e.g., ELC, HIGH) but they still got replaced by worse ones...

I'm not happy about the math education overall in this country. There is a big jump from Alg 2 to AP Calc that school doesn't prepare kids well to jump over. And now the new IM curriculum even waters down the Alg 2, so kids without supplementing ahead of time will have a higher chance to fail at AP Calc level. The K-12 STEM education is really rudimentary at U.S. compared to many other developed or developing countries (e.g., Germany, Russia, China, Korea, etc.). I immigrated from one of these countries, and in my field and many other STEM fields that I can observe, the majority of top-tier contributors come from first-generation immigrants.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am an avid reader of this forum as I try to figure out where to send our kids to school for kindergarten.

But reading these threads are really starting to seriously worry me.

Our neighborhood is about 50/50 public private. Nearly all the public parents are happy with their kids’ ES and HS experiences (mixed on MS), and all the private parents are happy with their kids’ schools, too.

Are the public school parents in my neighborhood just settling, or is this forum wildly anti-public school and not reflective of how most people feel about MCPS?

While this forum can be extra, I actually disagree that it’s anti-public school. From my experience, there are a lot of legitimate complaints voiced here. However, if you’re in a neighborhood where half of families send their kids to private, you’ll probably be fine because your public school demographics will reflect the benefits of high household incomes.

My child is in upper elementary that is a step right below Title I (focus school, I think?). The teachers have been caring and the school administration seems responsive and organized, but it’s clear that more resources are needed to support all students and different needs. Many students are not on grade level. On the other end, my kid is regularly bored with reading in class, but I don’t think the school has the capacity to differentiate and has to stick to the provided curriculum.

Meanwhile the central administration has spent the whole academic year talking about this regional plan (which in my opinion, favors the already successful, resourced high schools) without a peep about how to address gaps and be more innovative in earlier grades, where an academic foundation is built.

I’m happy with my kid’s education 50-75% of the time but hoping to expand our options in the future.

It is definitely anti-MCPS

No, 90% + of the complaints here are anti-central office and upper-level administrations as I can observe.

[Anonymous]

Our "average" kid graduated last year from MCPS and is doing fine at an out of state public. Two of things they commented on were the whiteness of their college (almost 90%) and that a lot of the other freshman grew up very sheltered.

They enjoyed most of their time at high school and may have even learned some things about dealing with challenging teachers, bureaucracy and swimming in a big pool where some kids are going to Harvard and others are continuing their manual labor jobs that they've been doing.

Not at all perfect but much better than what I always heard from the (numerous) haters.

[Anonymous]

I am in a Bethesda cluster school. I am somewhat ok with elementary school. Middle school is just terrible. Classes with over 30 kids. Most of the homework is online. English class - so far for 8th grade they read 2 books. I can list many more issues but what is the point? I do not have the funds to go through private school so I am supplementing a lot. Math and English. After school activities. I am also a first generation immigrant coming from a less wealthy country so I cannot understand the problems with FARMS schools. In our culture parents push for better life meaning kids are expected to be excel at school. There are consequences if one misbehaves. Here we are raising snowflakes that will not be ready for any real life problems in adulthood. I am thinking of miving to VA. Will it be better across the river? Probably not..

[Anonymous]

We were extremely happy with elementary school but around 2018 the equity brigade took over MCPS and it's been in freefall ever since. Our kids' teachers have all been amazing and I think they got a good education (not nearly what it could have been) but that is despite the BOE and central office's best efforts. If you're UMC and Asian or white, MCPS doesn't want your kids to succeed because it hurts their equity metrics. If we knew then what we know now, we definitely would have sent our kids to private HS and private middle school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am an avid reader of this forum as I try to figure out where to send our kids to school for kindergarten.

But reading these threads are really starting to seriously worry me.

Our neighborhood is about 50/50 public private. Nearly all the public parents are happy with their kids’ ES and HS experiences (mixed on MS), and all the private parents are happy with their kids’ schools, too.

Are the public school parents in my neighborhood just settling, or is this forum wildly anti-public school and not reflective of how most people feel about MCPS?

We are! Two kids at W school- both very self motivated, self learners, competitive but don’t care what kids around them are doing- high achieving but not the toxic kind..

If I had a kid who was not self motivated, go-getter- I don’t know how the school would fit, tbh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As a teacher and a parent of two in MCPS, I am generally happy with MCPS. I do think we provided a better product 20 years ago, but I'd say that's a national trend rather than a local. I do believe there is some correction going on that's going to take time to shake out. Someone mentioned how many parents are happy with their teachers, but would like to see more educational rigor and accountability for their children. I'd say that's accurate for the teachers too. But there are a lot of policies put in place over the last decade that have to be undone. Still, my experience is that there are good teachers teaching good students.
Of course, the biggest factor to your child's education success is you. Keeping them exposed to reading, music, physical activity, and limiting their use of screens (especially at an early age) is going to do so much more for their educational outcomes than any policy from central office.

This. The academic rigor just isn’t there compared with my rigorous private school education 30 years ago. They barely teach writing. My 6th grader has never been asked to write even a book report let alone a real essay or paper. But I’m not sure any other local public is better. We don’t have the money for private. As far as school experience goes it’s been fine. Just I wonder about the curriculum. My 3rd grader is doing a bit more writing so maybe it is improving.

[Anonymous]

Why do we (MCPS parents) feel the need to defend the school system? Does being "anti-MCPS" mean acknowledging politicians' and administrators' inability to stop the decline of the schools, and then holding them to account for that failure? If so, I guess I'm "anti-MCPS." We should be battering the incompetent school administrators to either improve or organize to break this organization up into manageable entities. I guess that parents feel like because their kids are in the system, they have to pretend it's good, for their own sanity and perhaps to collectively hold up the reputation until their kids are out. I think this is a self-defeating strategy. MCPS parents should be raising h*** with the Board and the professional administrators. We live in a democracy. This is our job.

[Anonymous]

For my gifted child, I wish mcps curriculum is more challenging. If I could afford private, I would have switched to private. I find some kids are mean, but I bet it could happen anywhere. For my another child with learning disability, I would say I have been happy with mcps. This child has been making more progress than I hope for even though still falling behind compared to peers. Thank you mcps teachers for their patience, and I wish mcps curriculum could slow down a bit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why do we (MCPS parents) feel the need to defend the school system? Does being "anti-MCPS" mean acknowledging politicians' and administrators' inability to stop the decline of the schools, and then holding them to account for that failure? If so, I guess I'm "anti-MCPS." We should be battering the incompetent school administrators to either improve or organize to break this organization up into manageable entities. I guess that parents feel like because their kids are in the system, they have to pretend it's good, for their own sanity and perhaps to collectively hold up the reputation until their kids are out. I think this is a self-defeating strategy. MCPS parents should be raising h*** with the Board and the professional administrators. We live in a democracy. This is our job.

+1