Why do people say schools in NOVA are competitive and cutthroat when people also say the education system here is bad?

[Anonymous]

Schools have no video cameras and documenting is frowned upon and discouraged even though it is a teachers legal duty. Schools maybe competing to seem like the best and that is making up good numbers, having low crime numbers (not because crime is low but because admin intimidates teachers not to perform their legal duty- or look the other way). With good fake data they get good funding and the scapegoats of this whole setup is great teachers who need to be ousted because the good ones do stuff by the books the legal way. I don't think legality has as much incentive as a system that is based on fraud and money that incentivizes data manipulation.

[Anonymous]

If you want to see how Singapore school system works, go to you tube and search for the video Inside Singapores Elite Education System by SBS Dateline

The show walks through the pressure that 11 year olds have on them to prepare for the test to attend HS. A low score sends you to vo Tech school where they teach things like cooking and how to be a barista. This schooling starts at 12.

70% of kids are participating in tutoring programs. The kid that they followed is in school from 9-1:30, science tutoring for 2 hours, drama class for 2 hours, and then has 2 hours of homework before bed.

So when we are comparing HS test scores, remember that we are comparing only the kids who test into the college prep classes vs all of the kids who attend HS in the US.

And this system is not unique to Singapore, it exists across a lot of Asia.

European education is somewhere between the US and Singapore.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Perhaps a lot of very invested parents who will fill in any gaps left by the schools? Just a guess.

If schools have gaps that need filling they are not good schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Education in NOVA (Fairfax County) is light years ahead of education in most of the USA. I grew up in an affluent area in another state, and the schools do not offer as many opportunities. There are also less services for gifted kids and less services for kids with special needs compared to NOVA.

NOVA is not ahead of education in the states that do much better than Virginia, North or South. The top states for education consistently mention Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Vermont, and New Hampshire.

Quite a few posters claim the schools in NOVA use screens too much, don’t teach handwriting, don’t teach handwriting, don’t read complete books, just excerpts.

There are great schools like TJ and others but a school system is judged by the whole state.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NOVA schools can be competitive. The kids taking AP/IB classes at the HS in out area are getting an excellent education. There are some bad teachers but that exists in every school. AP/IB classes have a mandated elements that are the same across the country, you have to teach to that standard if you want kids to do well on the AP/IB exams. The kids in our area tend to do better then the kids across the country because the area has so many parents who know the value of getting high scores and being able to skip classes in college.

There are issues at some of the HS where the regular classes are a joke. the base school my kid is supposed to attend is one where anyone who wants to go to college avoids the gen ed classes and takes all honors. The gen ed classes have many kids in them that are years behind in skills and do not care about completing school. They have been allowed to continue to the next grade because being retained is deemed to be too socially damaging for the kids. These are the kids that teachers have been forced to pass for ages. You will find this population is larger as you see a decline in the income levels at schools. There are studies showing that grades and educational quality drops once you get over a certain threshold of students living in poverty. FCPS has a decent number of ES, MS, and Hs that are considered Title 1, which means a large number of impoverished kids, and those schools tend to perform poorly.

Then you have the hyper competitive families who think that their kids need to do a ton more outside of school and push enrichment, like RSM or AoPS or fully academic summer programs. Not all the kids in those programs are there because the parents are obsessed with high stats, there are kids there because they genuinely like the material and want to be there but a large percentage are there because their parents make them attend. People have been doing this for ages, my parents sent my brothers to summer programs for smart kids in the 1980's because they needed more then they were getting at school, our HS did not have AP/IB classes at the time. It really isn't anything new. The market seems to have exploded though. I remember SAT prep being controversial when I was in HS and Sylvan being a new thing to help struggling kids. Now those are normal and the kids who want more or whose parents want more turn to RSM and AoPS.

The kids in the Honors/AP/IB track in HS are doing well and will be fine at college. They are getting an excellent education. The parents saying that they are so far behind are, many times, parents who come out of the Asian tradition were the kids are in school far longer then our kids are, there are tutoring centers all over the place, and where there are tests to take to be accepted into MS and HS across the country. It is a different tradition with a massive emphasis on education. The European schools do focus more on writing, which is the distinctive element of the IB degree, but are not as far ahead in math and science as you can get in the AP programs in the US.

I am an Indian immigrant parent. My kids did not go to AoPS or RSM etc, but I tutored them at home and enriched and accelerated them as best as I could. My kids could be contributing to the narrative that schools are very competitive.

Here is the thing - I had always imagined that k-12 education in USA will be at least better than what I grew up with in India. Which I am sure it was true when I was in school. After all, I studied sometimes in ramshackle buildings and with basic textbooks, and not much access to knowledge outside what was in the textbooks. But in those days - 30-40 years ago - in the USA or in India - at least all students were taught the 3 R's well. The older Americans are far better educated than the students nowadays. Should that not tell us something?

USA students 30 years could do even better than students around the world if they were motivated because they had access to textbooks, electricity, infrastructure, nutrition and far superior libraries and many resources to do independent projects and tinker in the garage.

But today - most of the world has access to these resources through the internet. So now there is nothing to stop a poor student in India or Ghana to learn what they want to learn online. And that is the main problem for US competitiveness. Now, there is no longer the gatekeeping of knowledge and resources that kept even sub-standard US students employed and rich as adults.

Which means that now I as a parent get a heart-attack when I see that in US schools there is - a very short school year with lots of long breaks, a lack of robust curriculum/syllabus/textbooks/tests/final exams, a lack of discipline in classroom, rampant grade inflation, lack of differentiation in students abilities and needs, and no student is held back to repeat a year if they are deficient in their studies to get intervention and intensive tutoring.

Then I compare it to what my nieces and nephews are studying in India - robotics, coding, at least 3 languages (Hindi, English, Regional Language or World Language), advanced Math, advanced Geometry/Trigonometry, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, History (India, World), Geography, music, art, pe, basic skills - and they have access to all the textbooks, documentaries, internet resources that an American student has but does not use and I frankly I get anxious. My kid will not be competitive in USA or India because the US schools are not using the resources that have been provided to them

And also now the Indian student in India gets - a longer school year (on average the Indian student will go to school for at least 2 years more from K-12 because of more school days in an academic year), discipline in the classroom, national exams, all graded tests/exams come back home for the parents to check, curricullum-syallabus-textbooks are completely mapped and so at any given point the parents know what the kids are learning... and so I get more and more stressed.

Telling the admin, parents, teachers about how US schools are falling behind and other countries are producing well educated students falls on deaf ears. Their response ranges from - "Oh, your kid will become depressed and stressed and commit suicide", "Why don't you go back to India", "childhood is for having fun and being care-free"
... I feel that I am sucked into the film "Idiocracy".

So what do I do? My kids continue to go to the public school and I teach them at home or a tutoring center so that they remain competitive globally. Which also means that I have sacrificed my leisure hours and my lifestyle to tutor my kids because their school day is a waste of time. Unfortunately, private schools are worse.

Yes, US schools are substandard and bad compared to other first world countries (and even an emerging market like India). Yes, many kids do very well because their parents are teaching them or they are getting tutored outside of schools. Especially parents who have access to education material from other countries like Singapore, Japan, UK, Switzerland, China, S Korea, India etc. They cherry pick what they want to teach their kids and go from there. And there are many people from the countries above so they know the ground reality of what the kids in these countries are learning. So, Yes, this area is very competitive (because many expats & immigrants who are well educated or know that US schools sucks get their kids educated outside the school day).

Would you say that is the typical education in India or the education for kids who test into those programs?

I know that there are schools across the globe that are really impressive with what kids do, to include in the US. Most of those schools are schools for kids who have tested into them and not the day to day schools. One area that US schools are very different then schools in Europe and Asia, maybe other places but those two continents are the ones I am more familiar with, is that we don’t test in ES and MS to determine what schools kids attend for MS and HS. Let’s be real, the kids who do not score high enough in those countries end up at schools that teach the basics and more trade materials.

Parents who want their kids to move up in society and who have the means, using tutoring at home or through outside centers, the cram schools, to get their kids through those tests and into the college prep programs. I know that Singapore, as one example, has entire shopping malls that are all tutoring programs. China has been cracking down on tutoring programs because they are expensive and cited as a reason why parents are not having more kids, the cost of educating them is too high. I believe that there is a similar culture in India. I don’t hear as much of it out of Europe but there is a lot of pressure and stress on those tests in their 5th year. We don’t have that in the US.

All kids attend the same schools and have the opportunity to take those more advanced classes. It used to be that it was ok for kids to drop from AP to Honors or Honors to Gen Ed because not every kid is cut out for those higher level classes. But now that there is such a huge emphasis on graduating everyone we are passing kids who don’t turn in work and who are grade levels behind so those Gen Ed classes are becoming more remedial in some schools. I would say that there are places where the optic is more on the graduation rate and less on what kids are learning and that is problematic. But I think that the overall approach to education in the US is more healthy then it is in Asia and that the examples of amazing HS and the like are wonderful but more rare cases then the norm.

I went to school in the 80’s and 90’s. People then complained about kids in the US not speaking other languages while kids in Europe and Asia spoke two or more. That has always been a complaint. The reality is that kids in Europe are surrounded by people speaking other languages so you have more of a need to learn a second or third language. The romance languages are similar enough that it is not a huge feat to speak a bunch of romance languages. Most will learn English but, having lived in Europe, most speak English the way Americans who took HS Spanish speak Spanish. Where they live and interacting with the larger world requires you learn different languages, that isn’t the case in the US so there isn’t the pressure to learn 2-3 languages.

The difference is that there is less of a cultural predisposition to grinding out education in the US then there is in other parts of the world. Kids can grow into adults with good jobs without attending the top MS or HS or University. That is not the case in many parts of Asia. And, honestly, there are plenty of reports of dissatisfied Chinese, Korean, and Japanese kids who ground through school, got into the top universities, graduated and don’t have the jobs that they expected.

Would you say that is the typical education in India or the education for kids who test into those programs?

Of course not. This is not typical education in India because India is still very much a 3rd world emerging market. However, millions of people are coming out of abject poverty and the middle class is expanding. Comparing all of India to all of US will be akin to comparing schools in Appalachia to magnet schools in DMV.

But, there are enough India private schools and some public schools that are providing an excellent education to the children of wealthy, UMC andMC families comparable to the best schools here.. These numbers are large enough that they can be the workforce for the world

There are no magnet programs that I know of in India, unike China who have had the "super genius" schools for talented kids that has given them such a headstart in AI and space tech. https://www.ft.com/content/68f60392-88bf-419c...5b-b049-5dc1430863d5

India does not have private prep schools for magnet K-12 schools - but they have coaching classes for entrance to med schools, engineering schools, all levels of state, federal jobs, US SAT/TOEFL/GRE/GMAT etc. In India, the vast majority of rural or poor children don't have access to resources to get any or a decent education. But, even that is changing through exposure in social media, TV and movies.

My point is only that there are huge resources available in the US for education. We need to invest just a little more and give a very good education to all children easily. We cannot keep on destroying whatever is good in education in the name of reinventing the wheels, but we need serious fixes in education.

[Anonymous]

DOES anyone think this?
No!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NOVA schools can be competitive. The kids taking AP/IB classes at the HS in out area are getting an excellent education. There are some bad teachers but that exists in every school. AP/IB classes have a mandated elements that are the same across the country, you have to teach to that standard if you want kids to do well on the AP/IB exams. The kids in our area tend to do better then the kids across the country because the area has so many parents who know the value of getting high scores and being able to skip classes in college.

There are issues at some of the HS where the regular classes are a joke. the base school my kid is supposed to attend is one where anyone who wants to go to college avoids the gen ed classes and takes all honors. The gen ed classes have many kids in them that are years behind in skills and do not care about completing school. They have been allowed to continue to the next grade because being retained is deemed to be too socially damaging for the kids. These are the kids that teachers have been forced to pass for ages. You will find this population is larger as you see a decline in the income levels at schools. There are studies showing that grades and educational quality drops once you get over a certain threshold of students living in poverty. FCPS has a decent number of ES, MS, and Hs that are considered Title 1, which means a large number of impoverished kids, and those schools tend to perform poorly.

Then you have the hyper competitive families who think that their kids need to do a ton more outside of school and push enrichment, like RSM or AoPS or fully academic summer programs. Not all the kids in those programs are there because the parents are obsessed with high stats, there are kids there because they genuinely like the material and want to be there but a large percentage are there because their parents make them attend. People have been doing this for ages, my parents sent my brothers to summer programs for smart kids in the 1980's because they needed more then they were getting at school, our HS did not have AP/IB classes at the time. It really isn't anything new. The market seems to have exploded though. I remember SAT prep being controversial when I was in HS and Sylvan being a new thing to help struggling kids. Now those are normal and the kids who want more or whose parents want more turn to RSM and AoPS.

The kids in the Honors/AP/IB track in HS are doing well and will be fine at college. They are getting an excellent education. The parents saying that they are so far behind are, many times, parents who come out of the Asian tradition were the kids are in school far longer then our kids are, there are tutoring centers all over the place, and where there are tests to take to be accepted into MS and HS across the country. It is a different tradition with a massive emphasis on education. The European schools do focus more on writing, which is the distinctive element of the IB degree, but are not as far ahead in math and science as you can get in the AP programs in the US.

I am an Indian immigrant parent. My kids did not go to AoPS or RSM etc, but I tutored them at home and enriched and accelerated them as best as I could. My kids could be contributing to the narrative that schools are very competitive.

Here is the thing - I had always imagined that k-12 education in USA will be at least better than what I grew up with in India. Which I am sure it was true when I was in school. After all, I studied sometimes in ramshackle buildings and with basic textbooks, and not much access to knowledge outside what was in the textbooks. But in those days - 30-40 years ago - in the USA or in India - at least all students were taught the 3 R's well. The older Americans are far better educated than the students nowadays. Should that not tell us something?

USA students 30 years could do even better than students around the world if they were motivated because they had access to textbooks, electricity, infrastructure, nutrition and far superior libraries and many resources to do independent projects and tinker in the garage.

But today - most of the world has access to these resources through the internet. So now there is nothing to stop a poor student in India or Ghana to learn what they want to learn online. And that is the main problem for US competitiveness. Now, there is no longer the gatekeeping of knowledge and resources that kept even sub-standard US students employed and rich as adults.

Which means that now I as a parent get a heart-attack when I see that in US schools there is - a very short school year with lots of long breaks, a lack of robust curriculum/syllabus/textbooks/tests/final exams, a lack of discipline in classroom, rampant grade inflation, lack of differentiation in students abilities and needs, and no student is held back to repeat a year if they are deficient in their studies to get intervention and intensive tutoring.

Then I compare it to what my nieces and nephews are studying in India - robotics, coding, at least 3 languages (Hindi, English, Regional Language or World Language), advanced Math, advanced Geometry/Trigonometry, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, History (India, World), Geography, music, art, pe, basic skills - and they have access to all the textbooks, documentaries, internet resources that an American student has but does not use and I frankly I get anxious. My kid will not be competitive in USA or India because the US schools are not using the resources that have been provided to them

And also now the Indian student in India gets - a longer school year (on average the Indian student will go to school for at least 2 years more from K-12 because of more school days in an academic year), discipline in the classroom, national exams, all graded tests/exams come back home for the parents to check, curricullum-syallabus-textbooks are completely mapped and so at any given point the parents know what the kids are learning... and so I get more and more stressed.

Telling the admin, parents, teachers about how US schools are falling behind and other countries are producing well educated students falls on deaf ears. Their response ranges from - "Oh, your kid will become depressed and stressed and commit suicide", "Why don't you go back to India", "childhood is for having fun and being care-free"
... I feel that I am sucked into the film "Idiocracy".

So what do I do? My kids continue to go to the public school and I teach them at home or a tutoring center so that they remain competitive globally. Which also means that I have sacrificed my leisure hours and my lifestyle to tutor my kids because their school day is a waste of time. Unfortunately, private schools are worse.

Yes, US schools are substandard and bad compared to other first world countries (and even an emerging market like India). Yes, many kids do very well because their parents are teaching them or they are getting tutored outside of schools. Especially parents who have access to education material from other countries like Singapore, Japan, UK, Switzerland, China, S Korea, India etc. They cherry pick what they want to teach their kids and go from there. And there are many people from the countries above so they know the ground reality of what the kids in these countries are learning. So, Yes, this area is very competitive (because many expats & immigrants who are well educated or know that US schools sucks get their kids educated outside the school day).

Would you say that is the typical education in India or the education for kids who test into those programs?

I know that there are schools across the globe that are really impressive with what kids do, to include in the US. Most of those schools are schools for kids who have tested into them and not the day to day schools. One area that US schools are very different then schools in Europe and Asia, maybe other places but those two continents are the ones I am more familiar with, is that we don’t test in ES and MS to determine what schools kids attend for MS and HS. Let’s be real, the kids who do not score high enough in those countries end up at schools that teach the basics and more trade materials.

Parents who want their kids to move up in society and who have the means, using tutoring at home or through outside centers, the cram schools, to get their kids through those tests and into the college prep programs. I know that Singapore, as one example, has entire shopping malls that are all tutoring programs. China has been cracking down on tutoring programs because they are expensive and cited as a reason why parents are not having more kids, the cost of educating them is too high. I believe that there is a similar culture in India. I don’t hear as much of it out of Europe but there is a lot of pressure and stress on those tests in their 5th year. We don’t have that in the US.

All kids attend the same schools and have the opportunity to take those more advanced classes. It used to be that it was ok for kids to drop from AP to Honors or Honors to Gen Ed because not every kid is cut out for those higher level classes. But now that there is such a huge emphasis on graduating everyone we are passing kids who don’t turn in work and who are grade levels behind so those Gen Ed classes are becoming more remedial in some schools. I would say that there are places where the optic is more on the graduation rate and less on what kids are learning and that is problematic. But I think that the overall approach to education in the US is more healthy then it is in Asia and that the examples of amazing HS and the like are wonderful but more rare cases then the norm.

I went to school in the 80’s and 90’s. People then complained about kids in the US not speaking other languages while kids in Europe and Asia spoke two or more. That has always been a complaint. The reality is that kids in Europe are surrounded by people speaking other languages so you have more of a need to learn a second or third language. The romance languages are similar enough that it is not a huge feat to speak a bunch of romance languages. Most will learn English but, having lived in Europe, most speak English the way Americans who took HS Spanish speak Spanish. Where they live and interacting with the larger world requires you learn different languages, that isn’t the case in the US so there isn’t the pressure to learn 2-3 languages.

The difference is that there is less of a cultural predisposition to grinding out education in the US then there is in other parts of the world. Kids can grow into adults with good jobs without attending the top MS or HS or University. That is not the case in many parts of Asia. And, honestly, there are plenty of reports of dissatisfied Chinese, Korean, and Japanese kids who ground through school, got into the top universities, graduated and don’t have the jobs that they expected.

Would you say that is the typical education in India or the education for kids who test into those programs?

Of course not. This is not typical education in India because India is still very much a 3rd world emerging market. However, millions of people are coming out of abject poverty and the middle class is expanding. Comparing all of India to all of US will be akin to comparing schools in Appalachia to magnet schools in DMV.

But, there are enough India private schools and some public schools that are providing an excellent education to the children of wealthy, UMC andMC families comparable to the best schools here.. These numbers are large enough that they can be the workforce for the world

There are no magnet programs that I know of in India, unike China who have had the "super genius" schools for talented kids that has given them such a headstart in AI and space tech. https://www.ft.com/content/68f60392-88bf-419c...5b-b049-5dc1430863d5

India does not have private prep schools for magnet K-12 schools - but they have coaching classes for entrance to med schools, engineering schools, all levels of state,federal jobs, US SAT/TOEFL/GRE/GMAT etc. In India, the vast majority of rural or poor children don't have access to resources to get any or a decent education. But, even that is changing through exposure in social media, TV and movies.

My point is only that there are huge resources available in the US for education. We need to invest just a little more and give a very good education to all children easily. We cannot keep on destroying whatever is good in education in the name of reinventing the wheels, but we need serious fixes in education.

I wanted to add another thing. Indian school systems are actually quite good job in the teaching of the traditional 3 Rs. Most of the languages are phonetic and so students can learn to read and write as soon as they master the consonants and alphabets. There is emphasis on traditional mathematics in ES and most school going kids know - counting, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and multiplication tables till 12.

Students who do poorly are held back and they can be held back in the same grade for several years too. Textbooks are the same for everyone in the specific board and textbooks have panels of top experts as writers and editors. Super comprehensive textbooks that maps to the curriculum and syllabus. Graded tests and homework are sent back home. Schools operate under national or state boards of education - and the 10th and 12th grade final exams in every subject are held by the board. Think of it as - every student in 10th and 12th have to take AP tests in every subject of the grade for final exam.

I won't say that it is as cutthroat in India as what you see in Korea, China or Japan in the school levels because there are no magnet programs. I think all in all the mental health of individuals in India (despite the poverty) is not as bad as the mental health of individuals here.

You wrote -
The difference is that there is less of a cultural predisposition to grinding out education in the US then there is in other parts of the world. Kids can grow into adults with good jobs without attending the top MS or HS or University.

I disagree. Those days are over in US. The problem is that kids are now growing up here without being well-educated for their level - be it ES, MS or HS, and they are unable to study STEM subjects in college and universities. And they are not finding good jobs as adults because they are not well educated or competitive. And it is only getting worse. American kids are being raised to be ignorant and stupid.

And that is the real tragedy. We are doing a disservice to our nation's future if we cannot provide the best education to our kids that serves their individual needs - so that they are able to become resilient adults with skills that the world and the economy needs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Look at all the educational enrichment centers. The curriculum has been watered down from when we were kids and places like AOPS, RSM, Kumon, etc fill in the gaps.

Because the basic curriculum is watered down so much, anyone who cares about education has their average kids take honors/AP/IB classes. Everything is open enrollment now so there is a huge range of abilities. Even the College Board has admitted to norming the AP test scores to reflect the fact that kids know less than 10 years ago but they still want to get paid. Schools love to brag about how many kids are taking higher level courses but the teachers know that tons of the kids taking them shouldn’t be there. Admin gets on us if not enough kids pass so we have to make the classes easier. It’s like a housing bubble. Lots of hype, little substance.

Citation?

https://www.educationnext.org/grade-inflation-sends-ap-test-scores-soaring/

A RW op-ed isn’t “the College Board has admitted to norming the AP test scores to reflect the fact that kids know less than 10 years ago”.

Stop pushing RW opinions/agendas as facts.

not pp

How tf is striving for educational excellence and return to merit based education a right wing agenda? I thought the left wing families loved the Ivy's.

That aside, it's well known that SAT/ACT/AP/etc tests have all been dumbed down in content, in cheat tools like Desmos/TI-84, or both.

More people are taking the AP test than before. Literally 4x the number of kids in only 25 years. Yet the score distribution has skewed higher during this time? Are we to pretend that an equal distribution of students from average to smart added to the total test takers each year and then scored higher, on average?

You'd assume that most of the smart kids were already taking the test and the increasing numbers of kids (each year) taking the test came from the average to above-average population. And seriously, in 15 years, the number of students who were getting a score of 1 fell from 1/5 to 1/10? And during the same time, the number of kids getting a score of 4 or 5 went up by 10%? Meanwhile, and strangely the number that would be expected to move the most, i.e., a score of 3, remained virtually unchanged during this time span. Mere coincidences, right?

Strawman bullsht.

I never said “striving for educational excellence and return to merit based education a right wing agenda.”

PP said “the College Board has admitted to norming the AP test scores to reflect the fact that kids know less than 10 years ago.”
I asked for a citation.
PP posted some RW op-ed pushing RW opinions, nothing that backed up the claim about College Board.

Republicans - why are you incapable of telling the truth? Why must you push bullsht 24x7?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Students are tracked. Told they are gifted, or not, or how gifted - it pits students against each other. Only a limited number of spots in AAP, so parents fight fiercely. It's so toxic. In HS, which should not have tracking, class grade distributions for the same subject are all over the place. No predictability. No consistency between schools or classes of the same subject/level in the same school.

FCPS are handed students, the vast majority are, of the well educated, the well off. FCPS does an ok job, but FCPS is not the reason these kids are doing well in life and headed to college.

I’m glad our schools do not use gifted programs. There’s no reason to. Our high school still has a disproportionate amount of students going to Ivy League and top schools. Those kids do fine.

One thing that’s not mentioned is the amount of Asian immigrants, immigrants from India and other countries. In our area they come for the high tech jobs. They are STEM people and they want their kids to be mini versions of themselves. Our math club in middle school is made up of about 30 Asian kids and a couple of non-Asian kids. My dd friends are from the US, Eastern Europe, South America and African counties. She had one Asian friend at school who live two houses over. By 4th grade she couldn’t leave the house after school so the friendship. It becomes a segregated school. It works a lot better if students blend and share their talents from various subjects and activities

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NOVA schools can be competitive. The kids taking AP/IB classes at the HS in out area are getting an excellent education. There are some bad teachers but that exists in every school. AP/IB classes have a mandated elements that are the same across the country, you have to teach to that standard if you want kids to do well on the AP/IB exams. The kids in our area tend to do better then the kids across the country because the area has so many parents who know the value of getting high scores and being able to skip classes in college.

There are issues at some of the HS where the regular classes are a joke. the base school my kid is supposed to attend is one where anyone who wants to go to college avoids the gen ed classes and takes all honors. The gen ed classes have many kids in them that are years behind in skills and do not care about completing school. They have been allowed to continue to the next grade because being retained is deemed to be too socially damaging for the kids. These are the kids that teachers have been forced to pass for ages. You will find this population is larger as you see a decline in the income levels at schools. There are studies showing that grades and educational quality drops once you get over a certain threshold of students living in poverty. FCPS has a decent number of ES, MS, and Hs that are considered Title 1, which means a large number of impoverished kids, and those schools tend to perform poorly.

Then you have the hyper competitive families who think that their kids need to do a ton more outside of school and push enrichment, like RSM or AoPS or fully academic summer programs. Not all the kids in those programs are there because the parents are obsessed with high stats, there are kids there because they genuinely like the material and want to be there but a large percentage are there because their parents make them attend. People have been doing this for ages, my parents sent my brothers to summer programs for smart kids in the 1980's because they needed more then they were getting at school, our HS did not have AP/IB classes at the time. It really isn't anything new. The market seems to have exploded though. I remember SAT prep being controversial when I was in HS and Sylvan being a new thing to help struggling kids. Now those are normal and the kids who want more or whose parents want more turn to RSM and AoPS.

The kids in the Honors/AP/IB track in HS are doing well and will be fine at college. They are getting an excellent education. The parents saying that they are so far behind are, many times, parents who come out of the Asian tradition were the kids are in school far longer then our kids are, there are tutoring centers all over the place, and where there are tests to take to be accepted into MS and HS across the country. It is a different tradition with a massive emphasis on education. The European schools do focus more on writing, which is the distinctive element of the IB degree, but are not as far ahead in math and science as you can get in the AP programs in the US.

I am an Indian immigrant parent. My kids did not go to AoPS or RSM etc, but I tutored them at home and enriched and accelerated them as best as I could. My kids could be contributing to the narrative that schools are very competitive.

Here is the thing - I had always imagined that k-12 education in USA will be at least better than what I grew up with in India. Which I am sure it was true when I was in school. After all, I studied sometimes in ramshackle buildings and with basic textbooks, and not much access to knowledge outside what was in the textbooks. But in those days - 30-40 years ago - in the USA or in India - at least all students were taught the 3 R's well. The older Americans are far better educated than the students nowadays. Should that not tell us something?

USA students 30 years could do even better than students around the world if they were motivated because they had access to textbooks, electricity, infrastructure, nutrition and far superior libraries and many resources to do independent projects and tinker in the garage.

But today - most of the world has access to these resources through the internet. So now there is nothing to stop a poor student in India or Ghana to learn what they want to learn online. And that is the main problem for US competitiveness. Now, there is no longer the gatekeeping of knowledge and resources that kept even sub-standard US students employed and rich as adults.

Which means that now I as a parent get a heart-attack when I see that in US schools there is - a very short school year with lots of long breaks, a lack of robust curriculum/syllabus/textbooks/tests/final exams, a lack of discipline in classroom, rampant grade inflation, lack of differentiation in students abilities and needs, and no student is held back to repeat a year if they are deficient in their studies to get intervention and intensive tutoring.

Then I compare it to what my nieces and nephews are studying in India - robotics, coding, at least 3 languages (Hindi, English, Regional Language or World Language), advanced Math, advanced Geometry/Trigonometry, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, History (India, World), Geography, music, art, pe, basic skills - and they have access to all the textbooks, documentaries, internet resources that an American student has but does not use and I frankly I get anxious. My kid will not be competitive in USA or India because the US schools are not using the resources that have been provided to them

And also now the Indian student in India gets - a longer school year (on average the Indian student will go to school for at least 2 years more from K-12 because of more school days in an academic year), discipline in the classroom, national exams, all graded tests/exams come back home for the parents to check, curricullum-syallabus-textbooks are completely mapped and so at any given point the parents know what the kids are learning... and so I get more and more stressed.

Telling the admin, parents, teachers about how US schools are falling behind and other countries are producing well educated students falls on deaf ears. Their response ranges from - "Oh, your kid will become depressed and stressed and commit suicide", "Why don't you go back to India", "childhood is for having fun and being care-free"
... I feel that I am sucked into the film "Idiocracy".

So what do I do? My kids continue to go to the public school and I teach them at home or a tutoring center so that they remain competitive globally. Which also means that I have sacrificed my leisure hours and my lifestyle to tutor my kids because their school day is a waste of time. Unfortunately, private schools are worse.

Yes, US schools are substandard and bad compared to other first world countries (and even an emerging market like India). Yes, many kids do very well because their parents are teaching them or they are getting tutored outside of schools. Especially parents who have access to education material from other countries like Singapore, Japan, UK, Switzerland, China, S Korea, India etc. They cherry pick what they want to teach their kids and go from there. And there are many people from the countries above so they know the ground reality of what the kids in these countries are learning. So, Yes, this area is very competitive (because many expats & immigrants who are well educated or know that US schools sucks get their kids educated outside the school day).

Completely agree.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Students are tracked. Told they are gifted, or not, or how gifted - it pits students against each other. Only a limited number of spots in AAP, so parents fight fiercely. It's so toxic. In HS, which should not have tracking, class grade distributions for the same subject are all over the place. No predictability. No consistency between schools or classes of the same subject/level in the same school.

FCPS are handed students, the vast majority are, of the well educated, the well off. FCPS does an ok job, but FCPS is not the reason these kids are doing well in life and headed to college.

I’m glad our schools do not use gifted programs. There’s no reason to. Our high school still has a disproportionate amount of students going to Ivy League and top schools. Those kids do fine.

One thing that’s not mentioned is the amount of Asian immigrants, immigrants from India and other countries. In our area they come for the high tech jobs. They are STEM people and they want their kids to be mini versions of themselves. Our math club in middle school is made up of about 30 Asian kids and a couple of non-Asian kids. My dd friends are from the US, Eastern Europe, South America and African counties. She had one Asian friend at school who live two houses over. By 4th grade she couldn’t leave the house after school so the friendship. It becomes a segregated school. It works a lot better if students blend and share their talents from various subjects and activities

I disagree. You don’t need to label things gifted but you do need some type of flexible grouping/tracking so that kids who are ahead can be in a place where the teacher can focus on them at their ability level. Too ma=nay classes today have students that range from 2 years behind to 2 years ahead and everything in between. Asking a teacher to prepare lesson plans for kids at 6-8 different levels in their learning is causing burn out for the teachers, it is too much work, and it leaves the kids who are ahead working on their own a lot because they don’t need help.

Flexible groupings for the core subjects would help by allowing kids who are strong in math but mediocre writers, like my kid, be in a group where kids learn math concepts quickly and easily but in a group where the teacher knows she/he needs to focus on core writing skills. The kids who need more help with math fundamentals can get their needs meet and if they are stronger writers, be in a group that works at their pace and not be held back by kids who don’t like writing or need to improve.

We do need to return to retaining kids who are not reading or fluent in math fundamentals in ES. More and more states are retaining kids in 3rd grade if they cannot pass the state test and I think that is great. We are passing on kids who are not ready to do the next grade levels work and that harms the student, the teacher, and the other students in the class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Students are tracked. Told they are gifted, or not, or how gifted - it pits students against each other. Only a limited number of spots in AAP, so parents fight fiercely. It's so toxic. In HS, which should not have tracking, class grade distributions for the same subject are all over the place. No predictability. No consistency between schools or classes of the same subject/level in the same school.

FCPS are handed students, the vast majority are, of the well educated, the well off. FCPS does an ok job, but FCPS is not the reason these kids are doing well in life and headed to college.

I’m glad our schools do not use gifted programs. There’s no reason to. Our high school still has a disproportionate amount of students going to Ivy League and top schools. Those kids do fine.

One thing that’s not mentioned is the amount of Asian immigrants, immigrants from India and other countries. In our area they come for the high tech jobs. They are STEM people and they want their kids to be mini versions of themselves. Our math club in middle school is made up of about 30 Asian kids and a couple of non-Asian kids. My dd friends are from the US, Eastern Europe, South America and African counties. She had one Asian friend at school who live two houses over. By 4th grade she couldn’t leave the house after school so the friendship. It becomes a segregated school. It works a lot better if students blend and share their talents from various subjects and activities

I disagree. You don’t need to label things gifted but you do need some type of flexible grouping/tracking so that kids who are ahead can be in a place where the teacher can focus on them at their ability level. Too ma=nay classes today have students that range from 2 years behind to 2 years ahead and everything in between. Asking a teacher to prepare lesson plans for kids at 6-8 different levels in their learning is causing burn out for the teachers, it is too much work, and it leaves the kids who are ahead working on their own a lot because they don’t need help.

Flexible groupings for the core subjects would help by allowing kids who are strong in math but mediocre writers, like my kid, be in a group where kids learn math concepts quickly and easily but in a group where the teacher knows she/he needs to focus on core writing skills. The kids who need more help with math fundamentals can get their needs meet and if they are stronger writers, be in a group that works at their pace and not be held back by kids who don’t like writing or need to improve.

We do need to return to retaining kids who are not reading or fluent in math fundamentals in ES. More and more states are retaining kids in 3rd grade if they cannot pass the state test and I think that is great. We are passing on kids who are not ready to do the next grade levels work and that harms the student, the teacher, and the other students in the class.

If you mean grouping within the class by ability I agree. I don’t agree that you need to separate by putting students in separate classrooms by ability. The top students don’t always have the best social skills, lower performing kids don’t always have confidence. They can learn from each other.

What happens if they track too early, testing too early and the student can’t keep up by 5th grade? Advanced math starting in 8th grade is soon enough.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Students are tracked. Told they are gifted, or not, or how gifted - it pits students against each other. Only a limited number of spots in AAP, so parents fight fiercely. It's so toxic. In HS, which should not have tracking, class grade distributions for the same subject are all over the place. No predictability. No consistency between schools or classes of the same subject/level in the same school.

FCPS are handed students, the vast majority are, of the well educated, the well off. FCPS does an ok job, but FCPS is not the reason these kids are doing well in life and headed to college.

I’m glad our schools do not use gifted programs. There’s no reason to. Our high school still has a disproportionate amount of students going to Ivy League and top schools. Those kids do fine.

One thing that’s not mentioned is the amount of Asian immigrants, immigrants from India and other countries. In our area they come for the high tech jobs. They are STEM people and they want their kids to be mini versions of themselves. Our math club in middle school is made up of about 30 Asian kids and a couple of non-Asian kids. My dd friends are from the US, Eastern Europe, South America and African counties. She had one Asian friend at school who live two houses over. By 4th grade she couldn’t leave the house after school so the friendship. It becomes a segregated school. It works a lot better if students blend and share their talents from various subjects and activities

I disagree. You don’t need to label things gifted but you do need some type of flexible grouping/tracking so that kids who are ahead can be in a place where the teacher can focus on them at their ability level. Too ma=nay classes today have students that range from 2 years behind to 2 years ahead and everything in between. Asking a teacher to prepare lesson plans for kids at 6-8 different levels in their learning is causing burn out for the teachers, it is too much work, and it leaves the kids who are ahead working on their own a lot because they don’t need help.

Flexible groupings for the core subjects would help by allowing kids who are strong in math but mediocre writers, like my kid, be in a group where kids learn math concepts quickly and easily but in a group where the teacher knows she/he needs to focus on core writing skills. The kids who need more help with math fundamentals can get their needs meet and if they are stronger writers, be in a group that works at their pace and not be held back by kids who don’t like writing or need to improve.

We do need to return to retaining kids who are not reading or fluent in math fundamentals in ES. More and more states are retaining kids in 3rd grade if they cannot pass the state test and I think that is great. We are passing on kids who are not ready to do the next grade levels work and that harms the student, the teacher, and the other students in the class.

If you mean grouping within the class by ability I agree. I don’t agree that you need to separate by putting students in separate classrooms by ability. The top students don’t always have the best social skills, lower performing kids don’t always have confidence. They can learn from each other.

What happens if they track too early, testing too early and the student can’t keep up by 5th grade? Advanced math starting in 8th grade is soon enough.

Flexible groupings should allow you to move a student into the right group each year. A kid is ahead in reading in third grade but that is no longer the case in fourth, they move into a different group. A kid that struggled with math makes the connections and they start to excel, they move into a different class. That is the point. You have individual groups for each subject so teachers can structure lessons for a smaller range and focus on the kids in their class because they are in a similar place. You can push in the reading instructor or math instructor into the classes with the kids who are struggling while the kids who are ahead don't need that support and the teacher is fine solo.

Advanced math in 8th grade is not soon enough for the kid who is bored to tears in math. DS has been in the 95th percentile in 10th grade math competitions since 7th grade. He slept walk through Algebra 1H in 7th grade and has yet to worry about anything in Geometry. Regular math would not be challenging or engaging for him. He picks up math concepts quickly and enjoys playing with math. Attend a math competition speed round and see what these kids are capable of. They need more. There are enough of them in every school that it is silly to expect them to sit in the back twiddling their fingers while kids who struggle with math are trying to learn. And I was the kid who needed the slower class and more support. I struggled with math even with resource help. I 100% slowed my class down. And I knew it and it sucked. I would have been better off in a class with more support and where I didn't have to work knowing that the other kids in class were waiting on me to grasp something that they learned a week or two ago. And if you don't think that the kids who are struggling are not aware of the fact that they have classmates who are bored to tears waiting on them, you are crazy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Students are tracked. Told they are gifted, or not, or how gifted - it pits students against each other. Only a limited number of spots in AAP, so parents fight fiercely. It's so toxic. In HS, which should not have tracking, class grade distributions for the same subject are all over the place. No predictability. No consistency between schools or classes of the same subject/level in the same school.

FCPS are handed students, the vast majority are, of the well educated, the well off. FCPS does an ok job, but FCPS is not the reason these kids are doing well in life and headed to college.

I’m glad our schools do not use gifted programs. There’s no reason to. Our high school still has a disproportionate amount of students going to Ivy League and top schools. Those kids do fine.

One thing that’s not mentioned is the amount of Asian immigrants, immigrants from India and other countries. In our area they come for the high tech jobs. They are STEM people and they want their kids to be mini versions of themselves. Our math club in middle school is made up of about 30 Asian kids and a couple of non-Asian kids. My dd friends are from the US, Eastern Europe, South America and African counties. She had one Asian friend at school who live two houses over. By 4th grade she couldn’t leave the house after school so the friendship. It becomes a segregated school. It works a lot better if students blend and share their talents from various subjects and activities

I disagree. You don’t need to label things gifted but you do need some type of flexible grouping/tracking so that kids who are ahead can be in a place where the teacher can focus on them at their ability level. Too ma=nay classes today have students that range from 2 years behind to 2 years ahead and everything in between. Asking a teacher to prepare lesson plans for kids at 6-8 different levels in their learning is causing burn out for the teachers, it is too much work, and it leaves the kids who are ahead working on their own a lot because they don’t need help.

Flexible groupings for the core subjects would help by allowing kids who are strong in math but mediocre writers, like my kid, be in a group where kids learn math concepts quickly and easily but in a group where the teacher knows she/he needs to focus on core writing skills. The kids who need more help with math fundamentals can get their needs meet and if they are stronger writers, be in a group that works at their pace and not be held back by kids who don’t like writing or need to improve.

We do need to return to retaining kids who are not reading or fluent in math fundamentals in ES. More and more states are retaining kids in 3rd grade if they cannot pass the state test and I think that is great. We are passing on kids who are not ready to do the next grade levels work and that harms the student, the teacher, and the other students in the class.

If you mean grouping within the class by ability I agree. I don’t agree that you need to separate by putting students in separate classrooms by ability. The top students don’t always have the best social skills, lower performing kids don’t always have confidence. They can learn from each other.

What happens if they track too early, testing too early and the student can’t keep up by 5th grade? Advanced math starting in 8th grade is soon enough.

Flexible groupings should allow you to move a student into the right group each year. A kid is ahead in reading in third grade but that is no longer the case in fourth, they move into a different group. A kid that struggled with math makes the connections and they start to excel, they move into a different class. That is the point. You have individual groups for each subject so teachers can structure lessons for a smaller range and focus on the kids in their class because they are in a similar place. You can push in the reading instructor or math instructor into the classes with the kids who are struggling while the kids who are ahead don't need that support and the teacher is fine solo.

Advanced math in 8th grade is not soon enough for the kid who is bored to tears in math. DS has been in the 95th percentile in 10th grade math competitions since 7th grade. He slept walk through Algebra 1H in 7th grade and has yet to worry about anything in Geometry. Regular math would not be challenging or engaging for him. He picks up math concepts quickly and enjoys playing with math. Attend a math competition speed round and see what these kids are capable of. They need more. There are enough of them in every school that it is silly to expect them to sit in the back twiddling their fingers while kids who struggle with math are trying to learn. And I was the kid who needed the slower class and more support. I struggled with math even with resource help. I 100% slowed my class down. And I knew it and it sucked. I would have been better off in a class with more support and where I didn't have to work knowing that the other kids in class were waiting on me to grasp something that they learned a week or two ago. And if you don't think that the kids who are struggling are not aware of the fact that they have classmates who are bored to tears waiting on them, you are crazy.

I’m in the GenX crowd and have some of my elementary school report cards. Every subject had a group number. At the top they explained - Level 1 was the top group, Level 2 was the average group and Level 3 was the slow group. (Yes, they wrote slow group).

I was in level 1 math until 8th grade when I went down a level and by high school I was in very basic math classes. I don’t remember anyone slowing anyone down. Maybe that was just your perception.

Another change is the amount of out of school math some of these kids do. They are three grades ahead because they go to extra classes and learn it. They go to math competitions. All summer they’re in math programs. Public schools can only do so much for these students. They are teaching grade appropriate math with levels within the class. Expecting extra classes for these students before middle school is a waste of resources.

[Anonymous]

We moved to RSM in 4th grade after waiting for math at school to be engaging for our kid. It wasn’t and it wasn’t going to be. The math competition program was great for him. It did teach him advanced concepts but it also taught him how to think about his approach to a question, forced him to show his work, and taught subjects that were simply not going to be taught in school. He doesn’t do summer math programs, he goes to camp and has fun.

Don’t blame parents who realize that their kids need more then they are going to get at school. My kid loves math and asks to participate in math events, so we support that. He does rec sports and Scouts and hangs out with friends as well. He has friends who are bookworms and are reading grade levels ahead because they read a ton, which is great. He has a friend who loves science and reads some really interesting books on the subject.

Most people don’t expect the schools to be able to meet the needs of kids who are really engaged in particular academic areas so we use outside enrichment. Would you prefer that we were more demanding at school?