WAPO article on Prince George's County Schools

[Anonymous]

Kiki here again. I wonder if we can approach the folks at one of the nicer DC charters about starting a PG campus. I just might have to take leave tomorrow and write a few letters and make a few phone calls. You never know what might happen when you plant a few seeds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree 14:52 that this is an encouraging discussion, but I have a strong sense that no meaningful change will come out of the completely dysfunctional school board. Anyone have any suggestions on ways to get involved outside of the school board. PTA/PTO obviously, but that's at the school level. What about at the county level?

I would start by enlisting competent candidates to stand for school board elections. School board members hold a lot of sway in the county and the current incumbents seem wildly out of their depth in terms of their ability to implement and sustain reform initiatives. They are remarkably political in an old-school kind of way and are busy making life uncomfortable for every superintendent who enters the county. Perhaps under Baker's leadership, more talented candidates will apply for the superintendent's position and will be able to stay for more than two years at a time. The churn needs to end.

[Anonymous]

The real push will come from the parents. Approach your neighborhood association with a plan to help your local school. Start with small projects that might take a morning and a little sweat equity.

The real noise needs to come from the bottom up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:what's everyone's art like? I heard some schools art is like once a quarter (and they brag about that?) unless the PTA steps in.

There is an art teacher that travels the county and gets to each elementary school about once a quarter. That's not all the art that goes on at our school though because the teachers add it into the work the kids do, there are parents who come in and do art projects with the kids, and our school has an art club that meets once a week. The weekly art club is so popular that some quarters they have to run it twice a week.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:[
It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

I hear you, but I don't think this is *entirely* the case. TAG-ID'd kids get services. In some schools it is a pull-out program, in some schools it is incorporated into the classroom work. And then there's the magnet lottery. Now I won't argue that the pull-out is equal to the magnet, nor will I argue that the TAG services are universally terrific in every school, but the services were there and the TAG teacher at our neighborhood school was terrific. We would have stayed if we had not gotten a magnet spot and would not have done private.

The problem (as another poster pointed out) is that in some schools, it's only a few kids that are TAG identified. So the pull-out program actually only socially isolates them and doesn't help because they don't have enough peers in the program.

Perhaps there could be some kind of system where if the TAG numbers in a school are lower than a certain threshold, those kids then get to join the TAG program at another school (not necessarily a TAG magnet). But it isn't really a genuine TAG "program" if it's like 3 kids being pulled out of class an hour here or an hour there.

Once they set the parameters for what makes a kid TAG, they should ensure that all of the TAG identified kids actually get to be part of a full TAG program.

Our school does TAG in the classroom. The TAG kids are all in one class. My kid's class has 30 kids, all TAG, and it equates to 1/3rd of the grade.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think PG is just too large. Isn't it the second largest school district in the nation?

No. According to Wikipedia ( :oops, PGCPS is the 18th largest. MCPS is #17, and FCPS is #11. The largest school district (by a whole lot) is New York City, and the second largest (by a lot) is Los Angeles.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:23:15, that's exactly how I have felt from the outside for the last decade. It seems like they wanted to focus on the kids with more "need" with the limited resources, but now I think they have found there's a big consequence to that. Don't they get more federal money per enrolled child? So they get something with every extra child. The local school also gets more from the county for each child, as well as extra staff if the head count goes up enough.

They have tried to take away specialty programs entirely more than once, maybe as elitist? But what else is keeping the motivated families within the system?

I think they've also tried redistricting. I guess the thinking is that they need to break up the high-performing schools. And then they get surprised when the parents of the high-performing kids then pull their kids out and send them to private.

My impression is that high-performing schools and programs get punished. Instead of trying to replicate and add more of those programs, they break them up.

They need to stop messing with the few programs/schools that work. And instead try to establish more of them.

It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

It kind infuriates me in the article where the county official acts like it's a mystery why middle class families with high performing students are pulling their kids from private school. Their TAG process alone answers that question.

But what the county doesn't realize is that it isn't just parents putting their kids in private school; it's parents MOVING entirely out of the county. So the tax base will shrink if they continue. Sadly, many people really don't want to move. But they read article after article about the great schools in bordering counties and then they confront roadblocks to trying to work with the PG public school system, and they end up leaving.

I really don't want this to continue to happen. I want the schools to turn around.

Great post, agreed on all points.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:[
It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery. No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that. It's ridiculous. Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school. This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

I hear you, but I don't think this is *entirely* the case. TAG-ID'd kids get services. In some schools it is a pull-out program, in some schools it is incorporated into the classroom work. And then there's the magnet lottery. Now I won't argue that the pull-out is equal to the magnet, nor will I argue that the TAG services are universally terrific in every school, but the services were there and the TAG teacher at our neighborhood school was terrific. We would have stayed if we had not gotten a magnet spot and would not have done private.

The problem (as another poster pointed out) is that in some schools, it's only a few kids that are TAG identified. So the pull-out program actually only socially isolates them and doesn't help because they don't have enough peers in the program.

Perhaps there could be some kind of system where if the TAG numbers in a school are lower than a certain threshold, those kids then get to join the TAG program at another school (not necessarily a TAG magnet). But it isn't really a genuine TAG "program" if it's like 3 kids being pulled out of class an hour here or an hour there.

Once they set the parameters for what makes a kid TAG, they should ensure that all of the TAG identified kids actually get to be part of a full TAG program.

This

[Anonymous]

I want my TAG kids to interact with non TAG kids in the class. The TAG kids still receive challenging work and they learn the importance of working together and that not everyone works at the same pace.

[Anonymous]

11:34, seems great in principle but being slowed down or expected to help the other kids constantly instead of moving forward with your own learning can be a drag (somewhat my experience) or needing extra help and time when others are zooming right past you and you always have to be an exception because you can't keep pace with the work (my child's experience) tells me heterogeneous classroom aren't implemented in a way that achieves the goal. Seeing both ends of the curve has made me favor tracking more than I thought I would in the abstract. The current trend towards group projects makes some of these issues even more difficult. Most of these kids are not given the facilitation to help them work productively with kids much different than themselves. Slow kids are shunted to the side and given nominal things to work on, the advanced kids shoulder the bulk of the work.

Clearly there should be some better way for this to work. What is missing in the classroom that makes it so difficult to have a mix of abilities?