Has the fall off of MCPS been as bad as people say?
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Anonymous
Teachers of any race (as well as admin and parents) can be racist to other groups. We had admin hate the white kids in ES and at our HS - our one AP refuses to help smart kids/kids not of her race. It sucks and nothing you can do about it. |
Anonymous
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MOCO is lucky to have access to s ton of great privates in the county and nearby upper NW DC. The best area by far for privates in a multi state area.
It's the saving grace for real estate as publics everywhere are in the toilet. It's like MOCO is in the forefront of the educational life raft for everybody grasping for quality educational environments for their children. Example ,, Good Counsel, Bullis, Landon, Prep, Heights, St Andrews, Glen Elg Country, Holy Cross, Holton, Sidwell, Georgetown Day, Stone Ridge, Holy Child, St Johns, Norwood, Mater Dei, Sidwell Lower, all the parochials, Cathedral, St Albans, WES, We moved from NOVA to MOCO for these options , |
Anonymous
Yep, we need to do better on anti-racism training. And I agree - we are losing middle class families of color. This last comment is not helpful and even if true (and it may well be) that’s not even close to a big problem in MCPS or the world and like you said, it sucks but let’s move on. It is NOT a reason MCPS is in decline. |
Anonymous
| According to my biased anecdote |
Anonymous
But Virginia has much better college options…I wish we had stayed in Va |
Anonymous
I disagree there's nothing you can do about it. You can't MAKE people not be racist in their heads, but you CAN have policies and protocols that mitigate and disrupt the ability for those biases to harm student experience. That is what the MCPS Antiracism Action Plan was supposed to do. |
Anonymous
Outside of UVA which is a small school in a much larger state it's meh. Better chance of getting into Big Ten UMD as a Marylander than UVA as a Virginia resident. |
Anonymous
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It's almost impossible for anyone to answer this question, because by definition most people have kids in public schools for about 15 years maximum, during which time their kids are changing levels.
So the best thing to do is to try to find empirical data. From what I've seen, MPCS has slipped vis-a-vis other counties in Maryland, but Maryland overall does fairly well in objective metrics like average SAT scores. In terms of SAT scores specifically, every school in MCPS (with one exception) beat the national average. Some beat the average by a lot, some by a little. |
Anonymous
| The racist whites move away and then people of color follow them to their new racist communities. Its like racism is magnet for minorities. |
Anonymous
| The haters, the wannabes have been pushing this narrative for the last 15+ years, but they still cannot compete with MCPS. They cannot even compete with MCPS in the "it's academic" competition. |
Anonymous
PP your replied to. No, our kids attend/attended two Bethesda-area high schools. We're scientists and are happy with the STEM offerings of MCPS: it provides a solid start in science. Half our neighbors send their kids to privates like Sidwell and Landon, so I can compare. The MCPS STEM magnet teaches science differently, and in my opinion even better, but we didn't want the commute. The English curriculum is problematic because teachers have too many students to provide adequate feedback on writing skills. Students don't write enough long form essays, and thus they are not that well prepared for college writing. MCPS also doesn't have students read enough classics, in my opinion as a classics lover. It's all well and good to want to add contemporary works from minority authors, etc, but the point is to contrast and compare with the canon, otherwise all the debates over cultural sensitivities, racism, misogyny, religious and sexual control gets lost on students. Kids these days have a reduced attention span due to the nature of their online world, and need extra training in reading long passages, with rich vocab and complex grammar they would otherwise not encounter in their daily lives. |
Anonymous
| When new teachers work at the bad schools admin will fire them the next year when teachers are not able to fix it. Admin is not supportive and runs around like their job is to make a case to frame the teachers as bad |
Anonymous
| It seems so many here are unhappy with MCPS but I have a different take. I attended MCPS as did my husband in the 70s and 80s and our kids have by far had a more rigorous education. They found college easy when they arrived which shocked them as adults always implied college would be so difficult. They were well prepared. This is not to say everything was perfect. When DD went to middle school long ago she had huge gaps in her math knowledge and we had to hire tutors to fill them. That curriculum is long gone though and it was not an issue in higher level math or for #2 in later years. The biggest issue we had was a lack of accountability for special education. Services were hard to come by and not always appropriate to our kids needs. It was always a fight. We did lots on the outside but I think you’ll find that to be a common theme in most districts. With that said, all my kids were mainstreamed and we didn’t have issues with teachers or disruptive classrooms except on a very rare occasion. We had two awful ES teachers along the way but the majority of teachers were better than ok, they were terrific. #3 is in HS and feels very safe at school and academically challenged. I think that any large school district has issues and because it’s public school it will never be an exact fit. You have to do private for that and I wish we could have afforded it. But when my friend shares about her experience with Broward Public Schools in FL or I hear from friends and family in CO, I can see MCPS is quite good by comparison. |
Anonymous
| What about the W high schools? We have an incoming ninth grader.... cut and run now? can't afford private anymore...where is better?? switch to an IB high school like BCC? |
Anonymous
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Churchill cluster from k-12 was fantastic for my twins who just graduated in the past couple of years. They were safe and challenged. They started taking AP classes in 9th. One had an IEP and was well supported, even in the higher level classes. Freshman year in college went as well as we could have hoped. Clearly the curriculum worked.
But I am not ignorant enough to realize that we lived in a bubble. All of their friends came from educated parents, and the kids knew from kindergarten that they were expected to be respectful and go to college. The county wants to make an idyllic world for all of the students which is such an amazing goal, but truthfully schools can’t fix everything. Our county has so many disadvantaged children. We can provide food and curriculum but we can’t change home life. |