MCPS is cuttting compacted math and cohorted literacy enrichment

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They used to do this...like reading groups. One group is with the teacher. The others work independently

Back when behaviors weren’t what they are today…
Today is an f’ing joke.

[Anonymous]

I think the big thing people (central office) aren’t remembering is that it used to be that any child who was two grade levels below in elementary school was placed in a separate class for both language arts and math (the LAD program). Now those kids are all mixed in. There is no way a teacher can differentiate with kids who need handholding the entire class! The kids can’t read or do anything independently. Teachers are stuck with these kids and can’t work with the higher kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They used to do this...like reading groups. One group is with the teacher. The others work independently

What happened was the teacher met weekly with the good readers and daily with thise struggling. It was a joke.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think the big thing people (central office) aren’t remembering is that it used to be that any child who was two grade levels below in elementary school was placed in a separate class for both language arts and math (the LAD program). Now those kids are all mixed in. There is no way a teacher can differentiate with kids who need handholding the entire class! The kids can’t read or do anything independently. Teachers are stuck with these kids and can’t work with the higher kids.

We never had a separate class for English.

[Anonymous]

In 4th and 5th grade we never had kids who were still working on sight words, or a k-1 level. Now every class has kids at this level and every assignment has to be modified from ELA down to science and ss. It’s crazy.

[Anonymous]

Honestly this curriculum and cohort change will only drive more great teachers out of the classroom. The work load is already too heavy, class sizes too large, support too light and behaviors wayyyyy too distracting and hard to manage. Forcing teachers to differentiate every math lesson for five different levels and then switch kids’ levels for different topics is absolutely bananas. CO is showing they have no idea how implementation happens and it is disheartening and disappointing to continue to see CO pile more work on our teachers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly this curriculum and cohort change will only drive more great teachers out of the classroom. The work load is already too heavy, class sizes too large, support too light and behaviors wayyyyy too distracting and hard to manage. Forcing teachers to differentiate every math lesson for five different levels and then switch kids’ levels for different topics is absolutely bananas. CO is showing they have no idea how implementation happens and it is disheartening and disappointing to continue to see CO pile more work on our teachers.

Our compacted math teacher announced her retirement last week. We had thought she would stay on another year, but no. Not sure if this drove her over the edge.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The issue about taking AB or BC after pre-Calc isn't about what is right for some students, or even for the majority, it's about what is right for each student. For those for whom Calc BC is right, no MCPS school should be dissuading them from taking it or, if taken prior to Senior year, failing to provide reasonably equivalent access to logically following courses as is available at any other MCPS school (exclusive for that equivalence, perhaps, of STEM magnet programs, but then those should have ample seating).

The same goes for the early enrichment/acceleration that is the main subject of this thread, where MCPS's burden includes equitable identification (not well handled to date), practicable/effective differentiation, where the currently planned curricular approach clearly could use better public explication and, perhaps, considerably more thought, and flexible school/classroom resourcing models to help ensure these.

The process and standards for differential course recommendation should be clear, consistent across the county and, along with the options, themselves, communicated well enough in advance to allow students and caregivers agency with regard to prerequisite action.

In his first year, Superintendent Taylor espoused eschewing a model of scarcity for a climate of plenty. Let's make sure he is making his subordinates follow through on that on the one hand as we ensure the resources to do so (looking at you, County Council) on the other.

I look at the salaries of people in central office - lot of people making over $200K per year, and I think these people need to take pay cuts and we need layoffs from central office. The county council doesn't print money, as much as we wish it could.

Such pay/position cuts, justified or not, would affect such a small percentage of the budget that it makes the issue a red herring with regard to the County Council's funding/tax decisions. This is not to say that there aren't opportunitiesvl for better management, just that more money is going to be required to get to the education levels/results the county wants.

Families with school-aged children, and many others to a lesser extent, are going to be rather upset with the cuts that will be made with an under-funding Council decision. Of course, they won't know about them until it hits later, while the budget/tax decision is happening now.

MCPS isn't underfunded. They need to manage the money they have better vs. demanding more. Every year they get more, despite decining enrollment and poor test scores. This isn't a money issue. This is a management issue. Anyone on the BOE and County Council who agrees to more money vs. transparency, accountability and fiscal responsibility should lose their seat.

The mismanagement argument applies to most of government, from military and police to roads and schools, if not to just about any large enterprise. Still, it doesn't help get the job done. The rejoinders of past threads to observation of declining enrollment and test scores -- things such as the greater proportion of high-needs/high-cost students in that enrolled population, the higher proportion than might be widely known of relatively fixed costs (those that don't vary with year-to-year student population changes), general inflation, etc. -- largely get shrugged off as though they don't matter to those whose focus may be on taxes paid more than education delivery.

Talk to County Council (and Executive) candidates about their priorities. Where do they place this amount of funding vs. other planned uses of tax revenue? If education is a top priority, what would they be willing to give up, whether elements of another service area (e.g., parks, senior services, public transportation, etc.), some of the tax incentives (e.g., PILOTs) or the idea of keeping taxes at a lower rate than would be necessary to fund everything? If they see particular areas of mismanagement reflected in the requested budget, what are they, specifically, what would be done alternatively, and exactly what cost & performance differentials are we likely to see?

I agree that transparency, accountability and fiscal responsibility should be pursued. I'd say that it is clear (pun intended) that the first continues to be woeful, making the second difficult and assessment of the third much harder, and that, among the three, then, it is the first where Council and Board might find their efforts best spent at this time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly this curriculum and cohort change will only drive more great teachers out of the classroom. The work load is already too heavy, class sizes too large, support too light and behaviors wayyyyy too distracting and hard to manage. Forcing teachers to differentiate every math lesson for five different levels and then switch kids’ levels for different topics is absolutely bananas. CO is showing they have no idea how implementation happens and it is disheartening and disappointing to continue to see CO pile more work on our teachers.

This.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly this curriculum and cohort change will only drive more great teachers out of the classroom. The work load is already too heavy, class sizes too large, support too light and behaviors wayyyyy too distracting and hard to manage. Forcing teachers to differentiate every math lesson for five different levels and then switch kids’ levels for different topics is absolutely bananas. CO is showing they have no idea how implementation happens and it is disheartening and disappointing to continue to see CO pile more work on our teachers.

Teachers should look from the bright side. AoPS, RSM and one-on-one tutoring businesses will be booming. There will be plenty of opportunity to earn extra money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have not had a chance to read all of the pages, but I am a current 5th grade elementary math teacher in a school which is working closely with the county and state monitoring our math scores.

1) How did MCPS say they were going to determine the 5 groups?
2) Did they explicitly state that group 1 had to be with group 5 and 2,3,4 together? Or were those the suggestions?

I ask because if the county is identifying the 5 groups, isn’t it the schools who will determine class placement? Most schools have 4 or so teachers so why couldn’t there be a class just of 5’s, a class just of 1’s and a mix of the others based on individual school numbers? Is the county really going to monitor which students are grouped together? They never have in the past.

As often is the case, there were things in the slides that they tried to walk back a bit when questions were raised. The sample groupings was one of them, where they readily said it could be more like 1/3/4 and 2/4/5 than the sets they had shown.

Schools with fewer classrooms per grade (or those with separated programs) yet highly heterogeneous skill levels are going to have a hard time of it without differential resourcing to account for that greater classroom management burden.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They used to do this...like reading groups. One group is with the teacher. The others work independently

And new data on the science of learning dictated that we do direct instruction instead…aka CKLA etc.

[Anonymous]

Anyone know what "Math [X] with acceleration" is supposed to do in the new curricular paradigm?

How do they accelerate without leaving the other groupings behind? If they do leave some behind, wouldn't that be the same exlcusionary tracking they are characterizing as endemic to Compacted Math? Aren't AMP6+/7+ and PreAlgebra also, then, subject to the definition of exclusionary tracking? What is the point of "with acceleration" if at the beginning of the next year they have to start over with standards they learned in the previous year's acceleration?

Maybe they go through modules more quickly (and this is the acceleration) to facilitate on-grade-level enrichment activities in the extra time, only covering standards for the one grade?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Anyone know what "Math [X] with acceleration" is supposed to do in the new curricular paradigm?

How do they accelerate without leaving the other groupings behind? If they do leave some behind, wouldn't that be the same exlcusionary tracking they are characterizing as endemic to Compacted Math? Aren't AMP6+/7+ and PreAlgebra also, then, subject to the definition of exclusionary tracking? What is the point of "with acceleration" if at the beginning of the next year they have to start over with standards they learned in the previous year's acceleration?

Maybe they go through modules more quickly (and this is the acceleration) to facilitate on-grade-level enrichment activities in the extra time, only covering standards for the one grade?

You have it wrong. You assume they will accelerate in a class of multi levels and leave some people behind. They will not. They will offer on-grade curriculum, leaving out the acceleration. Then at the end of the year when the kids in the accelerated class aren't making progress, they will blame the kids and put them in a lower group -- after all, they didn't benefit from the acceleration.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have not had a chance to read all of the pages, but I am a current 5th grade elementary math teacher in a school which is working closely with the county and state monitoring our math scores.

1) How did MCPS say they were going to determine the 5 groups?
2) Did they explicitly state that group 1 had to be with group 5 and 2,3,4 together? Or were those the suggestions?

I ask because if the county is identifying the 5 groups, isn’t it the schools who will determine class placement? Most schools have 4 or so teachers so why couldn’t there be a class just of 5’s, a class just of 1’s and a mix of the others based on individual school numbers? Is the county really going to monitor which students are grouped together? They never have in the past.

There is a specific Cluster Grouping approach with a very specific mix and distribution. If MCPS enforces it, it is:

Group 1) Gifted kids (in this case presumably that would mean kids doing accelerated math)
Group 2) Above average kids who are not gifted
Group 3) Average/grade level kids
Group 4) Mildly below level kids
Group 5) Kids who are way behind

In cluster grouping, your classes with gifted kids always have groups 1, 3, and 4, and the other classes with no gifted kids have 2, 3, 4, and 5.