Schools splitting from large ineffective school systems - could the 4 Ws split from MCPS?

[Anonymous]

OMG! Enough already with the posts from disgruntled parents of CES students! You have no idea how good you have it! Even if your child only gets 2 years of a magnet, your child has more than most! Try being the parent of a SN kid in MCPS. SN kids are only entitled to access the curriculum. I have no right to ask for anything more than for him to meet artificially low benchmarks. They do not have the right to the “best education”. And “average kids” get the same one size fits all approach even when they might benefit from a different approach or more challenge in a specific subject. There’s a thing called a budget. We are all tax payers and your child doesn’t deserve more than my child or a minority child.

For those whining about racism, this is not about racism. Maybe economic disaparity but not race. Children in those communities have every right to the same challenging education as your child. Many will not have a peer group at their home school. Many will not have parents with resources to challenge them if its not being done at school. Check your privilege! Your kids do have a peer group at Hoover and Cabin John. If you don’t like it, move to Silver Spring.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:MCPS is admitting nearly no kids from W type schools because they have a “peer cohort” and therefore don’t need a magnet to find a peer group. The County is suggesting that local schools can meet those kids’ needs, but didn’t think about this ahead of time. Initially they put it on the parents to figure it out and lobby their principal, then they said they’re working on something, though it’s not clear what. The lack of clarity and the unexpected shutout from the magnet programs has W type parents reeling.

so the magnet program is basically moot and just lip service for anyone on the west side of the county? why can't they put a magnet program there as well, so it's not such an onerous location? sounds like politics at its best.

[Anonymous]

Maryland state law mandates county boards of education. You would either have to change the state law, or have Bethesda and Potomac secede from Montgomery County to form a new county. Good luck with that.

[Anonymous]

This thread is the worst school idea around. This is exactly what is done in Virginia. Independent cities have their own school systems. Those systems are all horrible. It’s because you have a very small tax base but you still require all the overhead of a regular system.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maryland state law mandates county boards of education. You would either have to change the state law, or have Bethesda and Potomac secede from Montgomery County to form a new county. Good luck with that.

This is just what I was coming on to write:

https://law.justia.com/codes/maryland/2010/education/title-4/subtitle-1/4-101/

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote: so the magnet program is basically moot and just lip service for anyone on the west side of the county?

No, there are a number of children from "W" schools who were accepted to the magnet programs this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Maryland state law mandates county boards of education. You would either have to change the state law, or have Bethesda and Potomac secede from Montgomery County to form a new county. Good luck with that.

Don't bring inconvenient facts to this discussion. Everyone is too busy crying about how persecuted they are in their million-dollar house with their child condemned to the cesspool that is Hoover MS.

[Anonymous]

I wish. but Bethesda and potomac property taxes subsidize so much of the rest of the district's school budget they'd be losing their golden goose of fun money and their high test scores.

Philosophically I agree, and it IS RARE to see U.S. school districts by mega-huge county and not by town or city. There can be such differences and need for customization, that attempting to serve 200 totally different schools from 20+ totally different towns and lengthy commutes (for teachers too), large square mileage, and general unique issues in demographics in MoCo it is a terrible proposition. Furthermore, such large, large school districts attract some real ego-boosting administrators bent on crazy personal initiatives and never go from community to community, just from fire to fire.

+10000

The other benefit is that the Montgomery County leaders will need to actually think about revenue growth or at least justifying themselves to the state to get money. Now, state level taxes for education collected by Montgomery residents end up going to Baltimore. Montgomery county leaders never fight for this dollars because they have a golden goose and use it as a bargaining chip. If Montgomery County loses the W school areas as their guaranteed personal school funding pot they'll need to start playing ball at the state level which they should have been doing already for their constituency. This means justifying their requests and being transparent.

[Anonymous]

It’s because you have a very small tax base but you still require all the overhead of a regular system.

Very untrue. Most of the best schools in the nation are small systems. Large systems create overhead that no one needs and doesn't serve the students. Many of those internal services are handled so much more efficiently in small systems.

Small systems do not have a large office dedicated to coming up with its own curriculum. They don't have PR departments. They may have a law firm on retainer for any necessary services but they don't keep a staff of in house lawyers. There is not a huge department of assessments constantly spinning numbers in ways that obscure the poor performance. It goes on and on but they basically serve the students rather than just serving as providing employment for life for a large portion of the citizens of the state.

[Anonymous]

I live in NJ- used to live in DC and moving back to the area in a few years. NJ has town based school districts and our taxes are 13k per year. The same priced houses in similar neighborhoods and schools in MD have 7k-9k taxes. Big difference!And I believe a big part of the high taxes is because of the town based schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We live in a W school district, though haven't followed the magnet thing since all our children are still in preschool. So W school children can't apply to Blair's science program or Richard Montgomery's IB program then?

Anyway, there is a lot of overhead in running a school district, like maintenance, buses, and government-mandated bureaucracy (reporting and so on). There's a benefit to having that done at the county-level -- it's an economy of scale. You may need just one person to handle the system's FARMs program paperwork, but that's one person per school district -- so MCPS can spread that cost across most students. Not that MCPS isn't bloated on the admin-side, just saying there's a lot more to running a school district than the actual schools.

If we had smaller districts and returned to neighborhood schools, we could spend a lot less on buses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This thread is the worst school idea around. This is exactly what is done in Virginia. Independent cities have their own school systems. Those systems are all horrible. It’s because you have a very small tax base but you still require all the overhead of a regular system.

City of falls church has a high performing school system

[Anonymous]

A good amount of the increase in reporting and data collection from teachers is from MCPS. I'm in a smaller district now and the grades are % based and easy for the teachers to enter - no secret second grading system that was entered into the system for MCPS purposes and then not shared with parents. I'll bet many parents have no idea that teachers under the elementary school P system had to enter multiple values that were more granular with + or _ per rubric. You only saw a P or a random ES but there was a ridiculous amount of data being gathered and quotas - not too many ES grades, how many kids below grade level going on behind the scenes.

In MCPS there was a data specialist assigned or percentage of one assigned to each school - this is in addition to the huge staff within MCPS doing this. In a smaller school systems its one administrator and so much saner!

This gets played out all over the place. A small school system has maybe one IT guy and a back up company that provides support. There is no big IT staff with employment longevity and aging skills.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
What would you change them to? I would require a certain percentage of low-income rent-controlled units to recent and future apartments/townhomes in the new public schools's catchment area. But I would keep the cluster boundaries, otherwise it gets too complicated and people would be upset that the price they paid for their houses ended up not benefiting them as they planned, and therefore would not be in favor of a Bethesda school system.

Don't we already have this? MoCo has had the MPDU program for years now: http://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/DHCA/housing/singlefamily/mpdu/index.html

12-15% of new developments must have MPDUs. Even that super-pricey condo building with a $5 million penthouse apartment near Bethesda Metro (the Lauren I think) has MPDUs on the ground floor. Avenel has them too -- an entire neigborhood of MPDU homes.

The government can't (nor should they) regulate prices of other homes though. The home prices are high in Bethesda because people like the area for many reasons, including the schools. I'm not sure what can really be done (or should be done) about that.

[Anonymous]

I think Potomac should incorporate and leave MCPS it would raise property values