DCPS Policy on Talented & Gifted & Acaemic Magnet Middle School Programs...Questions for You
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esevdali
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Even so, what would be wrong with full-fledged MS programs with a city-wide draw for the students who test in the "advanced" bracket on the 5th grade DC-CAS? There are hundreds of them District-wide, are there not? Such programs could keep a great many movers and shakers of various races on PTAs, enabling kids at different places on the socioeconomic and academic spectrums to accrue the benefit, even if their own children couldn't attend "schools within schools" in every case. Who wins when the affluent vote with their feet in droves after 5th grade - the poor kids? Few Capitol Hill parents of tiny tots seem to be looking far down the track - by and large, they seem to assume that demographic changes will drive reform. I'm far from convinced. At this rate, most will surely drift out of neighgborhood schools along the way, keeping mum on the issues to avoid drawing attention to their ambitions for their children. Many will hope in vain for lottery luck at Latin or wherever, angry that a brilliant, disciplined child cannot trump a low lottery number. There is an achievement gap between mostly white upper-middle-class kids and mostlhy minority low-income kids, it is sizeable by the 6th grade overall and the PTAs at Brent, Watkins, Ludlow-Taylor, Maury, Tyler etc. can't wish it away despite good intentions. The brightest poor kids in the District would obviously benefit from practical solutions geared at keeping well-educated and affluent parents in public schools circles in large numbers. It seems that well-heeled parents committed to DCPS are too small a slice of the pie for now, with too few volices joining the chorus advocating for "test in" academic magnets. DC MS charters are starting to look like bargain basement alternatives to suburban MS magnet programs serving the best students. |
Anonymous
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OK - let's lobby for a magnet middle school near metro in a central-enough location.
Kids in-bounds at a middle school where a majority are already proficient/advanced (Deal) need not apply. Would that be feasible? I bet most IB Deal parents would not want to move their kids anyhow. Their situation is good as is. Other parents around the city could vie to get in the new school and some could still send their kids to Deal. Forget the new Palisades MS idea -- when Deal empties out some, Palisades can become inbound. And then there's Hardy |
Anonymous
Many parents have already lobbied for this and been denied. It has not be politically feasible as others have posted before. They will tell you they will think about it to stall you. But there isn't a budget and for the last couple of years, they have cut the G&T specialist from it.
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Anonymous
| Frankly what should be more politically feasabile is to make middle schools more rigorous. When Montgomery county was doing an analysis several years back they found that even that vaunted county middle schools were letting kids down. It seems to me that parents could rally around a more rigorous program and curriculum within the schools to the advantage of all kids not just those in one part of the city. |
Anonymous
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The problem with 18:08's idea is that so many schools have been turned into PS -8 education campuses. It is simply too expensive to replicate all the resources needed for a rigorous middle school program across so many small schools.
This could be part of the impetus for a magnet middle school. |
Anonymous
Setting aside whether the bar is high enough, you would support removing every proficient student from his/her neighborhood school/cluster and leaving the other school to be filled entirely with kids that score at a basic or below basic level? |
Anonymous
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Setting aside whether the bar is high enough, you would support removing every proficient student from his/her neighborhood school/cluster and leaving the other school to be filled entirely with kids that score at a basic or below basic level? This might not be so terrible.... First off, it's silly to say that the T&G students need to be there to raise the bar for the others and make the school "look" better. What's in it for them? Are they to miss out on their potential to be the intellectual eye candy for DCPS? Second, why not give kids something to aspire to? I went to a magnet school in NYC where there was a huge quotient (approx 40%) of students from poor and economically disadvantaged backgrounds...including myself! These were kids whose potential was stoked in a challenging atmosphere rather than squelched in an enviroment where they were unable to reach their potential. I can only imagine how many smart, poor kids end up in the wrong crowd because their talents go unnoticed, undercultivated and undervalued so "why not just hang out and get high with the "cool" kids...no one really appreciates what I am capable of anyway" No teenager wants to be alone, much less bullied by a tough crowd. Third, this might allow teachers in the regular schools to concentrate on the students they do have in a less diversified learning environment. The students on the higher end of the spectrum would be able to shine and there will be room for them to advance exponentially without hanging just under the radar. I don't know much about the patterns within public school learning models but it seems entirely logical to me that there might be a domino effect in an upwards direction if we were to introduce magnet schools into the equation . |
Anonymous
| PP I think you miss the point of 23:28 about the impact of what you are proposing. First of all it would not pull all of those kids, only those kids whose parents cared leaving a lot of poor kids with crappy opportunities. You may argue not that different from the status quo, but frankly one I think would ratify the current in inadequacies in ways I think would be lousy for schools. While I get why it can suck being smart in a poor urban school where learning is not necessarily aspired to, I lived it in Denver inner-city school, I also know schools can track and promote these students, question on that front is will. To me the bigger issue raised by one of the PP posters is maybe consolidating the middle schools so you can get sufficient scale to increase rigor. |
Anonymous
I disagree entirely. There seems to be a sense across the board here that poor kids come from homes with parents that don't care about their education. Nothing can be further from the truth. I've often seen the kind of smugness on this board (a deep need in privileged people to feel like they are better than the rest of the riff raff) that insinuates that kids who come from better educated and more affluent families are smarter. That is false. There is a skewed sense that if a kid tests better on standardized tests, if they have been drilled enough, if they have been exposed to more then they are therefore smarter. That keeps everyone who "counts" in their ivory towers. Kids with opportunities and exposure may be able to differentiate Bach from Beethoven and parrot ideas about post-modernism, but that doesn't qualify as gifted. Giftedness come from insight and creative problem solving in addition to rote learning. There are ways of testing giftedness at the raw level where privilege would be less of an asset in determining whether or not a child was eligible. At my magnet school I had friends whose parents were drug addicts, washed toilets for a living and lived on welfare. They lived in the poorest and most downtrodden neighborhoods and they had just as much if not more integrity and wit in their little fingers than most...and they were hungrier and worked harder. |
Anonymous
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"They lived in the poorest and most downtrodden neighborhoods and they had just as much if not more integrity and wit in their little fingers than most...and they were hungrier and worked harder."
For whatever it may be worth, I didn't find this at all in my gifted magnet middle school in L.A. during the years racial quotas determined admission. The poorest kids seemed generally competent, but although they needed to work harder to keep up, they were still the kids most likely to blow off assignments. Only a few students from the whole school stood out as really precociously gifted early teens. As it happens, all of those kids were from educated (but not necessarily particularly high income) families. |
Anonymous
| 10:19 I think you hit one of the problems on the head. Smarts and intelligence only get you so far. It is the lack of these intensive programs in the 3, 4, 5 years that are the bigger problem. Middle Schools would be doing ok if these years were more valuable for all kids. |
Anonymous
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Why treat the advanced kids as the outposts? Why not remove those that test below basic or that are A disruption to the class? Where I grew up, such kids went to an alternative school. They could rejoin their standard are excelling pEers once they showed they could handle the work load. I think basic and advanced kids should be allowed to attend their neighbOrhood school rather than get busses into so other school.
Otherwise, I like the consolidation into fewer schools idea.but certainly with tracKing. |
Anonymous
I was the PP and this is true. There were indeed poor kids with harder family lives who borderline kept up with coursework and blew off assignments, and maybe there were more of them than the privileged kids who did the very same thing, I don't know. (I am assuming you also saw this at your LA school?) Bottom line was regardless of how hard or little one worked, there were standards and if the student didn't meet them, he/she was asked to leave the school. |
Anonymous
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I think this thread has gone way off track because it is highly unlikely that the majority of kids testing proficient and advanced at schools across the city are gifted. Smart yes and possibly hard working but people forget that "gifted" is actually unusual and more than doing well on standardized tests. All kids deserve a good education, challenge and opportunities.
I think a gifted school is a great idea and necessary services for kids that are truly gifted and actually learn differently (meaning these are special needs kids that are often ignored). I do not, however, think the city should think in terms of "gifted" education for every child testing at proficient or advanced in any sector of the city because the majority of them are not "gifted". I do support introducing challenge and tracking at all schools with targeted outreach to make sure all kids, particularly those without crazed education obsessive parents are being challenged and well served. Some kids that are truly gifted do not actually do well in school for a variety of reasons and the DC-CAS is surely not going to locate those kids. Also, and I am bracing myself to be flamed, I agree that gifted children can have any SES, particularly the profoundly gifted. That said, much of "giftedness" is genetic (not just flashcards and french immersion) and DC is filled with more than its fair share of "gifted" adults because of the types of people its economy as well as political and economic opportunities attract. When these people have kids, they have a higher chance of having an academically gifted child than the average American so it should not be surprising that the children of intellectually accomplished parents turn out to be "gifted" at a higher rate than the general population. |
Anonymous
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No flaming here, please.
We can quibble about what constitutes giftedness in DC children forever and a day without changing the fact that the District's elite magnet high school (hint not Walls or Ellington) boasts mean SAT scores slightly BELOW the national average of around 500 on each of the three sections (the thread on the issue, begun recently, makes fascinating reading on this site). Compare this outcome to NYC's famous magnet high schools--Hunter, Bronx Tech, Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, Bard Early College etc.--where roughly half the kids hail from low-income families, most graduate from selective MS magnet programs and average SAT scores approach 700 across the board. When you don't set the bar anywhere in particular, as a general rule, is the motivation to excell in MS going to be as strong as when standards are clear, and high, as in NYC? I know a 20-something who was so determined to be admitted to Stuyvesant that she repeated the 8th grade in a Brooklyn, moving from a parochial school to a MS TAG program, while taking advantage of a new city-funded program to prep bright low-income minority kids for the SSAT magnet high school entrance exam. Her extended family, immigrants from Haiti, impressed with her determination, scraped together money for tutoring. Without a high bar to clear, she, the city and her family surely wouldn't have risen to the occasion. She graduated from Yale law school and clerks for a Supreme Court justice. The posts on this thread strongly suggest that the time isn't right for MS magnets. DC will surely need to wait until Gray is gone, and perhaps 5 or 10 years longer than that, for a critical mass of professionals with children in public and charter elementary schools to feel brave enough, and fed up enough with lackluster MS reform efforts, to effectively advocate for selective MS programs. In the current political climate, powerful fear of being accused of racism seems to stalk advocates of even the mildest forms MS tracking (e.g. offering algebra to only some of the 8th graders, but none of the 7th graders, at Deal, Hardy, Stuart Hobson etc.). Full-fledged magnets are starting to seem 15 or 20 years away in a city whose ambitions for its highest achieving low-income children are relatively low. Save your pennies, parents of especially bright and disciplined future 5th graders, for if you lack lottery luck at Latin etc., as you probably will, you may face stark choices indeed... |