Reply to Is IM only for CES student at elementary school level?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kids came out of an ES w/ a LOT of super high fliers (at both home school & HGC), & none took IM in 5th.  When they got to magnet in middle, a few kids had. I suspect that if the kids were outliers, & the home school wasn't prepared to do the compacted curriculum, they just bused them to a middle school and bumped them up a year. I know kids at an ES that had to go to a middle school to do compacted, so who knows. I guess the county and principal weigh in? Whatever the case, it's more about admin than individual talent. Several kids in my DC's peer group were high fliers, but school did not let anyone do anything other than compacted. My dc is currently at Blair magnet on hardest math track.  Occasionally they have had a kid a year younger in a class. The kid isn't necessarily a math genius, but just has had the previous class earlier. I don't know how this has played out, but I suspect it as an admin thing.[/quote]

Pretty sure all ES now have the compacted track (even if that wasn't the case until a few years ago), since most of the complaints on DCUM are about the schools trying to steer too many kids into it. IM is the continuation of that compacted track in middle school, but once they get into middle and high school they call it the "accelerated" or "advanced" track. It's just "compacted" in ES because they're cramming three years of the standard curriculum (4-6) into two.

Our DD's IM teacher told us that the "Investigations into Mathematics" class used to be the advanced, enriched course in middle school. Even though what they're teaching now is technically pre-algebra and is essentially the same course as before, when they changed the curriculum tracks with 2.0, they kept the IM name so parents wouldn't freak out about their kid "only" taking pre-algebra.

But any 5th grader who is taking IM at this point would be a true outlier, and likely either has parents who are willing and able to push to have them go to a middle school to take it, or a teacher who was willing to advocate for them. For 99.99% of kids, MCPS will try to keep them in the standard compacted track for elementary school, and wait until the middle and high school magnets to really start accelerating and/or enriching.

They definitely want to keeps kids in standard tracks, rather than having to deal with assessing and accommodating individual needs. Honestly I can see why, and for my gifted-but-not-stellar-at-math kid it works fine, but I know there are some kids and families who will be frustrated and exhausted long before they get to the middle school magnets. I just don't know of a better alternative that wouldn't involve throwing money and resources they don't have at the problem. [/quote]

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