Reply to Is it true all 9th graders take “honors” English?

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[quote=Anonymous]MCPS is basically Lake Wobegon, “where all children are above average.”   It will adjust course content, grouping, grading, and whatever else is required to support its claim that it is “one of the best school systems in the nation”, hiding or eliminating data to the contrary.

My kids are grown now, so I’m out of the loop and my info is outdated.  I am immensely encouraged that their curriculum update a few years ago exposed the utter deficiency of the curriculum they developed in-house.  I think they have finally adopted phonics in elementary which is a tremendous step forward.  I am hoping they are similarly replacing their middle school curriculum with one that was professionally developed and reviewed by content experts and has proven effective elsewhere.  Unfortunately, I haven’t heard of any rollout of a new MS curriculum.

If they are still using the old curriculum, I can tell you that not only are there not standard reading selections across the district, but that the curriculum department thought it was great if a kid ended up repeating the same book in multiple grades.  Moreover, the official curriculum minimized formal grammar instruction, which left it up to individual teachers to compensate.  Each year at Back to School Night, I would ask their teacher, “Do you teach grammar?” and they would kind of hem and haw before they admitted that while it wasn’t part of the curriculum they thought it was important so they taught it anyway.  This is why some parents complain that grammar isn’t taught in MCPS, while other parents counter that MCPS did a great job teaching their kids grammar - it’s luck of the draw whether your child’s teacher is willing to risk teaching outside the approved curriculum and is also willing to put forth the extra effort to do so.[/quote]

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