Reply to What's wrong with 2.0? Can someone break it down for me?

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Reply to "What's wrong with 2.0? Can someone break it down for me?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Agreed.  Throwing kids in one class doesn't really address the problem that some kids are ahead of others.   Differences will always exist, nothing will change this.  The achievement gap will never be closed honestly.

When you think about it, the real strategy behind putting all the kids in one class is to slow down the highly able kids.  That seems immoral to me.

An honest approach would be to challenge every child and give children who are behind opportunities to catch up by giving them resources and opportunities to catch up.

My main problems with 2.0 are not necessarily around content.  Instead, I have a problem with roll-out.
1)   Heterogeneous grouping is not a productive way to challenge every child
2)   There is a cohort of third graders that gets the new curriculum every year.  Changes this big should be piloted and tested, not just rolled out blind every year.  The pain should be distributed across different cohorts, not born by one group of kids.
3)   Assessments are not helpful to parents at all.   I want information about how my child does against his/her peers and MCPS does everything it can to hide that information.  I don't want this for bragging rights.  Instead, I want to understand if and where my child needs help.  I have a child that I suspected was behind in reading, but I didn't realize how far behind until we got private testing.  Dropping the Terra Nova test was a mistake.
4) Pearson -  This curriculum is made by a private company for their profits.    I expect we will eventually get testing from this company that shows how well C2.0 works.   Pearson will also control how much parents can see of the testing because it will be copyrighted.  There are too many conflicts of interest that bother me about the Pearson relationship.   They may not be aligned with MCPS interests.

By the way, there is a law called COMAR that requires MCPS to provide education opportunities for gifted children that need it.  I think MCPS is violating this law, at least in sprit.  MCPS says as much when you listen to them.[/quote]

I just skimmed your post but it takes a half a second to recognize that if your child is I then the are behind.  There's nothing about 2.0 that hides the fact that a child isn't up to speed.  If you already knew they were behind the terra nova wouldn't help you.[/quote]

Not sure what you are talking about.  How can a parent know where their child performs relative to their peers.  The parent is not in the class and isn't exposed to kids all day in the office for comparison.  The parent just knows their child at home.   Both the child and the teacher might give vague responses to questions about academic readiness.  The child may say "I'm dumb".  The teacher may say "Your child is doing fine.  He is reading on-grade level".   After a little research, you realize that 80% of the kids in Montgomery county are on grade level or above.  So what does on-grade level mean?  If you read to your kid an hour every night, but they are on the 20th percentile, that is different than being at the 80th percentile.   Let's take it further, what if your kid has an incredible vocabulary; is very verbal and creative; and seems just as bright as any of their friends, yet their other friends are reading at much higher levels.  You can't know this for sure, but you sense it from talking to other parents.  This all happens very slowly and takes a lot of delicate and vague conversations with these friends.   All the parent knows is that the kid is on-grade level and the teacher is ok with it.

This story is exactly happened to us.   After years of suspicion and some independent testing we discovered there was a learning disability that prevented progress in reading.  It took a lot of our own initiative and constant communication with the school to confirm this problem.  There is no way to convince the school there is a problem without some kind of independent testing.   When you take away tools like Tera Nova, you now have no tools to communicate with the school.  If the school doesn't want to deal with you, they just keep saying your kid is on-grade level when almost every kid is on-grade level and when it takes you enormous effort in working with your child at home to keep them on-grade level.

This is why testing and grades and report cards are important.   Your feelings and your sense, don't really count in MCPS world.

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