Reply to Reaction to "Study of Choice and Special Academic Programs: Report of Findings and Recommendations"

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[quote=Anonymous]I don't know what the right answer is but I would venture the idea that often the geniuses of the last century who were not organized and had social issues would not have benefited from a magnet school.

Education and the world have changed over the years.  50 or 100 years ago teachers wrote their own tests designed to separate the kids in their classes down into groups who should get each letter grade.

Today, there is much more bureaucratic work and tests are often written by the school district in order to find out who has mastered a certain level of information.  Since mastering this certain level is easy for

someone like your DS, they need a magnet.  In the old days, with tests written by their own teacher, the number one and number two students in any class could learn much more than every one else.  They

learn more either by doing independent work or just by being able to struggle through the hardest of the homework examples.  This allows them to compete to see who got the 93% and not the 90%.  The

other kids, who may have only got 50% of the question right, would end up with scaled B grades.

When I write things about scaled grades on here many people really hate the idea that someone who only got a 50% gets an 85% on their report card.  What you need to understand is that there are two

ways to scale a test.  If you have a district wide test, you usually scale after all the grades are in.  This leads to MCPSs crazy attempts to get final exams to fit the grade profile they want.  In a single class,

where you know how much the students have learned by grading homework and quizes with many levels of difficulty on each, you can create a scale for a test by having 3 or 4 levels of questions.  Everyone should

get the lowest level questions right and get a D on the test.  The D students just won't be able to get all the C level questions right easily but might get some and so on.  By the time you get to the top two

students, who need crazy hard questions to determine which one learned more, the B level students won't even understand what the A level questions are asking let alone have a chance to get them correct.

The geniuses of yesteryear, who might have been say 1 out of 1000, still has to do quite a bit of work to ALWAYS beat the kid who is just 1 out of 30.  They can learn huge amounts as long as the homework, quizes

and tests are set up so that the teacher learns how much all of the kids learned and if the genius tried this week and not so that 24 kids out of 30 have a chance to meet a standard and get an A.[/quote]

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