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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They don't need to hire extra teachers - they need to assign existing teachers to teach more advanced work and organize the student schedules that way.

They do need a decent sized cohort to make it feasible. If the overall enrollment grows more will be hired. But the teachers' certifications and skills would enable them to do it already.[/quote]

DCPS's mantra (with several schools) has always been that [b]they can't identify advanced students until they enter 6th grade [/b]and are then tested for their ability; and then, even if they identify some advanced students after they've entered 6th grade, they must come up with extra money in the budget to hire new teachers to teach them (and only IF there are enough students they've identified to compose a class).  And, by that time, any students they identified in 6th grade are now in 7th grade.

What the poster here is saying is that existing schools don't need to hire extra teachers in order to teach advanced kids, the schools just need to move their plans around a bit.  Maybe that's true.  But the main consideration for us is DCPS is not being honest about how simple it would be to create space for advanced classes.[/quote]

So why does DCPS bother giving the PARCC math test to 5th graders? As a PP noted several posts back, the PARCC enables DCPS to easily identify academically advanced rising 6th grade math students--those who earned 4s and 5s on the 5th grade math section--as soon as the results are in.  If a rising 6th grader didn't take the PARCC, or wanted to try to test into advanced math classes despite not having earned 4-5s on the PARCC, s/he could be given a placement test over the summer, or once 6th grade has begun. My understanding is that DCPS gets PARCC results in June or July, leaving ample time to create advanced math classes for already-enrolled students before school starts (even if that were to mean hiring more teachers).

Right, they aren't being honest. Placing kids in advanced MS math classes isn't all that challenging. Building the political will to justify the outlays needed to create MS and HS classes where most students are high SES outside Upper NW presents the challenge. Apparently, it's much easier to justify spending tens of millions of dollars to renovate MS buildings that are mostly empty (e.g. JA with less than 300 students in a building designed to accommodate several times that many) than to plan to challenge sizeable groups of academically advanced kids living in the school's catchment area.

NYC doesn't heat and maintain public middle schools that are 2/3 empty, like JA - they rent out empty classroom space to charters.   
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