Reply to What's up with Piney Branch?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]My son is in 4th grade at PBES - bright but didn't make it into CES. Here's what he said to me this morning: "Mom, I'm frustrated - there are so many kids in my class that don't take school seriously and they are getting all of us in trouble. It's like all the good kids are in CES now." Just about broke my heart. I'm all about expanding opportunities but I'm personally worried about kids like my son falling through the cracks at PBES - even more of a concern now that so many of the "strongest students" are removed from the general population.[/quote]

I'm sorry that this is happening to your son. You could press the principal to get your son into the CES. [b]Everyone is doing this but sometimes the squeaky wheel does get the grease.[/b] If so many kids are coming off the waiting list, its much more likely that for some their parents simply pitched a fit rather than their scores being the highest on the waitlist. If your son did really badly on the test and does do well on other tests like PARCC etc then its unlikely the principal will let him in even if he's brilliant. It would reflect badly on her if too many kids in her local CES program were scoring poorly.

This is likely to continue through ES and MS. Schools intentionally do whatever they can to balance the classes and sprinkle the remaining high achievers (or low achievers depending on which is more numerous/rare at the school) throughout different classes. Its unfair to teachers who are evaluated on scores for one teacher to get all the high performers and another to get all the low performers.

Could you afford private school? The Catholic schools are much, much less expensive than the "big three" type schools and would still have students that take school seriously. Your other option , I hate to say it, is to move to a school with more highly capable and serious students. WJ cluster is the closest to you and usually less expensive than the BCC area. [/quote]

And then ... she will be accused of racism. I am not sure how to navigate this sort of thing, either. I am sure every one of the kids with behavior problems deserves compassion, and help, and more time than my UMC white kid who works on grade level. But my kid is miserable in this class. If I advocate for him, I am pulling resources from those other kids who need the resources more. If I pull him out to home school or for private, I am isolating him from students of color and lessons he could learn about difference and compassion.

I have ideas about how to make this work for all kids. Those ideas take money the school system doesn't have, and the ones that don't are not something anyone cares to hear about anyway. And maybe they're wrong. Even if they did care, or I knew how to present them to the right people, or they were the right ideas, they wouldn't be implemented in time to fix my son's elementary education. So how do I live my liberal values and not make my kid feel like I've abandoned him, or set him up for a poor outcome?

Would they let me come volunteer in the math classroom? Every day? Maybe, but I have to work, too.[/quote]

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