Reply to What is the real reason MCPS uses Lottery for Middle School Magnet Program

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Define qualified...if you want to have a program for the top students, there is always a group at the top.  [/quote]
This is the fundamental misunderstanding of the CES program. It is not supposed to be for the "top students" in the school system. It was designed to meet the academic needs of students whose needs couldn't be met in their home elementary school. This really doesn't mean the top academic performers, it means students who learn differently, at a faster pace than their peers, and who thrive on independence and complex thinking. As more and more students over the years demonstrated they would benefit from the enriched curriculum, they began offering that curriculum at home schools, rather than shipping an entire class of 4th graders to a different school.

If parents stopped treating the CES as a coveted prize to be won by a select few students, and instead focused on advocating for better enriched curriculum (and GT trained teachers) at their school, everyone would be better off.[/quote]

All lecture aside, Did you stop to think about how does lottery help to meet the needs of kids who are not selected into the program by lottery? if you argue that their needs can be met locally at homeschool, then why can't MCPS meet the needs of other kids at their home school? Why do you even need a CES program?[/quote]

These posts are, in my opinion, the very heart of the matter. The magnets are, in their best version, a method to to meet the needs of kids who cannot get that enrichment at their home school. Cohort matters. If your child is at a school with plenty of similarly leveled kids, [b]AND[/b] MCPS offers enrichment for those kids, they do not need the magnet. Hence the in-school CES programs and home school enrichment classes/programs that MCPS has been starting to offer. If a homeschool is too small for a significant cohort or child is such an outlier, the magnet is a resource to help with that rarer situation. The lottery COMPLETELY undermines this because it just looks for ability but does not take into account circumstances or cohort. MCPS says this saves them from having to parse through kids and “split hairs” in their decision process, but THAT IS THEIR JOB and they are really just choosing a pretty lazy method of names in a hat.

The problems to fix: 
More quality enrichment available at home schools
More regional CES spots, because the student population has grown enough to need it, even with home school enrichment increases 
The office of accelerated and enriched learning needs to get back to the hard work of picking out the kids who really do need the regional magnets
Central Office needs to get back to the hard work of selecting the outlier kids who really do need [/quote]

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