Reply to What happened to MCPS?????

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
My children have been exposed to the French and British school systems (private and public) before coming here to MCPS. While no system is perfect, they DO expect much higher standards of performance from their average students compared to MCPS.

For example, in DC1's private British school, they were teaching multiplication tables to FIRST graders (started at step counting and jam tarts, and ended by learning tables off by heart). In the French public school system, they learn this in second grade. In MCPS, they learn multiplication in third grade. And everything is like this.

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I don't think that it's valid to compare British private schools to US public schools.[/quote]

You have missed the point.
Many, many school systems around the world, especially the Asian systems like those in Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc, but also some European systems like I wrote, are training the next generation to be much more competitive than here because their schooling is more rigorous.

Feel free to quibble on minor details. The big picture is that MCPS, and the American approach to education in general, are not sustainable in the long-term. We need curriculae with informative factual content, not "higher-order thinking / creative strategies". We need to use detailed and specific measures to evaluate students' work, not meaningless Ps and Is. We need to train teachers to be precise and rigorous in their teaching, not laissez-faire. We need to pay these teachers more to begin with, so that the cream of the crop will be attracted to the teaching profession! No more wishy-washy murky nonsense.

[/quote]
10:56 here. I beg to differ in regards to what the standards should be. An increase in rigour, I don't necessarily have a problem with, however, I am a big proponent of the "higher-order", "creative" thinking. I don't want my child to just be able to be do multiplication in 2nd grade. I want my DC to be able to think critically and analytically, think  outside the box, be creative, to be able to figure out new ways to apply the math knowledge to something no one else would have thought of doing. I want my kid to think "Hey, if I cut the foot off these panty-hose, I can be a billionaire in a few years", and bump it if everyone else thinks it is a sucky idea."
I care less about DC  out-running and gunning the next man, DC needs to be able to see PAST the next man.
All this trying to be better, make more money, out doing each other didn't help us NOT run our economy in the ground.
I'm all for changing the paradigm.  And I don't think that makes anyone less intellectual, dumbed down or any other way "less than".[/quote]

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