Reply to Another article about the magnet programs in Washington Post

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How about - Year round school for poor URM students starting from pre-K?  These students must get into gifted programs to get into 10 month of regular school schedule.

This will bridge the achievement gap in my opinion.

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You want to pass a law with different school attendance requirements depending on the student's race/ethnicity and the student's family's income? Really?

And would this requirement apply to the kids of my neighbors, who are African-Americans with a law degree and an MBA, respectively? Please explain.

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Well, we are talking about changing the admissions criteria for magnets based on race/ethnicity and family income, are we not?  So, why not change the attendance requirement for schools as well?[/quote]

I don't think we ARE talking about changing the admissions criteria.  I think we're talking about ensuring that we're capturing all of the "highly gifted" kids irrespective of race/ethnicity or family income.  Right now the HGC and other magnets programs are wildly disproportionate to the population of the district.  If we assume true giftedness (rather than just good coaching) occurs at a similar rate in each group, then we clearly have a problem with identifying gifted kids from URM groups.  The idea isn't that MCPS would lower the bar.  [b]The idea is that there are kids who would clear the bar but are not currently being identified[/b].

The alternative is that we just accept that our "gifted" program is really a program for high achieving but not necessarily gifted kids.  [/quote]

New person, are you saying that the kids are not identified because they don't apply?  or are you saying not lower (or raise) the bar but have a different bar?[/quote]

I'm not sure.  This is a problem that basically every school district in the country is dealing with, and a district like MCPS with significant racial and economic diversity is just dealing with it in a higher profile manner.

There have been multiple dissertations written on how to identify gifted kids from URM groups, so I'm not going to pretend to know more than the experts.  All I'm saying is that we have to identify the correct problem.  There are gifted kids in every racial/ethnic/economic group.  We know that.  We also know that the kids identified as "gifted" in MCPS are not at all representative of the student population.  So...how do we make sure that we're not excluding gifted and high achieving kids, who would be successful in the magnet programs, just because they are poor or Black or Latino, or whatever?

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