Reply to MCPS to end areawide Blair Magnet and countywide Richard Montgomery's IB program

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The worst thing about this is the loss of the incredible magnet teachers that we will have at both the RM IB and Blair SMCS. My son is a student at the Blair Magnet program, and their math teacher has a PHD in math from Yale! Other teachers are equally qualified and hold PHDs from many renowned universities in the country. [b]There is no way that these teachers will opt for teaching county magnet programs[/b], as they are more than qualified to teach college level classes with much more pay as well. [b]They stay because they enjoy teaching a group of highly motivated students who love to learn[/b]. The loss of teachers will be something we won't be able to replace, even after Taylor is gone.[/quote]

Seems like you are making a lot of assumptions here, about the teachers and the future students.[/quote]

Not that pp, but my child also goes to the same program, and more than one teachers told their personal stories to students about why they chose to stay in Blair SMACS, and the reasons are highly similar to what described above. They will choose to leave the magnet as it's not rewarding anymore to themselves, and practically many of the current courses will not exist anymore due to lack of enrollment. [/quote]
If true, those teachers are not great in reasoning then, and perhaps not as incredible as some PPs describe. They’re assuming students in the future regional magnet will not be a group of highly motivated students who love to learn. We don’t know the criteria of the regional program, so we don’t know what those students will be like. If they maintain a hard cutoff of 90% MAP (“A” students by objective measure), the type of students should be the same. Incredible teachers are good at reasoning and not emotionally reactive.[/quote]

It has been repeatedly cited in this forum that the median MAP-M score for the admitted students is somewhere around 285, which is &gt;99% for Grade 12 according to NWEA breakdown. More than 50% of the current SMACS students came from Churchill and Wootton, and the 3rd is WJ. Many admitted students had won state or national STEM prizes before joining SMACS. What makes believe that the new regional program wouldn't be significantly watered down?   [/quote]

The fact that most of the current students came from just 3 schools suggests that it should be no problem to fill the regional programs with kids from 4-5 schools each, right?  The admission standards might have to be a tad bit lower if the distribution of smart kids isn't exactly equal between those 3 schools and the others in the county, but presumably that's a pretty small difference.[/quote]

Is this a joke?
It's astronomically different. What is your explanation for why almost no one in Silver Spring qualifies for SMACS, while students from Rockville/Potomac/Bethesda bus in from far away?

SMACS already struggles to fill upper level courses, offering many electives only once every 2 years.

Splitting Blair SMACS into 3 would eliminate those classes.

The Functions (advanced/accelerated Alg2/Precalculus) class has 20 kids. If you split those kids across 2-3 regions, what happens to them?

Yes, there are students that would thrive in regional STEM programs that enhance their current home school offerings with more AP options and some electives. No, no one is helped by shattering the current SMACS into 4 parts and pretending that those kids are well-matched to programs that run courses at half the academic pace.
[/quote]

What on earth makes you think that "almost no one in Silver Spring qualifies"?  There's like 30+ Silver Spring kids who actually attend Blair SMCS every year right now, plus presumably many others who get "beat out' by richer kids from elsewhere in the county who can juice their MAP scores in ways most Silver Spring families can't.  Why would the difference in the number of smart, motivated kids from rich schools and poor schools be "astronomically different"?  [/quote]

37 in total from Blair catchment: https://go.boarddocs.com/mabe/mcpsmd/Board.nsf/files/DJVQ56678E2B/$file/Attachment%20D%20SY2025%20Student%20Enrollment%20Countywide%20Programs%20250724.pdf

I agree with you that switching to regional model might encourage more admitted students from, e.g., Whiteman, to attend Blair. But the overall number of "qualified" students is undoubtedly going to reduce significantly. Of course you can always lower down the qualification threshold.[/quote]

Blair is not the only school in Silver Spring.  And if the qualification threshold isn't based on the intelligence and potential of the students, but is just based on getting super-high MAP scores which can be and frequently are gamed/skewed, then probably it should be lowered so that the smartest kids don't get blocked out by "merely bright" hard workers with rich parents who are good at test prep.  But that doesn't mean the standards would be decreased-- arguably you would get even higher numbers of the smartest kids in that way. [/quote]

The top feeders to Blair, by catchment, are:

1. Wootton (25%)
2. Churchill (20%)
3. The entire DCC combined. (Blair, Wheaton, Einstein, Kennedy, Northwood) (20%)

And that's not counting kids who don't go to Blair from W because of the long commute or because they go to elite private schools (Whitman catchment).
 
The "prep" whine is a myth. The W kids at SMACS who are getting that 285+ (SMACS median) are mostly getting it by 7th, a whole year ahead of the application deadline.

Anyone getting an A in geometry in 8th grade is getting 285+ or very close to it.

Anyway the whole "prep" complaint is nonsensical. [B]If your kid doesn't like doing more than the minimum amount of work the school assigns in middle school, not even a tiny bit of Khan academy, then why the heck would your kid want to go to SMACS, with an extra course every year, with accelerated courses with more homework? [/B][/quote]

Do you seriously think that the only reason some kids don't do lots of supplementation and test prep is because they're not hard-working and don't like schoolwork?  You must live in a bubble.  Just because it's common knowledge in your circles that if you want to get into Blair you've got to play the game and do Khan Academy or whatever to get ahead of what's taught in school, doesn't mean that everyone else knows that.  And they shouldn't have to, and families that do know shouldn't get extra advantages because of it. [/quote]

Teachers are perfectly capable of mentoring smart, but disadvantaged kids.  That happened to lots of us.  And frankly, those kids have lots of time in class with Chromebooks if they want to do well.[/quote]

Many of these smarter kids aren't disadvantaged but their parents choose lower cost housing as either they are in lower paying professions or one income or another reasons.[/quote]

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