Reply to Least run down/overcrowded schools in Vienna area?

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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]PP. I do wonder, though, if it is more likely in LIV for children to become (or to already be) more preoccupied with achieving and competition with peers. Ideally, AAP should provide enrichment and opportunities for academic and intellectual growth rather than nurturing an obsession with being the best, the smartest, etc. (Well, ideally for me, at least.)

[b]It's possible that the latter is inevitable just because of the orientation of certain parents. [/b][/quote]

Yes.  That ship has sailed.  AAP kids are told as soon as they are accepted into AAP that they are "special" and "smarter" than Gen Ed.  It's absolutely absurd, considering the vast majority of all these kids overlap somewhere in the middle.  FCPS has done no one any favors by sorting them into two groups by the third grade.  It's a broken system.[/quote]

My point was more that *some* parents may focus intensely on this but not all parents. I certainly wouldn't. I know others out there who just want their kid to be challenged and engaged but do not care for competition. I think it's easy to say it's AAP that causes or reinforces this but I'm skeptical that this is true. If there was no AAP do you really think things would be different?[/quote]

If there was no AAP, but instead a very, very selective GT program (as there used to be), then yes - I absolutely think things would be different.  The vast majority of kids would be in Gen Ed (which could be beefed up), and the very few truly gifted kids would be in GT.  This is how it was when I was in school and there was no resentment because everyone understood that a few kids actually needed a special program - but that everyone else was more or less "the same."  The current AAP model makes it seem as if half of the kids are "gifted" and the other half are not.  Nothing could be further from the truth, especially as we can all see these same kids in the same classes (and colleges) once they hit high school. [/quote]

[b]There was never a GT program in FCPS that limited participation to the “very few truly gifted kids.” [/b]

It once was smaller, and was rigid in ways that kept out some of the brightest students in the county (for example, and without going into all the details, some of the screening tests inadvertently discriminated against students who were early readers).

The program may be too large now, and the avenues for appeal may have provided wealthier families seeking to have their kids placed in AAP with unfair advantages, but it was never as well-oiled a machine as you’re pretending.  Any time a public school system tries to provide differentiated instruction, some people are going to be unhappy (and, ironically, attempts to make the program more “inclusive” can end up further upsetting other parents).  [/quote]

I beg to differ.  I am a product of FCPS and there was indeed a very selective, very small GT program and no one gave it much thought either way.  FCPS has done a major disservice to ALL of its students by allowing AAP to encompass such huge numbers of basically ordinary students.  [/quote]

I can assure you that people gave it plenty of thought at the time.  You just choose to see it through rose-colored glasses now because you think it compares favorably with the current AAP program. [/quote]

Agree. There seems to be a contingent of people who maybe were designated as gifted themselves at some point who resent that the advanced programming is [b]now accessible to the merely bright.[/b] People are always grossly oversimplfying the issues. The current system may not be perfect, but I can only imagine the chaos of of having no Level IV and just a small percentage in gifted. [/quote]

And therein lies the issue:  the "merely bright" are found in all groups of students, not just in AAP.  So what AAP does is take a huge amount of these kids, leaving behind another huge amount - for no real reason.  Whereas a GT program would only take the few ACTUALLY gifted students, leaving the "merely bright" as the majority.  [/quote]

Where do you get that the merely bright are the majority? That doesn't even make sense. The average is the majority, and I hate to burst your bubble but the average kid is not bright--by definition. When you have large classes with gifted, bright, average, and below-average kids, where many kids can't read and others are reading fluently and a whole lot in between, it's impossible to give everyone what they need to thrive. We have long separated kids by age, for convenience in order to teach to large classes, because age is a proxy for development, but it's clear to anyone looking that it is a far from perfect proxy, hence the need for further differentiation.

My six-year-old reads fluently. I wouldn't say he's gifted. He just learned something he was taught. Why should be be forced to sit in a class where most kids are just learning to read? 
[/quote]

Unfortunately, SES is also a proxy for development (within age cohorts).  So a high SES school might have bright kids constituting the majority of a classroom, whereas a low SES school might have more average (as compared to the US population) and below kids.  That's the way it is, and FCPS has to work with that.  And FCPS can't hire enough teachers to have 5 levels of differentiation within each grade level.  Most school systems differentiate two or three levels (e.g. GT, genEd, and remedial).  Anywhere you draw the line between GT and genEd, there will be kids on the margin who will either struggle in the GT class or be bored in the genEd class.   [/quote]

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