Reply to What are the real facts about MCPS inequities?

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Reply to "What are the real facts about MCPS inequities?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]And this is one way MCPS keeps going downhill:  instead of ALL parents working together for the good of ALL the students, they keep parents fighting for their own school. MCPS likes when we fight against each other instead of pushing them to do better for all students.

Anyone here long enough to remember when Paul Gellar and Melissa McKenna organized the CIP testimony where every cluster coordinator said, "we need to make the pie bigger?"  ALL testified for the need for more funds for all, not just "our school needs xxx" and "our school needs yyy" and "our school needs zzz"???

It worked! And ever since it has been back to bickering between schools for scraps - everyone is me, me, me, rather than advocating for all.

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The county's demographics have drastically changed over the past few decades. This impacts test score averages but this doesn't mean that opportunities to gain an education are any worse today than 20-30 years ago. As someone who attended MCPS in the early 90s, I feel my kids today are getting a much better education. So I don't buy this myth that things are going downhill. If you want to do well in school and get a first-rate public education, that's possible; however, if you're one of these parents who expects the county to raise your kids then probably not.[/quote]

I totally agree with the first part of your statement. It is possible to get a quality education in MCPS. Many students do. At the same time, the focus on "equity" as measured by test scores has a detrimental impact on all aspects of public education, which includes the excessive administrative burden placed on teachers, the time spent on test-related issued which takes away from actual learning, and the well-intentioned changes to discipline policies that allow disruptive and sometimes violent students to remain in classrooms. As a result of conditions that are less conducive to the success of all students, the gap as measured by testing is growing, because families with the financial means to fill in gaps in their children's educations will do so, while others fall further behind. Given the demographic changes in the county, the current tests are not a good measure of student progress.

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A couple of good points... People seem to be hung up on these obsolete metrics that fail to capture the greater context. I read a lot about these discipline issues here, and although my kids just go to regular DCC schools, we haven't really encountered anything like that personally. Maybe we're just lucky.[/quote]

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