Reply to Parents making "pact not to pursue CES & get more enrichment @ home school...anyone pulled this off?

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Reply to "Parents making "pact not to pursue CES & get more enrichment @ home school...anyone pulled this off?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wow, if my kids' school educated my kids so well that they ended up with 99th percentile scores, I'd be grateful not looking for "leverage" to get them to do something different.  I don't understand why a kid "needs" enrichment if they are doing that well.

-- parent of two 99th percentile kids (out of 3) who will never understand this mentality.[/quote]

I... would be willing to consider this perspective, but I'm not sure I fully understand. I think the disconnect here is that you seem to see high standardized test scores as prima facie evidence that the kids are being "well-educated."

I would agree that they are not being "poorly-educated!"

But I think it's been pretty well-established that very high test scores in [i]young[/i] children tend to be much more correlated to parents' SES and education levels than the children's educations (though of course, most such kids usually attend "good" or at least adequate schools).

I feel like you're painting me as a DCUM striver, and that couldn't be further from the truth. I love our school's teachers, but this is not a well-resourced school by MCPS standards. It's a Great Schools 4 or 5. Now, GS is BS (ha) but this is not a case of a parent whose kid is born among the 99th percentile, clawing to put her in the 99.1st percentile. I don't care! Or else I would be pushing to get her into the CES at all costs!

I said I'd like "enrichment" for every student. I believe literally every student would benefit from more personalized, challenging instruction than worksheets and so on. But that's an uphill battle against the whole American public educational philosophy.

There are two reasons I'd like to push for more at our school, specifically for kids who would be in the CES pool.

VERY VERY secondarily, I'd like my own kid to be less bored. Yes, yes, only boring people get bored. But she's possibly 2E and it could help her to be taught with a different approach that meets her where she is, in terms of abstract thinking. But this is only about 10 or 20% of why I'd like "leverage" via enrichment at our school.

The primary reason I am looking for "leverage" is to secure the ~commitment of [i]other[/i] families, who might be more likely to send their kids to CES if they are selected. I don't want our school to keep losing primarily white and Asian American MC/UMC kids to the CES. That tends to reinforce all kinds of problematic stereotypes, and shrinks the ~gifted pool at our school, which means fewer resources for those that are left (that tend to skew Black and Latino-- just as gifted but usually a bit lower-scoring).

It's true that this is a little selfish on my part as well, in the sense that I don't want my kid to lose half of her friends/community, either way. About half of her friends are in this CES-likely cohort, and half are not. Either she will lose friends/nerd peers to the CES, or, if she goes to CES, which I'd strongly prefer she did not, she will lose half of her friends left at her ES, not to mention the community feel, and just... I don't want her to go to an overwhelmingly white/UMC program. She is not white, FWIW.

Anyway.
[/quote]

I understand where you are coming from OP. Unfortunately, you will not get the traction or momentum that you need to make your vision a reality.  Most parents who are in your situation and can be your allies in this scenario will bow out. Why? Because concentrating their efforts/time/money  to enrich/educate their kids on their own is a 100x times easier than wasting energy and time to fight MCPS to get crumbs.  [/quote]

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