Reply to The impact of IEP or 504 plan on magnet program selection

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Under the current magnet pool construction paradigm, both for CES and criteria-based MS magnets, there is an adjustment to the MAP score criteria for students receiving services -- EML/ESOL, FARMS, IEP and 504.  Instead of needing a locally normed 85th %ile score, a locally normed 70th %ile is required.

With a significant proportion of IEPs & 504s coming from those with the means to identify, formally, conditions and pursue associated accommodations, this is one of the ways that MCPS has left the magnet selection system vulnerable to gaming.  That's not to say it is a principal reason that MCPS might push back on a designation; it's more of an afterthought, if even that.

The timing of designation vs. applicability to magnet lottery pool creation (or appeal) is unclear.  There are also the other criteria (grades, reading level), and the whole paradigm could always change -- there is some possibility of that this coming year with a review scheduled for this spring.[/quote]

[b]This 70th percentile claim is a guess, no where has such info been confirmed or published.[/b] In fact I know a kid with a 504 plan and 92nd percentile nationally that didn’t get in the lottery. Pretty sick even on a moderate farms school that’s about 70th percentile.[/quote]

See the slide marked 15/45, box 1, 4th bullet:

https://www2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/siteassets/district/boe/meetings/memorandum/09/uploadedfiles/boe/meetings/memorandum/230119-ap-capstone-magnet-prog-12-06-2022-01-c-d-e-bd.pdf

It says 70th percentile local norm for students receiving services instead of 85th percentile.

This was a follow-up to BOE questions, either in December of 2022 or January of 2023 (date of the memo is 1/19/23).  I don't think it was ever discussed at a meeting, and it may have been posted some time later.  These kinds of follow-ups don't always appear on the boarddocs site, and, since the BOE makes the meeting videos their record (no official written transcript, no separate files with full content of presentations made, etc.), it's one of the ways information of interest might get buried, intentionally or not.

I'd almost think that this was overlooked by MCPS, since they have been so reluctant to provide the full specifics of the paradigm, especially that 15 percentile accommodation for those receiving services (maybe a third or so of the population?).  If you look through the whole set of slides, there are other places where it more ambiguously is mentioned, though the slides for the various programs are all in nearly the same format.  Someone at a lower level preparing the slides might have put the full info in there, with someone higher up editing that to hold that specific piece of info out but missing this one slide.  There's at least one copy/paste error, too -- mention of MAP-M instead of MAP-R on the literacy slide; it's not that that's terrible or anything, just that it might show something done in a bit of haste.  While the 70 slipped through only on that one slide, I'd strongly think that this was the paradigm across the board for all of the elementary & middle school criteria-based decisions.

As an aside, I'm not suggesting that an accommodation is inappropriate.  I do think that the heuristic would be better if more finely tuned, given the limitations of the measures they have (e.g., MAP) and the varied characteristics of the student population that might justify adjustment.[/quote]

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