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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Imagine if they just made enough [i]real[/i] magnet-level education available locally to everyone with a big enough local peer cohort and centrally to everyone without.  Too bad that the old paradigm was so demagogued by ongoing anti-GT elements that that approach, when introduced, didn't come with either the organization or funding to support that local equivalent well enough, and was then the subject of threatened lawsuits such that it lasted a single year and we've ended up with the lottery, instead.[/quote]

That would mean a loss of programs.  There are 20+ HS.  There is not enough funding to duplicate every program everywhere.[/quote]

The post does not say to duplicate it everywhere.  It says to [b]make something magnet level available locally where the numbers are large enough to do so and to make it available centrally in large enough numbers to cover the rest. [/b] One could just do the latter, but it may provide savings to allow the former in some instances.

Funding involves choices.  Over the past couple of decades, MoCo has chosen county councilmembers who do not support education enough to make funding available at levels necessary to keep the system healthy and has chosen BOE members who have deprioritized GT funding relative both to funding for other initiatives and to the population associated with GT need.[/quote]

I will go to my grave reminding folks that THIS is what MCPS promised to do for the MS programs. They moved to locally normed cut-offs, and introduced HIGH and AIM with the explicit promise that kids would receive a comparable education at their home schools with other kids who qualified. It would not have been exactly the same, but it was close enough that most families would have been willing to accept the trade-off to avoid long bus rides and having kids in different schools.

From the beginning, though, MCPS insisted on tripping on its own d*** when it came to roll-out. They left implementation up to individual principals, most of whom either refused to implement the new classes or immediately made them open to every student regardless of ability. So the promise of a differentiated and accelerated MS education outside the MS magnets never arrived despite MCPS clearly telling parents they would offer such an option.

The infuriating thing is that fixing this would be SO SO EASY and would not even require additional teachers. Just cohort the kids who qualified for the magnet lottery, and give them access to a curriculum that goes deeper and further. The curriculum exists but MCPS refuses to put qualified kids in the same room. [/quote]

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