Reply to RMIB and Blair criteria for HS program acceptance

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Blair median MAP score has been around 280 for the past few years so kids below that certainly get in. All As in STEM subjects are necessary too. A good rule of thumb is above 99th percentile. I wouldn’t bother below that.

I’m shocked that middle schools are helping with applications. Or at least at one middle school. That doesn’t happen elsewhere.[/quote]

JW feeds into RM and there are 25 seats in the RMIB program specifically set aside for JW cluster students so it makes sense for that middle school.[/quote]

These local set-asides in excess of the ratio of seats-to-overall-student-population for the rest of the county -- one-school CESs, Potomac ES Mandarin Immersion, Takoma Park MS magnet, etc. -- need to go away.  Inequitable on their face.

You can have a set-aside to ensure students from that school get in, but not any more seats than would give the local students a similar overall chance of selection as the non-locals.[/quote]
The local set-aside seats still have to meet the program criteria. The set aside ensures that students already inbound don’t take away seats from out of area. In other words, they are extra program seats for students already attending the school and don’t impact staffing by bringing in students from outside the school boundaries.[/quote]

This is the unjust "justification" for inequity to which those schools with such set-asides have been clinging.  The [i]program[/i] is set up to accommodate a certain number of students.  Both local-school-in-bounds and wider-catchment students are [i]in that same program[/i].

At TPMS, for instance, it is about 125 per year.  Some 100 of those are given to about 3/5 of the county by population (the other 2/5 are served by Clemente MS), maybe drawing from 7000 students (pre-criteria).   By contrast, 25 are given to those in-bounds to TPMS, maybe drawing from 300 students, resulting in it being about 6 times as likely to be granted access to the program.  The numbers, here, are rough, but any error is marginal to the point -- to get to parity, a significant majority (some 19-20 with that shown here) of the in-bounds set-aside seats would have to be shifted to that rest-of-the-three-fifths lottery pool.  This doesn't even count the tendency of school administrators to select currently attending locals to backfill any seats that open from students deciding to leave the program early, returning to their home schools.

There is capacity at TPMS, and funding for teachers for all classes follows the enrolled population.  There is no reason to consider the excess set-aside seats within a magnet as "extra" to the program, as though, for some reason other than fealty to an old BOE-and-Council, back-room-brokered decision, they couldn't make all 125 part of one pool with no particular set-aside.  Meeting the same criteria and having the same chance are two different animals, and the one should not be conflated with the other when two lottery pools are operated, one (the local set-aside) with a much larger seat-to-population ratio.

If you believe otherwise, show your math and allow for it to be picked apart.  Or you could realize that there are programs without differentially probablistic local set-asides, concede the point and save everyone the back-and-forth.[/quote]

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