Reply to WAPO article on Prince George's County Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I think they've also tried redistricting.  I guess the thinking is that they need to break up the high-performing schools.  And then they get surprised when the parents of the high-performing kids then pull their kids out and send them to private.

My impression is that high-performing schools and programs get punished.  Instead of trying to replicate and add more of those programs, they break them up.

They need to stop messing with the few programs/schools that work.  And instead try to establish more of them.

It seems INSANE to me that TAG students have to go through a lottery.  No, if you score high enough for TAG, you shouldn't have to go through a lottery on top of that.  It's ridiculous.  Those students who are TAG identified but don't win the lottery end up being put in private school.  This has to be evident to the school board and administrators (unless they're incompetent, which could be the case given so few of them even have a strong educational background).

It kind infuriates me in the article where the county official acts like it's a mystery why middle class families with high performing students are pulling their kids from private school.  Their TAG process alone answers that question.

But what the county doesn't realize is that it isn't just parents putting their kids in private school; it's parents MOVING entirely out of the county.  So the tax base will shrink if they continue.  Sadly, many people really don't want to move.  But they read article after article about the great schools in bordering counties and then they confront roadblocks to trying to work with the PG public school system, and they end up leaving.

I really don't want this to continue to happen.  I want the schools to turn around.  
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The lottery is for going to a TAG center.  If you don't get into the TAG center then you do the TAG program in your in-bound in school.  While I don't like the lottery system in general, I don't think it is unique to PG that some gifted kids are not able to go to a TAG school.  In MoCo, they have highly gifted centers.  If I am not mistaken, there are kids that are qualified that apply but still don't get in and continue to do a gifted pullout in their in-bound school.  It is not through a lottery though it is based on an application, test scores, recommendations, etc. [/quote]

That is correct, the HGCs in MoCo are ranked. The problem with missing out on the TAG program is that while you technically still get TAG services in the in-bound school, what that looks like varies a lot school to school. Our next door neighbor's DD was in this situation at our school. Her pull out services were for her and 2 other kids who were TAG identified but in other grades because the entire TAG cohort at the school either went to the Center or left public come 2nd grade when not getting into the center. She was miserable. She had no cohort at all at her school. The pull out was not all day so most of the day she was doing nothing because she'd finish stuff so quickly and the teacher was understandably focused on the rest of the class and working with them. The pull out services weren't comprehensive enough to keep her really engaged in school but they were obvious enough that they just served to alienate her from classmates as "different". She's now at a private. Again, pull out is great and appropriate for some TAG kids, but it isn't a good fit for the kids who are profoundly gifted. They NEED the center or they just end up pariahs a lot of times and bored with school to boot.[/quote]

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