Reply to WAPO article on Prince George's County Schools

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]23:15, that's exactly how I have felt from the outside for the last decade. It seems like they wanted to focus on the kids with more "need" with the limited resources, but now I think they have found there's a big consequence to that. Don't they get more federal money per enrolled child? So they get something with every extra child. The local school also gets more from the county for each child, as well as extra staff if the head count goes up enough.

They have tried to take away specialty programs entirely more than once, maybe as elitist? But what else is keeping the motivated families within the system?[/quote]

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.  
[/quote]

The TAG thing really makes no sense to me either. In theory it should be cheaper to educate the TAG kids as you can have a higher student/teacher ratio and meet proficiency on the tests with no problem, right? I think another issue with the TAG placement is that they've made the criteria for inclusion pretty broad which means they have to lottery because they have too many kids meeting cutoffs on the tests. The problem to me is that the kid who is just making cutoff via test score and doing pretty well in their zoned school is in less need of a true TAG center than the kid who is hitting 99th percentile across the board and has a profoundly gifted label on them based on other testing and has no cohort at all in the zoned school. If they don't have the resources to deal with the TAG group (and a look at the Glenarden Woods waitlist numbers tells me a lot of kids aren't getting seats) as it is defined right now then maybe they need to tweak the criteria or rank in some way so that the kids who really do need the Center end up there.

I get that adding more immersion or Montessori programs is tough because it isn't easy to find certified teachers who are native speakers or Montessori certified to boot, but adding more TAG programs should not be hard. Adding more specialty programs that center on arts shouldn't be hard - I know multiple music/art teachers who are on horrible cobbled together schedules in PGCPS being split between multiple schools. Any of them would be thrilled to have a true home school to teach from. Adding another STEM magnet program shouldn't be hard either and might stop the outflow of really good students who get waitlisted at Roosevelt and end up in private.

I was talking to a friend last week about how our neighborhood school really doesn't "look" like our neighborhood at this point. On our block there are 6 kids who are K-6 age (our zoned school's age group) and NONE are at the neighborhood school. 6 kids split among 4 private schools. 4 at 2 relatively close parochial schools, my child at a MoCo private, another at a DC private. 4 of the 6 were TAG lottery losers, including my child. That's a major problem. We'll try again for middle school. At least Roosevelt is ranked so I feel like my daughter is largely in control of her own destiny there and not crossing fingers in a lottery again. It's frustrating too because once your child is out and in private, if you've found a good school that they like, they don't want to change schools and I can't blame them. But they never should have had to leave the public system in the first place.

We didn't pick private for some big philosophical reason like commitment to the Waldorf method or something. I think that is a difference between PGCPS and MoCo. MoCo loses kids to privates too but with the families we know that is usually a philosophical difference (they want progressive ed so they send them to Green Acres or Lowell) or they want the name brand school and all that entails (networking, a perceived better shot at an Ivy, etc.). In PG people go private because they feel like the neighborhood school either can't meet their child's basic educational needs (especially TAG kids) or because there is a concern about the neighborhood school being an unsafe environment (especially true come middle school+). Those people could be retained or won back I think, but PGCPS doesn't really seem to be trying to do that. [/quote]

Thank you for your explanation.  That was really helpful.

I do believe PGCPS could win back people, but I agree that they have to try.  I think part of the answer is more TAG schools and more charter schools.  It's so obvious that people want to go to those schools, and it's also pretty obvious that it isn't that those schools "steal" kids from the regular neighborhood schools, because the reality is that when parents can't get their kids into the charter/TAG schools, they go private or move (unless they have a good inbound school, and there are some good inbound elementary schools; it gets trickier with middle school).

But again, I kind of feel like the attitude of the school board is that they don't have an incentive really to lure people back.  They actually keep getting more funding *because* they are failing.  And from the recent audit of federal stimulus funds that were given to PG schools, they aren't using that funding appropriately.  The status quo works for them.  They don't have to add more staff or facilities.  They get special grant money and funds because of their failure.

I hate to say that, but the more I learn about it all, that's the conclusion I reach.  I am curious to see what Baker does, because the advantage of having the county intervene is that Baker has more of an incentive to improve the schools, because he's trying to lure people to the county (middle class families, businesses, et cetera), and schools are a big part of that equation.  The school board is too insular and narrowly focused.

I also feel like the jest of the commentary in the article is that middle class students are seen as a way to help the low-performing students.  And I think that is the attitude that drives parents with means of high-performing students away.  They don't want their kids to be seen as a tool to fix societal/cultural problems among low SES communities.  They want the school to be just as committed to giving their kid the best education possible as it is to bringing up to speed the kids that are left behind.  [/quote]

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