Reply to CES Lottery

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]MCPS should stop wasting money on surveys and contractors and start focusing on properly educating all the kids who meet the parameters for CES/enrichment/magnet schools.  Or perhaps MCPS needs to also ask why so many kids qualify for these enhancement programs? Maybe educational standards need to go up. These lotteries are ridiculous.[/quote]

Agreed.  [/quote]

+1 Maybe raise the bar to top 2 percent, the way CTY does, to enter the lottery, and moderate or high FARMs can be locally normed.[/quote]

Maybe we could actually dedicate money and resources to expanding the enriched studies program so that every kid who qualifies can access that instruction.[/quote]

Most of the new funds this past year went to increasing the number of Central Office positions. [/quote]

While there may be new central office positions, ELC is also expanding to all schools so there is supposed to be enrichment available at all schools.  How the implement it we will see, but I've heard great things about it from other schools.   I find this encouraging. [/quote]

Correct, and I want to pull this out because I think it will reassure some parents on this thread, but also encourage them to get involved in advocacy. There is a large-scale enlargement of the ELC curriculum coming for next year's 4th graders. Almost every school in MCPS will get the curriculum.

[u]However, contrary to the intent of the ELC and in opposition to best practice for GT education[/u], many schools will be rolling out the new curriculum to every single 4th grader and with no cohorting. That is, it amounts to a change in the reading/ELA curriculum but classes will remain heterogenous.

When the ELC was piloted, it was always meant to serve the needs to highly able learners, and to cohort them with one another for ELA. It was meant to provide an appropriate education, with academic peers, in the home school and without the trouble of changing to a CES.

This matters because MCPS had found that BIPOC kids and poor/working class kids were far less likely to accept CES placements than their white/Asian and middle class peers. Providing an appropriate, differentiated, education in the home school was meant to serve those kids in their home environment while not creating logistical challenges for their families.

So, the good news is that every kid who qualified for the lottery will have access to the ELC curriculum next year (almost). The bad news is that principals may decide NOT to cohort those kids together.

The opportunity to advocate for the lottery-eligible kids to receive the ELC curriculum together is right now. Literally right now. Call/email/show up to PTA meetings and ask your principals how they intend to handle the ELC rollout. If they are going to offer it to every single kid without differentiating or cohorting the highly able learners, get in touch with the MCCPTA Gifted Committee and ask them for help advocating to the next level.

You can check them out here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/875483609961996[/quote]

The big problem here is how to advocate. I have 4 kids and have been in MCPS a long time. In my experience MCPS does not care about the MCPTA gifted committee. I'd like to see what the gifted committee has accomplished in the last decade. My guess is very little--not through lack of trying--but due to low prioritization in MCPS. It has gotten harder and harder over the years to advocate for gifted (or just good old enriched) learning because it has become a lower and lower priority. Curriculum 2.0 ended meaningful enrichment in ELA, and pushed math enrichment backward. The number of students in MCPS has dramatically risen but the number of spots at ES and MS magnets has remained the same. MCPS has chosen to solve this problem by providing access to magnet level classes in homeschools (which I think is a wonderful idea), but, many schools don't cohort these classes. During all of these years MCPS is also facing record class sizes and a huge ESL population.[/quote]

I don't have a dog in this fight, but two things I've seen the MCPSPTA Gifted Commitee do in recent years were to push hard for ELC in every school and file a FOIA making MCPS share the cut-offs for inclusion in the lottery by tier.

Making MCPS actually articulate which schools were in with tier, and the cut-offs for each, is a huge win to my mind. Getting ELC in every school (except immersion as of right now) is also a big accomplishment, but now the challenge will be ensuring that individual principals/reading specialists cohort the lottery-eligible kids. The entire point of rolling out the ELC to all schools is so that lottery-eligible kids have access to a similar curriculum as they would have received in the CES. They can only have that if principals choose to cohort the kids who crossed the local threshold. [/quote]

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