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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wow.  2 different people misread “neighborhood” as “school”.  That’s truly bizarre.  [/quote]

Even more chance then that these assumptions are false. Who knows test scores and reading levels of half the kids in the neighborhood? Move on.[/quote]

You're crazy.  Or you're so antisocial that you don't talk to neighbors of similarly aged kids at the bus stop or at other gatherings or when your kids are playing together.  Most likely, you're just trying to cover for your truly terrible reading comprehension by deflecting.

Anyway, they're not assumptions.  One parent was quite open that she parent referred her kid, the kid got into AAP, and then washed out in 3rd grade because the math was too hard.  Another parent flat out said that her kid got a 119 CogAT composite and didn't get pass advanced on any of the 3rd grade SOLs.  One parent consistently asked me for help with her kid's 2nd grade math word problems, because neither she nor her DD could understand how to do them, and my kid was getting them correct.  Her kid had a <100 NNAT and a 122 CogAT, which she acknowledged freely.  Her kid prepped for the CogAT score, which she also acknowledged.  After her kid got accepted into AAP, she wouldn't shut up about how the committee saw something special in her kid, and her kid is truly gifted, despite the bad test scores.  Yet another parent said they parent referred their kid.  Even after prepping like crazy for the IAAT, the kid told other kids that he only got a 68th percentile.  One parent was worried about parent referring for AAP because her kid was completely average in math on all metrics.  The kid still got into AAP and then slowed it down for everyone else.  All of these kids were the types standing around the bus stop reading Magic Treehouse or the like in 2nd, so we're not talking about very advanced readers.

These are the types of kids getting accepted into AAP, and it's not unexpected.   In the old system, under which all of these kids were accepted, 10% of FCPS kids earn scores in the top 2%, many due to prepping.  Only 2/3 of those kids get accepted into AAP, meaning 6.7% of the FCPS kids are both in-pool and in AAP.  AAP includes 20% of the kids per eligible grade level.  The remaining 13.3% of the kids in AAP  had scores in the 120s or even lower.  The AART at my kids' school flat out said in the parent presentations that parents should refer any kid with over 120 on any subsection of CogAT.  If the kid is above average, the school will support their application packet, and most of those will get admitted by the central committee.  [b]The AAP equity report pretty deliberately hid the CogAT composite data of admitted kids, but the subscore data they released was honestly quite low.  It should be quite apparent to everyone that the majority of kids in AAP are merely somewhat above average[/b].  [/quote]

Agree that the AAP report was surprising and I found the test scores to be surprisingly far below the "old" cutoffs.  Clustering makes sense, in that light, when coupled with center schools for kids nearer to or above the cutoffs.[/quote]

Yeah.  The big problem is that the overwhelming majority of AAP kids are only slightly advanced and somewhat above average, yet the parents of those kids are the ones fighting tooth and nail against clustering and LLIV.  They're convinced that their somewhat above average kids simply can't have their needs met among the unwashed masses, and that their kids are somehow better than or more worthy than the LIII kids from whom they are indistinguishable.  [/quote]

The issue in our cluster school has nothing to do with level III kids.  I would be happy to see my kid in a separate class with a combination of Level III and Level IV students.  My issue is that our local program only provides Level IV material (beyond the math component) three days a week--sometimes two, depending on the AART's availability.  [/quote]

A lot of people do not feel this way.  There have been numerous threads and comments in this forum about how the parents don't want their kid in a standard LLIV classroom, because they want their kid only with centrally placed LIV kids and not any principal placed LLIV kids.  [/quote]

I haven't seen any comments in this thread like that- what I have seen is some parents saying they don't like the LLIV cluster model. Some schools may cluster by filling a class out with LIII kids, but some just fill out classes with everyone.

Our ES told us they were looking at a model where they would split the LIV kids across all classes in the grade, and the other LIV kids in their class would learn LIV content as a cluster. I asked how many LIV kids per grade they usually had, and the answer was 6. Six kids split across 5 classes, and the rest not filled in w LIII, just with everyone.

We're not arrogant enough to think that the poor teacher is going to spend a lot of time teaching our solo kid a separate curriculum when she has 24 other kids to teach. We want our kid with a cohort that will give the teacher the ability to teach faster and more in depth. That could be all LIV kids, or a mix of LIII and LIV, but it's really not in the totally heterogeneous classroom [/quote]

Our school is doing clustering by teaching the AAP curriculum to everyone and offering advanced ways to answer the questions to the more advanced kids. So whereas the General Ed, LII and III kids might answer an essay question with a paragraph, the LLIV kids can go deeper, do additional research, and write an essay. If they are doing a group project, the teachers will group the LLIV kids together so they can do a more complex answer. They also switch kids for math which has the added benefit of getting them ready to switch classes in middle school -- I heard this is one critique that middle schools have of LLIV programs that kids are together with the same cohort of 20-25 people for three years and then really struggle when they hit middle school with different kids in every class.[/quote]

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