Reply to Did the Takoma MS magnet got MORE white this year?

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Did the Takoma MS magnet got MORE white this year?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think people want easy answers, and there aren't any.

It would be EASY to just use CogAT or a similar test to "fine tune" peer groups, but that assumes CoGAT is the right tool for identifying gifted kids, and/or kids with a large amount of potential.

We all know that the smartest kids we went to school with are not necessarily the most successful today, and, as young people get older, working hard and staying focused becomes almost as important as having "gifts."

Additionally, there are multiple ways to be "gifted" and giftedness is often present in some areas and not others. This means that tests like the CogAT will be "spiky" for some kids, which makes an easy solution hard.

If you take the kid who has a 99% across the board but leave behind the kid who has a 99.99999% on one subtest but a 75% in another, does that serve the second kid?

These are HARD questions, and we haven't even touched the ways in which the tests themselves are culturally biased.

I know we all want a hard and fast rule, but that's not how life works.

[/quote]
I agree with a lot of what you say.  I think that for the CES programs it definitely makes sense to include as many children who show "promise" even if it is just in one area.  The middle and high school programs are really programs for kids who are not just gifted but also high achieving.  They are very challenging academic programs with a heavy work load and high teacher expectations.  A "spiky" kid or a kid who is really into one subject but is not otherwise engaged in school would have a tough time.  There are some kids like this who are so exceptional that there is no other place in the school system for them and they should be in the magnet programs but this is a relatively small group of kids.
I am not sure that is what happened this year.  It sounds like a lot of 99+ kids were passed over not because there were spiky kids in other schools who deserved those spots but simply because of where they lived.    [/quote]

To use a personal example, I have a spiky kid who is well served by the CES program because her spikes are in language-based areas. It isn't that she's "not otherwise engaged in" school. It is that she is off the charts in one area, and above average but pretty normal for DC in others. So a selection process where you would need to be at 99% in all subtests would leave her behind, but she actually desperately needs enrichment in the areas where she's really quite different than many peers.

I'm not saying that the program should be structured around kids like mine. I'm saying that I don't think kids like mine are that unusual. Sometimes it's the opposite - a kid who builds computers and codes games for fun but who is just normal in writing.

I really hope we can find a system that still "sees" kids like that. I actually think the current system does a decent job of making room for "spiky" kids in specialized programs like CAP or SMAC. I'd hate to lose that. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics