Reply to MCPS to end areawide Blair Magnet and countywide Richard Montgomery's IB program

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Reply to "MCPS to end areawide Blair Magnet and countywide Richard Montgomery's IB program"

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[quote=Anonymous]So I have a question.  What are the admissions criteria for the SMCS and RMIB programs, and do they actually serve the top 1-2%, high-potential kids across the county of all backgrounds roughly equally?

Because if they do, then I think it's right to have a special program for those kids-- there are real outliers like that in every school, and bringing them all together in a cohort of one or two programs could make sense.

But is that really what these programs are?  From what I've seen in lower grades, MCPS isn't great at actually identifying the most gifted kids and instead uses exposure based things like MAP scores and the like, which disproportionately select kids from good elementary and middle schools and kids whose families supplement and support them outside of school.  And based on the stats MCPS shared, these are disproportionately WJ, Wootton, and Churchill kids, which lines right up with that.

If the countywide magnets are essentially just helping 95th percentile kids from rich areas get more advantages than top 1-2% kids from poor areas because they select based on exposure rather than intelligence and capacity, that's a huge issue.  At that point you might as well just make sure that top 5% kids from all schools get access and throw out the countywide model entirely.

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