Reply to How is it possible that Walt Whitman high school has a score of 4 on greatschools.org??

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "How is it possible that Walt Whitman high school has a score of 4 on greatschools.org??"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

I don't care if Whitman students tank a test. I guess I care, as a member of society, if a teacher/administrator told them to tank a test. I do care when people use the lower test scores of the non-western/wealthy/white high schools in the county to show that the non-western/wealthy/white high schools are no good (or that the students who attend the non-western/wealthy/white high schools are no good) but discount the lower test scores of Whitman on grounds that the students could have done well if they'd felt like it.[/quote]

This.  How many posters on here from the W schools use the Greatschools rankings to impugn the high schools east of 270?  Now they want a mulligan from the rankings because their snowflakes were told to take a dive on the test.  Nobody takes glee in a school's rankings plummeting.  But some of us do take great joy in seeing a ridiculous double standard exposed.[/quote]

It isn't really a double standard.  I double standard would be saying that inability to do well on the test east of 270 reflects poorly on those students/schools/families, but the inability to do well on the test somehow doesn't reflect the same of Whitman students/schools/families.

But it appears that many Whitman students made a conscious decision to do poorly on the test that one year, given the dramatic one year drop and the equally dramatic rise back to normal score levels.  A conscience decision to fail the test is not the same as the inability to pass it despite one's best efforts.

One can very reasonably argue that consciously failing a test raised all sorts of issues about Whitman and its students/families in which they may not look good overall and/or relative to their peers elsewhere in the county.  But that is a different issue.[/quote]

Except it isn't realistic for that to happen at DCC schools year after year - not because those students are inferior - but because it is very unlikely something like this would happen repeatedly.  You would need a group of students to make the same decision, year after year.  If you believ this was teacher initiated, you would need it to again happen year after year.  Apparently the students and/or teachers at Whitman would read the riot act and the scores went up again this year.  I would absolutely believe that a DCC school who had a one year dramatic drop was due to tanking, but that isn't what is occurred.  That also means there isn't a double standard.

Maybe those in the DCC realized the tests don't matter years before obedient sheep west of 270 figured it out for one year and then complied again.

The fact that never crossed some readers' minds is the double standard.  [/quote][/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