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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]From the sound of some of these posts, parents are more concerned about the status of getting into Eastern or Takoma than the actual classroom experience their children will have. Why this immediate assumption that enriched classes at home middle schools won’t be good? Are the Takoma and Eastern classes taught by Harvard faculty? They are all MCPS middle school teachers. Some of them move from teaching at one school to teaching at another every year. They’re all qualified. [b]There’s no reason they can’t teach good enriched classes.[/b][/quote]

Sure, that should be true at W feeder schools or where a class full of CES students (Carson, Stonegate, Matsunaga, etc.) was rejected from magnets, there will be plenty of high achievers left behind to form an enriched class that can be fast-moving and appeal to all of the high achievers.  But lots of the local MS, especially in the DCC, do not have a student population that supports a cohort that can learn at that level.  Even the best teacher in MCPS has to make sure that her students are keeping up.  Maybe 10 are sufficiently advanced (and at some schools, that's pushing it), but the teacher has to slow down for the other 10+.  Last year, when they determined the cohorts, they did not take into account people who can leave moving, getting into a lottery MS, or appealing and getting into a magnet off of the waitlist.  The magnet waitlist is not based on local schools or cohorts - it's a straight-up lottery, and being unranked means there's too much uncertainty to build a future.  Therefore, by the time the school year started, at some DCC middle schools, there were significantly fewer than 20 students left for the originally-defined cohort, so the spots were filled with students from the next tier down based on elementary school recommendations.

There's also the simple fact that the magnet decision committee refuses to publish how they define a "cohort" and how they define an outlier.  I get there being 20+ students in the 95+% (i.e., 2 standard deviations) in some of the W feeder schools, but that's simply not the case for many DCC schools.[/quote]

Um, you claim to know a great deal about "lots of" or "some" or "many" DCC middle schools. Do you work for MCPS, or are you just making stuff up?[/quote]

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