Reply to Why is Winter Break so short?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]What about families with limited income which cannot afford to send their kids to camps and costly afterschool classes? Not everybody has resources to do things you listed above. It is too bad that many people give up on the school system and have to spend their own money.[/quote]

As far as I can tell there is NO WAY to change MCPS. The administration has struck gold with all its focus on standardized testing. They "blame" NCLB but in reality they have constructed their own incentive system that fuels them to only focus what is on the test. The individual school principals compete against others in their cluster for fractions of a percentile point. The financial administrators fuel this even more as more test prep time means less expenditures on PE, science, art, or drama facilities and less spending on any special teachers who understand math or foreign languages.

Teachers are not afforded any creativity to make material come alive or given support and training to learn how to do this. Its easy to shoot for mediocrity across the board by being overly prescriptive and overly focused on administrative tasks than to nurture and support great teachers.

The Parents Coaltion seems like a bunch of loons. I don't care about pouring over MCPS finances to make sure that they never collected $10 from parents. Heck, I would happily donate thousands to schools across the system for some science supplies, some foreign language instruction, or extra PE or recess time. The PTA are focused on entertainment only and barred by legislatuion from fundraising for anything that actually impacts the course instruction. Since this is the case, it only attracts the social moms who don't have an interest in changing the system.

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