Reply to Teacher “recommendation”/input necessary for AAP admissions, but not allowed for TJ admissions

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[quote=Anonymous]I wish we hadn't gotten away from the teacher recommendations conversation here.

I think we have to get them back but that it has to be done intelligently and with an eye toward minimizing 1) the load on middle school teachers to write them and 2) the impact of experience in recommendation writing on the evaluation of the applicant. That is to say, you don't want to have a kid whose application is negatively impacted because their rec didn't come from Vern Williams or Eugene Huang.

My thought process would be to design them to be used to evaluate applicants from the same school against each other to help determine that top 1-1.5% (I am strongly pro-reform but in favor of a 1% threshold while still considering underrepresented school status as part of the holistic evaluation).

You use a Likert scale, but you ask the teachers to evaluate each of the students based on how they fit in the context of their current class and, in some rare cases, in the history of their student population. And the metrics you ask them to evaluate on go well beyond the standard evaluation of content area knowledge and include things like "intellectual curiosity", "contributions to the classroom", "collaborative instincts", and the like.

And lastly, you afford each teacher the opportunity to write on an open-ended basis about a maximum of, say, three students - and with the ability to do so either positively or negatively (to spare TJ from, for example, a problematic parent or a student who is a strongly suspected cheater).

As I've said before, it is absurd to attempt to select the most worthy students from a school with no input from the classroom teachers at that school - and while we're at it, there should be an affordance for the Student Services department to write on behalf of a small group of students as well.[/quote]

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