Reply to LEMON ROAD AAP CENTER

Forum Index » Advanced Academic Programs (AAP)

Reply to "LEMON ROAD AAP CENTER"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Shrevewood is our base school, and if our son is admitted to AAP we will be sending him to the Lemon Road center.  Years (okay, decades) ago, Lemon Road was my base school and I went to the center at Haycock.  Haycock's center at the time was only modestly larger than Lemon Road's is today.  It was one of the most valuable experiences of my life (yes, an ES experience stands at the top of my most valuable life experiences, it was that good), and a major part of its value was having a larger mass of AAP students in a school-within-a-school.  I don't think that Shrevewood's 12 or so LLIV students per grade provides enough of an opportunity to interact with other students and a variety of teachers.  LLIV makes sense for schools that have enough level 4 students to create what amounts to a local center (e.g., Chesterbrook).  But I'm a strong proponent of supporting the centers.  I don't like how smaller LLIV programs at Shrevewood and Westgate are peeling off students from the center at Lemon Road.  I strongly encourage parents with children that are eligible for the center to send their kids there.

Candidly, I think one of the reasons that individual school administrations want LLIV programs is to keep the test scores up.  FCPS's center-based AAP system boosts the SOL scores of the schools with centers at the expense of schools that don't have centers.  A school without a center or LLIV program loses between 15-20% of its best students to a center starting in third grade--which is when SOLs start.  This obviously dampens test scores at the non-center school.  And it artificially inflates scores at the school with the center.  For example, Lemon Road was a "7" on GreatSchools before the center opened.   In the first year with a center, it shot up to "10."  The principal at Lemon Road no doubt noted this, which might be why he has suddenly been promoting the center (even though rumor had it that he was skeptical about the center at first).

I don't say this to criticize the school administrators.  They are under massive pressure to keep test scores up.  In a perfect world, they would be rewarded for how much they help students who can't pass the tests.  But they aren't.  They're evaluated based on raw numbers.  So naturally there's competition for the best students.  [/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