Reply to MoCo is diverse, for sure, but MCPS schools are not

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Reply to "MoCo is diverse, for sure, but MCPS schools are not"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I support paying taxes. I support allocating non-traditional educational resources such as food, healthcare etc within schools with higher poverty to address the problem. I support giving more resources to schools with poverty for smaller classes, special programs, more ESL etc.

However, there is a balance and Montgomery County needs to provide a good educational program for ALL the kids. While the lower SES schools have a 12:1 K ratio, the higher performing schools have 28:1. This is more than twice and 28 is way too high for any K class. The standards for the curriculum and level of challenge has been lowered so badly by 2.0 to allow the lower performing schools to claim success that kids from higher performing school who come into K with age appropriate skills are doing less than they did in preschool. This is not OK. Forcing my kids to sit on a bus for several hours a day and lose the neighborhood connection to a school just to mask over the housing segregation is not OK. The day this happens is the day everyone moves out of the county. [/quote]

I haven't concluded for myself that 2.0 is all about lowering standards and thereby shrinking the achievement gap, but I agree with everything else you say.  To read this thread, one might conclude that the county is not doing anything to help ease the differences that spring from neighborhood differences.  But these housing differentials exist in every community and has persisted for decades nationwide.  It's a vast problem that every community has struggled with.  To suggest that tackling this problem is the silver bullet is to ignore so many other incremental solutions that can be employed in every school.  Title I is a piece of that, and it's what allows lower SES schools to have extra funding and smaller classes to tackle the problems that higher poverty brings.  I just looked at a bunch of MCPS maps, and it's clear that there's been a lot of effort to put high density housing (apartments, condos, etc...) into high-performing school districts on the west side of the county...but there's a limit to how much change can be effected by moving one Gaithersburg neighborhood into another Gaitherburg cluster, or moving a Rockville neighborhood into a Potomac or G'burg cluster.  Unless you're talking about large-scale busing, that's not going to help low SES kids in Silver Spring.  Or it might help a few with dedicated and "squeaky wheel" parents in Title I schools -- but frankly, those parents' kids are not the ones who are most vulnerable.

I think most people want to do the right thing to help struggling kids in struggling schools, but it doesn't help the dialog to tell the wealthier residents that they're selfish and bigoted against the poor and the nonwhite for having good schools, to blame every "illegal" for...everything, or to claim the county administrators don't give a damn.  It's a big county with a lot of people and a lot of divergent needs -- there are balances to be calibrated and maybe if we spent as much time writing our elected officials (from the loacl school board on up) and getting educated on the issues as we do bitching on this board, the system could find the right balance more quickly.[/quote]

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