Reply to What is the real reason MCPS uses Lottery for Middle School Magnet Program

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[quote=Anonymous]+1 to the above.  There are a LOT of kids who would benefit from current GT programming, not just the top 1-2%.  Not every GT kid should be getting all As to demonstrate their need (or getting all As once in GT classes) -- there just needs to be a reliable and equitable way to identify those who would benefit.  However, there is an artificial scarcity of available GT seats.  This needs to change.

There may be a few (perhaps in the top 1%, but not necessarily, depending on the overall profileof their peers), who would not benefit only from typical GT programming, but are so greatly gifted in one or multiple subjects that they need extraordinary measures (grade advancement is one option, but shouldn't be the only one) to address their learning needs.

If a magnet is the venue in which such measures are best managed, then that should be the nature of the magnet, both in terms of population served and classes offered to meet the need.  It is a terrible and inequitable situation that not all schools offer access to GT programming addressing the needs of the many, many who would benefit from acceleration/enrichment.  There are courses, to be sure, but they are not uniformly available, and they do not employ the level of rigor and enrichment necessary to challenge these students.  This makes families scratch and claw for magnets -- their children may not be suited to that environment (when properly configured to address the needs of the greatest outliers), but their alternative is to be underserved, themselves.  Again, this needs to change.

Conducting a lottery under pandemic conditions, where measures available were highly uncertain, may have been necessary.  Conducting them in the current environment calls into question whether MCPS is committed to identifying/meeting GT need or is not truly interested indoing so, despite law and policy requiring it.  As far as the MCPS local norming methodology feeding that lottery goes, the post on page 23 describes it to some extent (look for "MCPS makes things clear as mud..."), but MCPS needs to step up and provide that in a clear, more detailed and official mammer.  Anyone posting here that they have done so without linking to a website where that could easily be confirmed is being disingenuous.

Regarding the percentile versus a normal distribution/gaussian distribution/bell curve, the curve is what is typically seen in raw score data -- a few outliers at either end building towards a bulge in the middle.  Not all raw data fits such a curve, though, and there are alternate distributions (with different shapes) that might be expected depending on the item being measured and the undelying characteristics of a population being studied.  Some, bit not all, of these distributions can be run through a transfrom (e.g., logarithmic transform) that result in more of a bell shape; these, then, might be analyzed by statistical tools developed for gaussian distributions, keeping in mind that a reverse of the transform/analysis would need to be conducted to speak in terms of the original/raw measurements.

A population percentile, OTOH, is just what it sounds like.  85th percentile means that 15% of the population studied exceeded that particular score (or, probabilistically, that score would be representative of an individual compared to whom one would expect 15% of the population to do better).  99th percentile, generally, (100th percentile is never reported, as there is the consideration that some individual might always score higher) represents the top 1% of scores.  Or 1/15 of the top 15% of scores.  A raw score in the 99th percentile may be way out there on the curve, and that may be what confused the earlier poster suggesting the top 1% were somehow less than 1/15th or the top 15%.[/quote]

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