Reply to MCPS percentiles based on current school and not county or home school?

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[quote=Anonymous]I completely agree with universal screening.  Several parents have said that they didn't even know their kid was that smart, so they wouldn't have applied under the old system, and ESOL parents often did not understand or know about the process at all.  However, the next step of instituting the "cohort" thing, where lower-level students may be chosen due to there being enough kids left over, is silly.  Not to mention, the whole point of the CES was to give an enriched educational opportunity to the outliers at their home schools, so the cohort rules penalize them for doing so now that they've been homogenized within their CES classes to create new cohorts, leaving those who stayed behind, even though they had an objectively easier curriculum (the very basis of the CES) as being more likely to be selected as outliers for middle school.  (Our 4th grade CES teacher specifically said that an "A" on the report card means meeting the CES-level advanced curriculum, and it is harder to get an A in the CES than in the regular classes.  This is not taken into account in the magnet screening at all.)

I'd propose that, after the universal screening and CogAt, each ES can send X students to fill the TPMS and Eastern seats (the same for Clemente and MLK upcounty), the same X TPMS and Eastern local seats are reserved (not the 25 current seats reserved at TPMS or the 10 or so at Eastern).  Those top X students (by local ES, not CES) are invited, the next 2 are waitlisted on a school-by-school basis (one kid at school declined, kid X+1 gets invited).  That would encourage desegregation, as people who think their child may be just below the cutoff may move to areas they think would be less competitive.  It would also pull the top talent from all over the county, which is similar to what they did with the current group of CES 5th graders this year, who were identified as high-performing outliers by their teachers.

This proposal removes teacher bias (which was one of the county's objectives), still rewards the top students at each school, provides universal screening, pulls top talent from every area in the county regardless of SES (to presumably get a larger racial mix), and does not penalize those who attended a CES for 4th and 5th grades.

It also does not overly reward those who are local to the magnet schools, as they still get to send their own top X students.  In particular, PBES and ESS, which are both local TPMS schools, would have equal numbers entering TPMS, rather than the local class basically being just the PBES CES group, as it is this year now that the first PBES-local CES is going to middle school.[/quote]

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