Reply to If you can afford parochial/ private, why do you stay in MCPS?

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "If you can afford parochial/ private, why do you stay in MCPS?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In the Whitman cluster with ES kids. We are generally happy with our teachers and love our school community, but classes for my kindergartner and 4th grader have 25+ kids. The administrators are also extremely frustrating communicators and under qualified. My oldest needed some additional assistance learning to read, which we accomplished through after school tutoring. I am not sure we are quite ready to switch to private school quite yet, but my spouse is.

If you can afford parochial or private school, why do you keep your kids in MCPS?[/quote]
We took one out and still have one in. The one in is mainly because of friends, but also we cannot afford two in private. They have a good cohort that they developed through CES and I feel good that the kids themselves are stronger than the school system itself. However I do worry about and think about it every day.

The private school experience has been a godsend in many ways but also a lot different than public in other ways that also makes me uncomfortable. [b]For example, through the combination of MAP testing and conferences you get a very good idea in MCPS where your kid is objectively in terms of their development and where they sit vis-a-via their classmates. [/b]This has felt more opaque at the private school and I would suspect that they make those comparisons difficult by design. On the other hand, a huge benefit of the difference in private versus public is that we don’t need to feel constantly on guard and hovering over everything. In MCPS it feels like you are penalized for not helicoptering and not being constantly in communication with the school and teachers, even if they treat you like you are being a PITA.

With that said, in ES in particular when both were in MCPS, we expended a lot on outside tutoring.

For what it’s worth, a lot of kids at the private live in the Whitman cluster. So you would not be alone in making that choice.

Good luck OP. It’s a hard decision and it’s different for everyone. I would honestly love to leave MCPS completely in the rear view mirror if I could. [/quote]

Private schools offer standardized testing are are very transparent with results.  The big difference is most students do well on the testing whereas at MCPS the learning loss has been abysmal.  [/quote]
I’m the PP you are responding to and my kid that is in one of the top privates in DC does not have testing. By contrast, with MAP testing the kids get the results immediately and compare scores and we also get the report to contextual the scores in terms of nationally and the district. When I combine that objective data with the subjective responses from teachers during conferences I don’t feel that there is a lot of ambiguity about where they stand in MCPS. The problem with MCPS though is that it’s hard to get direct and honest feedback about improvement. Teachers like to talk retrospectively but not prospectively. When I ask about areas of improvement it’s always the same, “your kid is doing great”. Which I understand from their perspective because they have to deal with a lot of different educational levels and behavioral issues in the classroom.  But they never really give objective feedback about what my kid needs to do to reach the next level.

By contrast, the private school is actually very good about this kind of feedback but, for obvious reasons, is loathe to provide objective or comparative information so it’s hard to get a sense where the kid sits vis-a-vis other kids in the class. Presumably all of the kids in the private school compare favorably nationally.

There is a lot of things you can criticize MCPS for and there are a lot of reasons why so much testing is bad. But there are also reasons why it can be good. [/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