Reply to Is CogAT gone forever?

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Reply to "Is CogAT gone forever?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Love the tongue-in-cheek, above.

It's easy for families with considerable means to encourage/require their children to prep for SATs.  It's not a guarantee, but you do see plenty of 1400+, if not 1500+, among families that do so.

As with many things, it's possible for families not of considerable means to do so, but it is considerably more difficult, and the family focus on education isn't always there to make such pursuit at all likely.

Does this mean outside enrichment/prep is bad?  No, far from it.  It just means that we shouldn't be taking scores on more preppable tests as clear indicators of a student's ability (especially in the absence of or to the diminishment of other factors), but, rather, as indicators of achievement and exposure.  And that's not to say that [i]no[/i] students of high ability would score highly on achievement/exposure-dominant testing; just not all high ability kids would, and we don't want to leave those kids with their needs unaddressed.

I'd argue that such indicators are better suited to decisions about acceleration, while less preppable/"gameable" indicators are better suited to decisions about enrichment programs.  It's almost certain that blended heuristics utilizing both measures of capability and measures of achievement/exposure would be best, perhaps even using different heuristics for the different approaches.  This would be more likely to meet actual student needs, and I hope it would better identify those needs across varying populations.

That gatekeeping comment from before sticks with me.  While whichever selection paradigm is chosen becomes a de facto gate, it occurs to me that overreliance on more gameable metrics in MCPS decisions introduces a gate effectively managed, to a great extent, by those with means, even if not in a particularly organized/cabalistic [non-religious/culturally specific definition, there] fashion.[/quote]
+1 Just because you can prep for gatekeeper tests like cogat, sat, etc, doesn't mean people know how to do it well. UMCs are more likely to know how to test prep well and will push their kids hard to do so. Then they will try to hoard acceleration/enrichment opportunities, while trying to close the gate to URMs, labeling them as "unworthy" because their scores were not as high. I think the lottery as it stands seems reasonable, though they should double the number of seats available.[/quote]

Yes, many kids could easily do magnet-level work. It's more about who is interested than anything. The artificial scarcity they have currently is bizarre and unfortunate.[/quote]

+1. Also, it is not the UMCs trying to hoard/close the gate on URMs. I’d love to see data on URMs who were offered spots from the lottery and turned the opportunity down. I suspect the number is high. You can’t tell people what to want or value, or whether switching schools or adding a commute is worth it. At the end of the day, they literally identify all the students who “need enrichment” in this process. So then why not meet their identified needs at all the local schools?[/quote]

Except that, in the face of scarcity, UMCs and other demographic groups [i]do[/i] effectively hoard by gaming achievement/exposure metrics more prevalently.  This simply means non-gamers, which URMs are more prone to be than UMCs, have a lower overall chance of selection at an equivalent level of ability, whether they accept or not.

The prior, brief paradigm of leaving those with local cohorts at their local schools had some promise, but would have to have faithfully mirrored the magnet experience, which I don't think they really envisioned, much less achieved.

Also, despite larger cohorts expected at some schools, local numbers identified would vary more greatly than magnet-catchment wide (law of large numbers).  This could mean either periodic over-resourcing at schools with expected cohorts (another kind of inequity) or whiplash there-one-year-gone-the-next staffing for those enriched local classes.  There needs to be some flexibility in the paradigm to avoid such managerial hurdles that likely also would be disfavored by the teaching staff involved.

MCPS has made some moves in the AEI space, but there seems to be institutional opposition, with rollouts too slow, programs too incomplete, local implementations too varied and identification/selection too poorly conceived.  They have not put enough in place to meet the overall need with consistency and fidelity.[/quote]

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