Reply to MCPS is cuttting compacted math and cohorted literacy enrichment

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]So admittedly I am far removed from my own high school experience and my kids are still in ES, but the MS/HS math pathways surprised me a bit- do kids no longer take geometry and trig?

Pre-calc in 9th also seems a bit crazy to me (again this is coming from someone who graduated in the 90s where "accelerated" meant pre-calc in 11th and AP Calc in 12th).  But I don't understand what some of these students are meant to take in 12th if they've already had two years of calculus by then.[/quote]

When I went to a W school in the 90s, the accelerated path was 11th graders took Calculus AB then took BC in 12th grader.  When I glanced at the slides yesterday, it looks like that path is still there.

Anything above that, students went to Montgomery College for the math courses back then.[/quote]

MC has a lot of rules for doing advanced classes and told me no for my child.  They wanted her to start back to Calc 1, saying that the Calc in MCPS may not be good enough.  No way.  They were really nasty about it.[/quote]

This was back then in the 90s and really less then five students per year that I knew about that went that route.  Like honestly sometimes maybe one or two students.  And those students were like top tier.  Like getting 1600 on their SATs without taking a prep course, having high prestigous jobs now, etc.  Also I forgot to mention that I think AP Stat was an option as well back then.

But you'll see that a lot of schools aren't accepting AP scores for credits anymore.  They really got cheapened when schools found out that was a factor in high school ratings and tried to get as many students as possible to take the exams.  [b]Like some schools won't give credit for AP scores anymore.  At the most they'll let students take an advanced level of the course instead.  ie instead of giving them credit for Math 101 and going to the next math course of Math 201, they'll place them in Math 105 and put them on track to take Math 205, the next year.[/b]

Which makes it even more sad when looking at the low college ready proficiency rates that some schools at MCPS has for their AP or IB scores.[/quote]

I took APs in the 80s, and my kids have taken them recently.  I don't think what you're saying is true.  Many colleges (fancy private ones) never gave credit for APs.  I got zero credit for all my fives.  Big schools still give lots of credit for 4s/5s -- my niece went into Berkeley as a sophomore with her credits.  
I also don't think the APs have gotten easier, comparing what i took to what my kids take.  It's true that a lot more kids take them.  I think it's also true that kids are going in more prepared.  We didn't have things like Heimler's Videos on youtube to prepare us -- [b]if you had a good teacher, you were prepared[/b] and could get that 5, and if you had a not great teacher, you basically weren't prepared and would probably get a 3.  Now, every kid can be prepared [b]if they want to put in the extra time[/b], because there are good teachers posting their lessons online for free and sample tests posted online etc.  So there's a lot more opportunity to actually learn the content.  So I don't have a problem with that.

I do have a problem with the dumbing down of English curricula in supposedly honors classes -- that's where I think kids are really being cheated with today's system.[/quote]

DP.  Combine these notions and supplement with the notions that:

1) a cohort of similarly abled students large enough to make a full class facilitates provisioning (staffing, budgeting, etc.) for a school

2) such a cohort, along with that greater manageability and resulting budgetary flexibility for an individual school (under current MCPS budgeting paradigms), tends to draw more highly competent teachers

3) with current MCPS identification practices, which are disproportionately influenced by resource-requiring early outside enrichment, and with relatively high principal autonomy facilitating differential response to local family pressure (also highly correlated with family resource levels) for exceptions to allow cohort building/advancement, such large cohorts appear at local schools in wealthier areas in greatly disproportionate levels

We arrive at the realization that allusions to freely available outside resources for Calculus study as a salve for teaching quality issues are something of a platitude that distracts from attention to systemic inequity.

It's a shame that MCPS's new approach has not been presented with reasonably deep explanation as to how it would deliver excellence with equity.[/quote]

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