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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]college admissions can be influenced by the wealth of the parents who donate to alma mater.  Legacy is not merit, even though in this country you can become a POTUS without any merit.

Doesn't matter where your kid goes to school. If their AP/IB scores and SAT scores are less than that of someone from a lesser rated school then they are not higher achieving.  What are you going to do with the school ranking? Bake it in a pie?

What is your own kid's ranking and how do they stack up against other students?[/quote]

As a Churchill parent, I agree with the above post. I only know our cluster and if Churchill is considered to be a top school in MCPS then all of MCPS is crap.

Kids at Churchill will always do well as a whole because parents are engaged and they can afford to supplement. Parents pay $2,000 for SAT or ACT test prep. Obviously that influences scores. When teachers struggle to teach a class they do not have the basic knowledge to teach (ie Math Department) parents hire tutors.[b] If I had to do it all over again, I would have bought a house in a cheaper area and sent my kids to private school especially when the 2.0 disaster was rolled out[/b].

Don't fool yourself if you think the quality of the education is better at W schools than the rest of the county.[/quote]

We did just that.

Bought in ganglandia, supplemented heavily, did private in very early years, send them to magnet(sorry, they got selected because they are so precious).....and realized that magnet curriculum as taught by mcps teachers was above average only by MCPS standards.  So we continued to teach them, supplement and enrich at home.

The one critical advantage of the magnet programs is that it brings talented students and dedicated parents together in one place. If you have good teachers then they can make a significant impact. Unfortunately, in the magnet programs and in the top W schools - there is no dearth of substandard teachers who are cruising by because the parents will make up for the teachers deficiencies by teaching at home.  
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I don’t doubt private is great in the early years, but if the magnet programs are so mediocre, why is the college matriculation so excellent from them? It rivals the matriculation from any private school.[/quote]

My friend recently went on a college tour with his daughter, and the info session leader (at an Ivy) actually mentioned Montgomery County Public Schools by name. The official (an admissions guy) first asked if anyone on the tour was from this county. When no one was (my friend lives in CT) they said this: In some places, AP classes don’t mean as much as others, and we expect your child to take the most rigorous schedule available for that reason. They mentioned MCPS as an example, because they know that the students in our county take way more AP classes than kids do in other places, and also that as a result they’re not as indicative of ability as they would be elsewhere. In other words, they now expect MCPS students to take a huge number of APs because they’re not really harder than average classes would be elsewhere. The teachers in MCPS are told to teach to the middle/bottom of their clssses, even in AP courses. I think that’s pretty telling. In a county of this size with so many educated families, it stands to follow that we’ll still send a good number of students to top colleges, but that doesn’t mean MCPS schools will continue to be viewed as the most rigorous by universities. I’d argue that the county is damaging its reputation with its approach to educating kids who need extra challenge, and in the meantime piling unnecessary pressure on everyone else for no reason.[/quote]

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