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

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The MCPS percentage is what is calculated based on the performance of students in the "bands" of low, moderate, high.  And that seems likely based on the school the student is currently in, not home school.  But when the assessment for cohort or "outlier" status is made, the student is looked at with students that will attend the same home middle school.  The MCPS percentage is one data point, but not the only data point, that they will look at in deciding who is an "outlier."  And in deciding who is an "outlier" the student will be compared with other students slated to attend the home MS.

That is my understanding of how this MCPS percentage thing fits in with the rest of the evaluation process.
[/quote]

They use the band-weighted score from the ES level to then compare all incoming middle school students.  That's how score weighting works.  They assume that, if you attended a less poor ES, then you got a superior education and your scores are not directly equivalent to someone who went to a richer school.  This does not take into account the entire purpose of the CES, which assumes that the educational process is improved over the home school (although, they did change the name away from "Highly Gifted Center" for a reason).  CES students are not weighted for their grades in a more difficult program; an A is an A.

So if someone in a rich school sends their student to a poorer school CES, gets a more "enriched" experience, then is weighted higher for the same score as someone who stayed at the home school, they are more likely to be pushed out of the cohort band into "outlier" status.  Similarly, a CES student in that situation who may have raw scores lower than the local rich school may be bumped into the cohort, rather than being an outlier (but I still hold that they shouldn't have been qualified for the magnet pull-out by being a low performer outlier).  The same process (but in reverse) is true for students in CESs that are richer than their home school.  Under the current rules, you are definitely better off staying at your home school to increase odds of fair consideration to the magnets, and give up the CES.

They should either drop the CES program altogether and make a local CES in every school, just compare the raw scores to other students at the same middle school (without weighting by ES), or just take the top students from each ES.

At our home middle school, there are a total of [b]10 CES students[/b] in the elementary school area covered by the PCES/Oak View CESs (6 at PCES, 4 at OVES).  [b]Only 1 [/b]of the 10 was invited to either magnet (invited to both).  At our home ES, we know of one student invited to Eastern and one invited to TPMS, and that's just one of the 3 local ESs (there are claims that at least one student was invited for each program from each ES).  That means that, of the 20 students required for a cohort at the MS, (presuming that all CES students were in the cohort group), [u]more than half[/u] are coming from the local schools, and the odds of being invited to a magnet are HIGHER if you stayed at the home school.  The numbers don't lie.  Whether the weighting made a difference is unclear, and is seems from posts above that the magnet office won't answer that, but clearly the CES students are not getting the "enrichment" that was promised (or those 9 remaining students would not be part of the home middle school cohort), or are being helped at the elementary level for grades 4/5, only to be screwed over for middle school because they are now at the same level from having been in the same classes for 2 years.

It should also be noted that math is not a consideration for the elementary CESs, but it is for the STEM middle school.  I know that, for math, there was no individual enrichment for math 4/5 in my DC's class last year, but there has been quite a bit for this year's 5/6 class.  However, the enrichment (and subsequent significant bump in the winter MAP-M scores) was not in time for the September testing for the fall MAP-M.

The CES students who have their compacted math in 4th and 5th grades supposedly randomly assigned to the non-CES teacher (because one class-full of local non-magnet students is mixed in, so they have to add another teacher for compacted math) regularly complain that the non-CES teacher is not providing the speed and level of enrichment that the CES teachers provide.  This is another example of local inequities in the CES program that causes issues for CES students applying to the middle schools.[/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