Reply to APS is failing my gifted child

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Meeting your profoundly gifted child is more than just challenging them in spelling or math. It's also socializing them, giving them the opportunity to find solutions to being bored, teaching them to exist with others who may be different from them. It's about [u]PE, and recess, and music, and art class[/u]. Not just math and reading. It's all the things.  [/quote]

All those are dumbed down as well in elementary school. At least in our APS experience.

PE is about silly things such as coordination or stretching (juggling with silks anyone?) and not about competition games and improving skills: not to say that kids shouldn't learn those things but gym class is not for that, maybe some kind of physical therapy or something.

Most playgrounds in schools don't have actual playground equipment anymore (no swings, no tall slides, etc.) and just have that giant plastic behemoth that's mostly useless. Plus there's limited time to do anything meaningful.

Music is literally not taught at any level that would be considered enriching (except maybe at ATS??). Even the junior honors band level is not that great overall.

[b]And art class is a complete joke that teaches no actual art technique except gluing and coloring. 
[/b]
They don't want to push the gifted and talented kids, or even the gen ed kids, because the county has a perverse mission to not exclude anyone in their one size fits all classrooms. Can't hurt anyone's feelings I guess.[/quote]

Amen to this. My kid did better art projects through CKLA than she did in actual art class. It got so bad even her regular teacher was complaining about the art teacher just phoning it in with coloring sheets.

People are trying to frame this as a gifted vs. not-gifted thing, but from what I can see the issue is that academic standards have just collapsed across the board. No one is interested in actual rigor, everything is directed at the bottom 40% of the class and trying to get them across the finish line. So much of what my kids do every day is just make-work or digital pacifiers while they focus on the kids who are behind.

They gave up cursive, they're giving up grammar, they let IXL do most of the direct instruction in math facts. There's something to be said for the idea that having high expectations leads to better learning outcomes. [/quote]

The response here is exactly right. APS has dumbed down the entire curriculum in ES. I have an 8th grader and a 10th grader now, so we had a front row seat to watch it happen. To add to PP's list, they also eliminated FLES (Spanish used to be taught 3 days a week in our ES), they eliminated the Summer Laureate program (the APS gifted office used to offer a 3 week summer program), and a lot of the funding for exemplary programs and other extras has been chipped away at through the budget process over the past several years-- but that especially accelerated after the pandemic. Go talk to your neighbors with middle and high school kids, and they will tell you stories about elementary school programs that no longer exist for budget reasons.

Additionally, when my kids were in early ES (~2014-2016), there was a lot of criticism being leveled at APS for being a "system of schools" instead of a "school system"-- that led to a push by the Asst Super of Teaching & Learning to standardize what was going on across all the ES programs. Prior to that, the North Arlington schools could get away with doing their own thing to some extent with the curriculum, which is what led to the perceived divide in the "quality" of North vs South Arlington schools. There is a lot more standardization in how things are taught across all the elementary schools now, and teachers have less freedom to move the curriculum along faster even when most of the kids in the class seem ready.

Just be thankful you don't have a 2E kid. We have a gifted dyslexic. We were never able to get her the support that she needed because we were told that she wasn't having difficulty meeting the APS reading benchmarks (regardless of the fact that she was in the bottom spelling group and was struggling with multi-syllabic words). That's when I saw what the actual benchmarks are-- they are so, so low. If that's the bar now, then it is no wonder that kids are bored in APS (gifted or not). [/quote]

NO. This is interesting.  Time was, APS was known for its excellent grade schools while FCPS (apart from AAP) were considered meh, and FCPS high schools were great while APS high schools were meh.

Now both school systems are wrecking their grade schools.  [/quote]

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