Reply to MCPS is cutting ELC.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am so so so glad we made it into the CES next year. This is a complete bait and switch for those who didn’t get into the lottery [/quote]

Well that’s great for you. How is any of this fair for the kids who qualified for the CES but didn’t get a seat through the lottery. I don’t understand how MCPS justifies keeping CES. Disband them and offer enrichment at local schools. [/quote]

Advocating to disband the CES isn't going to help, PP. I agree with you that all of this is unfair, and counterproductive, but I'm old enough to remember that ELC was introduced in order to redress concerns that arose after MCPS adjusted the cut-off for CES. It was introduced explicitly in response to parent outrage, which means it can be brought back the same way. [/quote]

I don’t think it should be disbanded for sour grapes reasons, I just don’t see the point in it. The fact that they moved to a system that now identifies kids who qualify and then lotteries off the spots exposes that more kids qualify for the program than MCPS will provide spots for. Why? Why can’t MCPS offer an enriched curriculum to everyone who qualifies based on the criteria that they set? The solution to me is that it should be provided at the local school level for all the kids in the pool, instead of creating winners and losers arbitrarily based on a lottery, and then bussing those winners to other schools and leaving the losers with no enrichment. Why are there now essentially two systems for the same pool of kids? This makes no sense. [/quote]
MCPS hasn’t always used a lottery system for admissions to the CES (or previously, for the HGC), but they have always had more students who qualified than seats for qualified students. That part isn’t new. In fact, there are fewer seats in the middle school magnets than at CES. They should expand these magnet programs or limit them to the very most advanced learners. They should not randomly select a small portion of students who are in the top half of performers for the CES and then offer no enrichment to most of the qualified students. The ways they plan to offer an enriched curriculum to students isn’t satisfactory to anyone.[/quote]

Yes, I know how the prior system worked and how the current system works. I think the lottery process exposes that they do not provide access to all who qualify. They set the criteria, they identify students, and then they say sorry, no access for you to a segment of the identified students. Why do we need to expand magnets when the curriculum could be provided in the local schools? Same with the middle school magnets. Don't people want their kids to stay at their local schools but have access to the best programs MCPS has to offer? Why the gate keeping, the two tiered system, the busing kids around? Who wants this other than maybe current magnet parents who fear that somehow bringing the curriculum to the local schools will feel less special? [/quote]
The benefits of the programs get diluted when you do anything other than accept the top performers. They’re diluted by using lottery admissions and they’re diluted by being set up at every school, regardless of whether the school has enough high performers to fill a class. What do you do at schools that can fill 1.5 classes with high performers? Do you give them 1 or 2 classes with the CES curriculum? And just as the busing of students costs money, it costs money to roll this curriculum out to every school in the county. When a new CES is established, there’s extensive training for the new teachers. The cheapest, most effective way to provide this enriched instruction is to bring the top performers together.[/quote]

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