Reply to Compacted Math- FYI

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I spoke to my son's teacher. Each principal is handling things differently. My principal is moving everyone forward but they are going to review everyone at the end of the 1st quarter and knock kids down who are not ready. He said that other schools are following the county recommendations and moving kids down for the start of the year as it can be traumatic to have to switch classes midway through. I am not sure what is best, but I know I will be working with my child this summer.[/quote]

Wow, that's very different than our case, where they're planning to cut down from 3/4 compacted math classes in the school to just 1/4. They said that compacted math was always meant for a very small subset of kids, but we know that the kids at our school are much more advanced in math than the average. For instance, my son got a 95th percentile nationally on the Cogat, whereas in MCPS it was just 77th, but we know that the MCPS score was based on schools with similar FARMs rates. (And not all kids take the Cogat.) My point being probably a lot more than 25% of the kids at our school are in the top 10-15% nationally in math and that they are not served by the regular curriculum. They're making it sound like you have to be a genius to be in compacted math and I just don't think that's the case.[/quote]

But it’s possible other schools had a smaller group to begin with, just including the top math students, and didn’t need to cut down. Our school has one compacted math class, and the kids in it are generally top students anyway.  [/quote]

Honestly, there is also probably more parent pressure at the wealthier schools to have most children included in compacted math, when maybe it wasn’t meant to be.  So this is adjusting things back to what they should be.[/quote]

[PP who said "Wow, that's very different..." here] I definitely don't deny that could be an issue! In general there are parents who want to push their kids regardless of the reality of how their kid is doing. It does seem like there's a ton of variability between schools in general, which I think is a bit of an issue (I do think it's good to have some flexibility though and accept that it's very hard to find a balance). Mostly, I just don't like the fact that there aren't more options (my kid got "enrichment" grades 1-3 in math that was basically just 2 pages of "math puzzles" a quarter or something along those lines) and that things are communicated very late in the game and in a misleading way (eg "don't worry about the MAP scores, we don't use them for anything, actually we do..." "here is the MCPS percentile for the Cogat... actually it's calculated in this very complicated way, it's not the actual MCPS percentile"). I also have to say that my son has had at least one math teacher who was very confused about division by 0 so it's not always the case that the teacher knows best....[/quote]

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