Reply to Is Cold Spring HGC the only HGC targeted by MCPS for denying entrance to MS magnet programs?

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Reply to "Is Cold Spring HGC the only HGC targeted by MCPS for denying entrance to MS magnet programs?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I wish folks would stop talking about a certain school being "targeted" as if there is malice involved.

They tested a lot of kids. They changed the test itself. They almost certainly included more kids who had not been in any CES at all.

One factor I haven't seen mentioned is that, beyond even the question of identifying gifted poor/working class kids, a lot of poor/working class kids who were accepted to the HGCs didn't go.

So you have a cohort of smart poor and working class kids who test well that are not in any CES but whose parents decide to make the leap for middle school that they didn't make for 4th and 5th. [/quote]
It would be great if that were true, but if you read the Metis report, it's obvious that's not what's happening here. The report essentially says that reliance on standardized testing is unfair to African-American and latino students because it causes those groups to be proportionately underrepresented. Read pages 108 and 109. The report uses TJ as an illustration, and quotes directly from the complaint of a discrimination suit made against TJ. (Not from a court opinion, mind you... they just quote directly from a complaint.) The complaint says that "Nearly every FCPS student admitted to TJ attended a level 4 Advanced Academic center (GT) in middle school. Because Black and Latino students are [u]denied access[/u] to these services at the very earliest stages of identification for ‘giftedness,’ the lack of Black and Latino representation at TJ should come as no surprise."

In other words, the Metis report just accepts, with no support, that black and latino students are "denied access" to the feeder gifted programs at the elementary level, and then uses that to argue that any standardized testing-based criteria at the middle or high school level is therefore biased, as it's just carrying over the initial discriminatory practice. The report argues, essentially, that MCPS should take a selected percentage from every elementary school, regardless of whether certain schools tend to be higher or lower performing.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that the MCPS programs need to be made more equitable, but it's important to make sure everyone understands how the BOE is thinking about this. They are not arguing that kids with the strongest standardized testing scores are being kept out because of lack of information - they are arguing that any standardized testing based criteria that results in racial disparities at magnet programs that are different than county-wide racial distributions must inherently be biased. Their support for that statement is, essentially, that someone alleged it in a lawsuit, and therefore it must be true.[/quote]
Holy crap that is so messed up.  [/quote]

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