Reply to Your experience with a 40% FARMS rate Middle School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]This gets proven over and over. MCPS has been trying to do this with the Magnet programs and CES programs in ES being placed in lower-performing schools. It’s been tried in other areas as well and it rarely does anything to close the achievement gap.[/quote]

I want to push back on this specifically, as a parent who has had kids in CES programs and the TPMS middle school magnet.

At the CES level (my kids were at Pine Crest), I would not expect the presence of the CES to have any benefit to the home school, since the kids never mingle. It is a school within a school. Now, I think Pine Crest is a fine school, but the presence of absence of a CES program does nothing for the kids at that school who are not in the program.

At TPMS, there is more "mingling" between magnet and home school kids in the classes that are not magnet courses, but there is nothing wrong with TPMS without the magnet. My experience has been that the school is well-run, and that the "mixed" classes are just fine. That is, I don't think my magnet child is doing anything to "help" TPMS because it is a great school with or without my magnet kid. [/quote]

That is because TPMS drew its boundaries to avoid the poorest parts of Takoma Park. Completely accidental I am sure, or maybe another example of hypocrisy [/quote]

TPMS has a 30 percent FARMS rate, which is not nothing. The point is that PP said the CES and magnet programs were "proof" that economic integration doesn't help poor kids. My argument was that the CES programs wouldn't be expected to "help" kids outside the program, because it isn't integration. It's a school within a school. At the middle school level, TPMS is a perfectly fine school with or without the high SES kids bussed in for the magnet program. These are both terrible examples of "why economic integration doesn't work," which is the point PP was apparently trying to make. [/quote]

DP - Do you have any data to support the assertion that TPMS is a perfectly fine school with or without the magnet program?

One could make a case that it was the magnet program that made TPMS a "perfectly fine school".  You might want to read the metis report that provides the history behind these programs: [url]https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/...dyReport-Version2-20160307.pdf[/url]. As per the report, TPMS magnet is one of the programs that were developed to prevent white flight and maintain racial diversity. It seems the program (with the 25 seat quota in the magnet program reserved for local students) has done the job very well.

For the poster who made the point about the boundaries of TPMS, are you sure you don't have the cause and effect reversed? Is it possible the strategy MCPS used 50 years ago did not work with Eastern (no home school quota in the magnet program) but worked with TPMS?
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