Reply to What are your thoughts on Blair NON-Magnet?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Look, I don't know what the deal with the UMd admissions requirements is, but I also really don't think it is as dire as PP says it is, based on how students at other MCPS high schools do on the same metric.

So, for BCC that number is 47%

For Blair it is 31%

For WJ it is 50%

For Whitman it is 58%.

Are folks prepared to argue that more than half of the kids who graduate from BCC are not college-ready?

Amost certainly not. Which means this metric is flawed. There is absolutely room for Blair (and every other MCPS HS) to do better by its most vulnerable kids, but we need to move off that particular metric because it clearly doesn't mean what folks want it to mean. [/quote]

Remember CAP and SMAC include lots of DCC kids.  You are skimming off many of the top performers..

Think for a min that 31% for Blair is about 1000 kids 
700 or so kids are magnet or cap mostly from OOB, most of those are part of the 31%
That leaves 300 or so kids out of the remaining 2500 students which means 12% of the general population leave qualified for an decent State school

That is Kennedy/ Einstein level performance. Mediocre at best
[/quote]

While the dig at the end is petty, the break out of kids is startling and concerning for the non-magnet kids. Any parents care to address those? Overblown ?[/quote][/quote]

Remember CAP and SMAC include lots of DCC kids. You are skimming off many of the top performers.. [/quote]

Sure lots of DCC kids in CAP and SMAC but that still leaves 12% of the 2500 non-magnet qualified for UMD. That is 88% of the normal kids not making the cut.  Using your same argument the top performers are also taken out of the Whitman’s that still manage 58%.

Feel free to counter the school is still good but it is the kids that struggle and couldn’t be helped . I am not sure how one can reconcile that a fridge full of old food doesn’t stink even if 12% doesn’t [/quote]

Like others have said, there's something funky about that statistic. You can look on mdreportcard and see that 75.40% of Blair graduates enrolled in college within 12 months.[/quote]

Exactly, until we understand why 42% of Whitman students aren't qualified for the MD University system, we can't pick apart why 69% of Blair students aren't.  And while it's plausible that Blair CAP and Magnet students aren't in this category, that's not automatic--find me a Whitman parent would guess correctly that only 6/10 of their kid's classmates hit the MD benchmark.

One piece of the MD benchmark is having a cumulative GPA of C or better--from the UMD website that's defined as a 2.5.  If you look at a Whitman class profile, 19% of graduating students have an unweighted GPA bellow 2.5.  If you look at a Blair profile, 21% of graduates have an unweighted GPA bellow 2.5.  If you look at a magnet profile 
*none* have a GPA bellow 2.5.  There isn't information on CAP.   But if the assumption is all the low GPA students are in the regular population (which accounts for 77% of the school population), that means only 56% of the regular population has a GPA above 2.5 at graduation.  (And yes this is grabbing data from different sources, and making assumptions, but it's a start.)

So that is significant.  81% of Whitman students meet the GPA benchmark, and only 56% of regular Blair students do.

But, only 47% of Blair students have never been on FARMS, while somewhere over 95% (too high to report) of Whitman students are non-FARMS.  Magnet/CAP is also likely 95% or higher non-FARMS.  So, playing the same game, only 24.3% of the regular Blair population is non-FARMS.

So then the question people are interested in, how do FARMS and low-GPA students overlap in the *regular* Blair population?  (And the real axe to grind would be if non-FARMS students have significantly worse outcomes at Blair than at Whitman.) We know at Whitman 19% of non-FARMS students have low GPA.  Is the percent higher or lower at Blair?  We can't tell.  But the PP, has been playing with a suspect statistic and trying to prove it can't be the same--it has to be much worse.  Looking at the GPA benchmark, there's no way to make that argument.  If it is the same, there's no inconsistency to be seen.

Suppose it is the same: 19% of regular-population, non-FARMS Blair students have low GPA, just like 19% of (entirely) non-FARMS Whitman students do.  That's 19% of 579 students: 110 students.  Overall at Blair 21% of 3083 students have low GPA: 647 students.  This means 537 FARMS student have low GPA.  So given there are 1804 FARMS students, (537/1804) 30% have low GPA.  And remember this was with the assumption that no one in Magnet/CAP has low GPA.  There's no way to know that this is the breakdown, but there's nothing implausible about the calculation that results.  The GPA benchmark doesn't raise any alarms.

Finally, it can't be ignored that magnet/CAP are part of Blair, and students do interact.  So overall 30% of FARMS students have low GPA, but once the magnet is included, only (110/(3083-1804)) 8.5% of non-FARMS students have low GPA.  Compare that to Whitman, where 19% students have low GPA without the excuse of hardship.  I won't kid myself that being around magnet students makes my student higher achieving, just like being around FARMS students doesn't rub off.  But context matters, and if my kid is a suburbanite with a 20% fail rate expected, may as well dilute that behavior with examples of overachieving Magnet kids and FARMS students fighting long odds.  If anything, I'm more concerned about a school where everyone's on easy street, yet one in five can't be bothered to work.  YMMV.[/quote]

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