Reply to Question about re zoning elementary schools in S. Arlington

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yeah. Former SA parent at one of the schools mentioned. Now in NA. I spent innumerable hours meeting with classroom teacher, RTG, and principal attempting to get appropriate differentiation for my child. I can only imagine how much harder that is for a parent with an advanced child new to the country with language barriers.[b] But i moved to NA and I have not been involved one bit. My child is challenged by the teachers and peers. Night and day.[/b] There are crazy helicopters in NA and SA. But this is not that. [/quote]

Arlington Blvd is magic. Cross the golden road and all your child's problems disappear...[/quote]

Or stay and have everyone assume because your kids first language is English and they were born here that they have no problems of consequence compared to their poorer immigrant classmates and "will be fine" and can be ignored.[/quote]

Congrats. Now your poor child doesn't have to be ignored & victimized. Once the SA teachers got a look at your son's birth certificate, they knew it was ok to let him flounder in class. Being native born, they had no reason to care about his well being. [/quote]

It's not about "floundering." SA neighborhood elementaries are specialist when it's comes to floundering. It's about accepting mediocrity from the most capable students in the class because ESL, SOL are simply a higher priority. No one will admits that publicly but it's just common sense and the experience of people who have moved bears it out.

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I am a N. Arlington parent in an elementary school and also a former teacher.  I have not been overly impressed with my DC's teacher from last year; however, I did notice that there were wide disparities in the classroom this year in terms of reading ability, etc.  What I noticed is that the vast majority were not able to read and the teacher had to spend a lot of time with them this year.  The few that could were left to read to the other kids.  I can imagine that if the classroom is even further behind grade milestones, how that could slow down the pace even further.   I'm sure there are exceptions in every school, and if the teacher had fewer kids in his/her class who were behind, they could challenge the kids more who could. [/quote]

Careful, careful....that sounds like tracking.[/quote]

Tracking is cool now - they do it at Barcroft. I think that's why so many people are changing their minds about it. [/quote]

No one is changing their mind about Barcroft. The Barcroft delusion is incredible.[/quote]

[b]They've been doing clustering at Barcroft for years.  In fact, one of the former RTGs at Barcroft is the one who brought it to APS and Barcroft.  Regardless of what it's called or how it's done, it's still essentially tracking.[/b]  One form works better than the other; while the other looks better than the first.

Not with the current calendar they aren't, not in a significant way.

Anyway, what PP has described isn't tracking. It's clustering of students, and it's what every APS school is supposed to do so that kids have academic peers. If they weren't doing that under the last principal, no wonder parents left the school. [/quote][/quote]

That's not tracking. If you call that tracking, then any differentiated curriculum is tracking, any delivery of services (gifted, ESL, SpEd) is tracking. I don't know what to tell you. Not every kid is at the same level to start, then some catch up and some fall behind. As long as kids can move in and out of their groupings, it's not tracking. They aren't all the same, instruction can't all be the same. Some kids need more help and others need a faster pace/greater depth. And sometimes those things change year over year.[/quote]

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