Reply to Brookings Institution article about the new MCPS middle school magnet selection process

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm not the PP but I would be fine giving a bump to truly low SES kids. A poor kid scoring 92% that is willing to do the work and ride the bus for 2-3 hours can get in. However a kid who is MC and white who gets a 95% should not be bumping out a kid who is asian and gets a 99%.

The way you would do it would be to give extra % points for being poor and then choose the top students. [/quote]
maybe.. but is that what happened?  Do they know which child is on FARMs?  Hard to tell without seeing the numbers.  What we do know is that they used "peer cohort". So say that a low income student from a W cluster (yes, they do have a few) got a 93% but had a peer group at the W school. Based on MCPS admission criteria, that low income child would've been denied.[/quote]

Well....no, because peer cohort was not the only factor. Other factors, including FARMS status, MAP scores, etc. went into the mix per the guidance at the time. [/quote]
Per MCPS, if there was a peer cohort, they were denied, irrespective of test scores.[/quote]

We know that's not true because there are kids from schools WITH cohorts at TPMS and Eastern. The bar may have been higher, but it isn't as if there are zero kids at Eastern who would otherwise be at Pyle or Westland. [/quote]

+1 also not true at TPMS. There are kids from Pyle, Cabin John and Hoover in the 6th grade cohort. [/quote]

Correct. I agree with another PP that those kids were likely outliers at their own schools. So, now the magnet program is for outliers. Which is GREAT. That's exactly what I would hope and want for a magnet program, to pull out the outliers from each of the schools and educate them together. [/quote]

My kid is one of those kids at the magnet now from one of the schools with a large peer cohort.  From what I can tell, it seems a bit random who made it into the magnet from those schools.  I'm not saying the kids weren't high scoring, I'm just saying that they were not necessarily "extreme outliers," or at least the committee didn't have enough information in front of them to make that determination. Remember, the committee knew very little information that would have served to differentiate those kids, given that only percentile scores were reported for the COGAT.  And the kids with the highest MAP scores (anecdotally, it is of course hard to know or verify what a kid's MAP score was, but kids do talk) were not necessarily the kids who got in.  I think that a parent for the Cold Spring CES also reported that same information.   The CES teachers also told me that they thought the selection seemed a bit random.  I feel lucky that my kid got in; I wouldn't say that the process is designed to find "extreme outliers" among upper middle class kids.   [/quote]

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