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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think most people on dcum have heartily endorsed universal screening as a way to identify children who might have been missed in previous years and to generally expand the applicant pool.  It was therefore only to be expected that there would be some drop off in the numbers of students coming from ESs that typically send a lot of students.  
What makes me and other parents suspicious is that the number of students coming from high performing ES dropped so precipitously.  It seems especially strange that only a couple of children from Cold Spring CES would gain admission to the middle school magnets this year as Cold Spring always reported the highest median magnet middle school test results in the past.
If you look at MCPS's own data (https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/uploadedFiles/schools/msmagnet/about/MS%20Magnet%20Field%20Test%20Data%20by%20Sending%20MS.pdf)
the sending middle school clusters that had the most students who did well on the COGAT test were: Hoover, Frost, Pyle, SSIMs, Sligo, Cabin John.  These were the same schools that saw ridiculously low number of students accepted into the middle school magnets presumably on the basis of the peer cohort criteria.  What is more telling is that only 25 students were accepted to Takoma from all the CES schools and only 28 were accepted to Eastern from all the CES schools.

I will also note that if MCPS was concerned that high performing students in low performing schools might not have a peer group, that may not be the case as nearly every middle school appears to have at a minimum 20 students who are "qualified" wrt their COGAT scores and so there are enough qualified students in every middle school to run an enriched math and enriched humanities class.

MCPS needs to release the median scores of accepted students for every sending middle school so we can see whether they did indeed find dozens more kids they missed in years past (in which case I will be the first to congratulate them) or whether they tried to socially engineer the program with a clumsy peer cohort device.[/quote]

Sounds like there's already such a strong cohort at Cold Spring they don't need a magnet.[/quote]
The magnet experience includes a strong peer group (ideally the very best students drawn from all over the school district), teachers who are trained and experienced in teaching this population, an enriched curriculum that integrates related disciplines.  So at Eastern when 6th grade children are learning about the Russian revolution in their magnet World Studies class they would be reading Animal Farm in their magnet English class and they would be reading several books that deal with an Utopia theme in their Literature and the Humanities magnet class.  They would then do projects in each of these classes that might be linked to each other.  They would probably also do a thematically linked project in their magnet Media class.  
The experience at a magnet middle school does not compare to the experience in an enriched class or two in a regular middle school even if you have a strong peer group.[/quote]

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