Reply to Waste – FCPS School Facilities

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Are we all pretending like parents don’t also fight like crazy against boundary adjustments?  The school board is always in a no-win situation.[/quote]

It’s only no-win if they care more about the position than doing the best job and being fiscally responsible.  Being responsible might mean a lost election and we mustn’t let fiscal responsibility stand in the way of our re-election chances!

Think of our political careers![/quote]

If you looked for 12 people in Fairfax County more likely to flip moderate voters in recent and upcoming state and local elections, you couldn’t come up with a better dozen than the current, imbecilic members of the FCPS School Board.  Inattention to waste and an inability to establish reasonable priorities aligned with parents’ expectations are just two of their many shortcomings. [/quote]

So you think a moderate would be successful running on a platform of boundary adjustments? [/quote]

I think a moderate would be successful running on a platform of committing to understand the reasons why some schools are overcrowded while others are under-enrolled and pledging to oppose inequities such as the massive expansion of West Potomac to 3000 kids while no funds are made available to help other overcrowded schools with less capacity currently than West Potomac.  The current School Board pays next to no attention to rampant disparities and several stand to lose their seats next year as a result of their incompetence and indifference. [/quote]

The thing is, focusing on the high schools is starting at the wrong end.

If they want the lower performing high schools to be more desirable  then fcps needs to heavily invest at the elementary level upwards to middle school  in literacy (not the whole language nonsense they have been using the past decade or so), rigorous math (not lowering standards in the name of equity), English language proficiency, and rigorous science classes with lots of TJ track style enrichment in the after school programs.

Work up, not down.  Play the long game instead of pushing a band aid fix like rezoning that is just designed to make you feel riotous and benevolent, but will surely fail.

You aren't going to get a rigorous, in demand high school program at a high school where half the kids cannot read, are unable to do math at an elementary level, and who are not proficient in English.  Anyone who is on that high performance track thwt gets rezoned to those low schools is going to switch to private if they can afford it, or fight like hell to find a loophole to transfer to another school, such as German or Japanese.

[b]There was actually a Republican at large candidate that ran on putting this type of enrichment into the low performing elementary and middle schools, but they were beaten by the current mess of at large candidates.[/b] [/quote]

Do you realize that this has been tried and studied in many contexts and hasn't been found to be an effective solution without a lot more systematic change? There is no harm in it, and does create positive engagement for the kids involved so FCPS already has many interventions like this already, but it's no panacea.  It's frustrating when political candidates propose what seems like a "no-brainer" idea like this thinking that somehow such an obvious thing like providing enrichment to low-performing schools has never been tried before. Just because they don't know much about it when there are literally hundreds of variations and studies on the impacts of different kinds of enrichment programs like this.  Such hubris! [/quote]

There are high school pyramids that do not have a single AAP center and where the kids go out of pyramid for middle school AAP.

[b]So no, fcps is not doing all they can in the younger grades to raise kids out of low performing schools.  [/b]

Moving around a few high school kids will not make one iota of difference to the achievement of those high schools.

Improving rigor and proficiency in the lower grades will.

I know this from my background in teaching in a majority hispanic, immigrant and illegal immigrant school system full of migrant workers and trades people, with kids whose parents had lkttle more than an elementary education and who mostly spoke either no English, or very low class English.

Rezoning high school does nothing.

It must be fixed in the lower grades, when the brain is wiring itself. [/quote]

They actually are by letting them get out of those schools. They are literally raising them out of low preforming schools by giving them to option to attend better schools [/quote]

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