Reply to Lee Montessori open slots for 1st and 2nd

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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]Anyone know if Lee's test scores went up this year?  Too lazy to look them up myself. :)[/quote]

Yes, they went up a bit.

"Compared to 2019, 5% more students are scoring 4 or 5 on Math, while nearly 10% more are scoring 4 or 5 on ELA. 32% of all students scored proficient on Math while 36% scored proficient in ELA." [/quote]

They were one of a handful of schools that improved post-pandemic.  Chill out anti-charter warrior.  Talk to some Upper Elementary parents.[/quote]

Omg.  So a modest improvement, which is good, be ut still 2/3 of the kids at Lee are below grade level.  Wow.[/quote]

Uh, isnt that true of the city as a whole?  City wide is 31 percent proficient in ELA, 19 percent proficient in math.

¨In spring 2019, the last time students took the exam, 37 percent of students were reading at or above grade level. Now, 31 percent meet that standard. The share of students who passed the math exam fell 12 percentage points, from 31 percent before the pandemic to 19 percent in 2022 — the lowest ever recorded in the city.¨

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/09/02/dc-schools-parcc-test/[/quote]

Lee's scores are similar to our IB Title 1 school, where 99% of students are FARMS and there is a very high percentage of students with housing insecurity, an at-risk designation, or an IEP. Our IB is actually a phenomenal school but it's working with a population of students that have lots of needs outside of academics so it is unsurprising that scores remain low despite their excellent efforts.

With Lee the lower scores tend to get blamed on a different pace for learning at a Montessori school but given their population (high-SES with a much smaller population of FARMS kids, minimal IEPs, few if any housing insecure kids), it is still strange that less than 50% of the kids tested are at or above grade level. Sure, some of the non-Montessori schools testing higher might be "teaching to the test" in a way that gives them an edge. But not a 30-40% edge. Lee's PARCC scores are concerning.[/quote]

A lot of these title 1 schools are also teaching to the test…so I think is best if people stop focusing so much on PARCC scores.[/quote]

It's one thing to base all decisions on PARCC (that's a mistake) but it's another thing to ignore them altogether. PARCC is deeply flawed and no one loves the emphasis on standardized testing (seriously, no one does!) but you can't ignore the link between PARCC scores and, say, literacy or math proficiency. They aren't unrelated. Title 1 schools teach to the test because they are really working to teach kids the material. It's not a cynical ploy to lift their PARCC scores and attract high-SES IB families. They are genuinely just working really hard to teach the kids and PARCC is an annoying but useful tool for seeing how they are doing.

Standardized testing is flawed but there isn't really another good way of checking to see how effective a school is, on average, at educating kids. You can make qualitative assessment and you can look at how an individual child is doing without these tests, but that doesn't give you a good picture of the schools' standard effectiveness. And yes, that means that Lee's PARCC scores raise questions for current and prospective families. If it doesn't raise an issue for you, I presume it's because your own child is not on the bubble in this respect and you don't worry overly much about the schools effectiveness. That' a position of privilege.[/quote]

All of this.  Look, I'm no devotee of standardized testing, especially the PARCC.  But you cannot look at Lee's scores, where 21 out of 80 PARCC-takers scored a 1 in Math, and say that everything's fine here.  If a school had a lot of 3s, maybe that's ok for a Montessori if you're really into Montessori.  But with 21 scoring a 1 and 16 scoring a 2, that's 37 out of 80 kids who are *significantly* below grade level in math.  ELA is a little better, but again, out of 80 PARCC-takers, 18 scored a 2 and some unknown number scored a 1. That's about 25% of the kids scoring a 1 or a 2 in ELA.  Those are concerning test scores.  They're not just a little bit bad.  They're quite bad.  Similarly disappointing is that hardly anyone scored a 5 in either subject.  [/quote]

For context, a 1 in 3rd grade means that children cannot order numbers between 1 and 100 in the correct order. A 1 is not about failing to teach to the test, especially if you're talking about a UMC kid. ALSO a Lee parent in this thread said Lee did PARRC tutoring! So they *did* teach to the test and 25% of their test takers could not order numbers from 1 to 100 in 3rd grade. That is horrifying.[/quote]

It seems pretty clear that Lee does the "bad Montessori thing" where they let kids avoid material they aren't interested in. A Montessori school should let the child guide their learning, but also monitor and guide when needed to ensure the child is making sufficient progress in all areas. There's no way Lee is doing that with these test scores. So probably fine for a rule following child that has the self motivation to do work they don't really like, because they're supposed to, or for a family that does a lot of outside monitoring and supplementing. But if you trust your school or don't have the ability to stay on top of academic progress, then you're in a really dangerous position. These kids are VERY far behind and with such a low at-risk population, there's really no excuse for it.[/quote]

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