Reply to "Is MCPS losing its edge?"

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Reply to ""Is MCPS losing its edge?""

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can you all stop accusing people of being private school parents and actually engage with the issues at hand?

Here’s just one example:

During the 2023-2024 school year, Rebekah Jacobs’ son was required to read only 2 books for English class at Wootton High School and none of his writing assignments were more than 4 pages long. [b]He, like all freshmen at the school, was in honors English.[/b]

During the 2022-2023 school year, Paul Jaskunas’ son was supposed to be studying Homer’s The Odyssey for his sophomore year honors English class at B-CC, but the students were only assigned a short excerpt from the book. To round out the unit, the class watched a 12-minute YouTube video summarizing the plot, performed a skit of the scene, and read a novella about Penelope, Odysseus’ wife.

Jacobs and Jaskunas are both members of the curriculum committee of the Montgomery County Council of Parent-Teacher Associations, At a recent workshop with MCPS administrators in attendance, the committee reported that in classrooms at every socioeconomic level, “students are not reading a lot of texts within the grade level band.” Even at high schools with 90% pass rates on the MCAP, where even the feeder schools had 70+ percent MCAP pass rates, “teachers are not assigning grade-level work,” the organization reported.

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The bolded is the source of the problem. If everyone is in Honors English, but they've reduced or changed the readings to account for a wider range of abilities in the class, then no one is in Honors English.[/quote]

The Honors/Advanced English thing is stupid.  My middle school kid is in "Advanced English."  So are all the rest of his classmates--they don't need to inflate the titles of the coursework if there's no actual differentiation.[/quote]

Middle School Advanced English is SO SO SO bad.  They often just read excerpts of books instead of reading the entire book.

The teachers are supposed to make the class ‘equitable’ and ‘accessible’ so instead of having the kids actually read the book, they show YouTube videos of someone else reading it.

There is zero differentiation.[/quote]

My middle schoolers read a book each quarter, including writing a (very short) note about every page of the book
[/quote]

That’s great. The article is primarily about high school. [/quote]

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