Anonymous wrote:Nice sentiment, if only what you described is true. If there wasn’t this “peer cohort” criteria added this year, the wider nest and streamlined application wouldn’t have kept all those top kids out.

Correct. It would have kept other highly-able kids out.

Nice sentiment, if only what you described is true. If there wasn’t this “peer cohort” criteria added this year, the wider nest and streamlined application wouldn’t have kept all those top kids out.

Anonymous wrote:No they’ll do fine in competitions since those are very small teams, hopefully not socially engineered.

But avg and median test scores will go down, commensurate with how much the avg and median tests scores of current admits differ from the previous years’ avg and median test scores.

I’d watch the wash out rate too, might be some very unhappy campers, but not the quitting stigma you see at top privates.

Of course they'll be socially engineered -- just like all of the previous teams. "Social engineering" doesn't just apply to policies you disapprove of, although people do often use the term that way. Any magnet school, in a school district where your home school is assigned by residence, in a county where residential patterns reflect decades of including some people and excluding other people, is by definition social engineering.

Anonymous wrote:I don’t feel sorry for the kids, I feel sorry for the parents who put all their egg in the basket thinking that if only billy can get in our house choices won’t come back to bite him.

I....don't think that's the case here. You are positing that middle class families in economically diverse neighborhoods were "putting all of their egg(s) in the magnet basket."

However, it isn't families in racially and economically diverse neighbohoods that are howling this year. It is families in highly segregated neighborhoods who never got a chance to tell the committee that Billy is on Suzuki Book 8, and never had a chance to write a carefully crafted letter about how Susie's academic needs simply cannot be met at Hoover, Pyle, Cabin John, etc.

When you cast a wider net, test kids who otherwise might not have been identified, and get rid of the parts of the application that are just a proxy for class, you have a better and more equitable system.

As someone who lives in an integrated neighborhood, let me tell you something you may not be able to see from Potomac: My kids' classmates are smart and hard-working, but I can SEE the institutional barriers that made CES and magnet middle school admissions harder for those kids in the past. A lack of knowledge of the test, challenging transportation logistics, no resources to pad the resume with private robotics lessons and all of the other things that people use to "prove" how gifted their child is.

So those kids are doing all of the after school clubs they can at the school, sticking around to study in the library, and genuinely doing their best within an unfair system that has been stacked against them since the start.

Trust me, it isn't those of us on the west side of the county that are upset about this. We know how necessary the changes were becuase it is our kids' friends who should have a chance at the brass ring, and who may have a slightly better chance now that the net is bigger and the extra parts of the application have been abolished.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Since the selection pool was so much larger this year they were able to fill the 100 seats while applying even higher standards. The math is simple.

The top 2.5% of 4000 applicants is better than the top 16% of 600 applicants.

It’s true but there’s a serious case of sour grapes here. People are angry that admissions are more competitive and not as easily gamed.

Not true at all.
If admittance was merit based they would stack rank whomever took the various tests and let in the top 100. As PPp alluded, let in the top.
Instead they added a major sludge factor, took whomever they wanted, and aren’t releasing the admins’ test data or scores. Total black box.

I absolutely feel bad for every single gifted kid shut out of a $3b budget, 200+ school, 500 sq mile, 10000s employee MCPS CES or magnet curriculum because it does not teach them to potential in math, English lit, science and humanities.

I don’t feel sorry for the kids, I feel sorry for the parents who put all their egg in the basket thinking that if only billy can get in our house choices won’t come back to bite him.

Anonymous wrote:Since the selection pool was so much larger this year they were able to fill the 100 seats while applying even higher standards. The math is simple.

The top 2.5% of 4000 applicants is better than the top 16% of 600 applicants.

It’s true but there’s a serious case of sour grapes here. People are angry that admissions are more competitive and not as easily gamed.

Anonymous wrote:Since the selection pool was so much larger this year they were able to fill the 100 seats while applying even higher standards. The math is simple.

The top 2.5% of 4000 applicants is better than the top 16% of 600 applicants.

Poor math...

Since the selection pool was so much larger this year they were able to fill the 100 seats while applying even higher standards. The math is simple.

The top 2.5% of 4000 applicants is better than the top 16% of 600 applicants.

Anonymous wrote:I'm willing to bet that next year's 6th Grade Takoma students will perform worse in highly rated academic competitions compared to before.

funny I’m willing to bet the opposite

No they’ll do fine in competitions since those are very small teams, hopefully not socially engineered.

But avg and median test scores will go down, commensurate with how much the avg and median tests scores of current admits differ from the previous years’ avg and median test scores.

I’d watch the wash out rate too, might be some very unhappy campers, but not the quitting stigma you see at top privates.

I'm willing to bet that next year's 6th Grade Takoma students will perform worse in highly rated academic competitions compared to before.

Truth

Anonymous wrote:There's one poster who keesp posting the PARRC scores from 5th grade to prove a point, but I think that ignores the kids who aren't in the system in 5th.

I personally know 2 (white) kids admitted into the magnet who weren't even living in Montgomery County prior to 5th grade, but who bought a house and closed before the deadline for magnet admissions.

The main reason the Parrc scores are being posted is because MCPS doesn’t provide a breakdown of MAP scores and they did not breakdown the COGAT scores either. It is unlikely that the breakdowns would vary much. What the PARRC scores show is that it isn’t possible to have competitive Magnet programs that mirror the makeup of the County without lowering admission standards which is likely to eventually lower the program standards
The real scandal is how poorly MCPS is educating half of its students. There is no acceptable reason for fewer than 5% of African American and fewer than 5% of Hispanic students exceeding expectations. That is the true scandal These kids are not being served well

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:So MoCo thinks that it's a good trade to put extremely high performers back in their home ES and MS where there is a defunct curriculum and no ability tracking whilst putting a new composite of URM OK performers into a highly engaging gifted & talented curriculum that is commensurate with the top private schools in the area because its goal is to "close the achievement gap."

They basically killed the hgc program and put a slower diversity program in place and relabeled it Center for enriched Studies. They are once again betting that having a bunch of gifted students in class with others will magically bring up the others. The teachers will be pressured to creat results that show this too.

Not at all There's no evidence that the URM students admitted to the MS magnets are not as extremely smart and motivated as the students from last year or their white and Asian peers. Are they as qualified as the Asian American students who were rejected? We don't know.

In terms of ES, anecdotally, there seem to be a higher numbers of minority students admitted but MCPS hasn't released comprehensive statistics.