Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

It seems like the new admission standards will greatly improve the caliber of student by better identifying aptitude instead of over prepped students. This should improve TJ's reputation.

But how? What metrics will they use to identify truly gifted students now that weren't available before? How will any new metrics prevent prepping, considering that essays can be prepped and GPA will also reflect tutored/prepped kids? I'm not at all opposed to reforming the TJ admissions process to eliminate overly prepped students, but I'm not seeing how the changes will do anything aside from giving the TJ selection panel less data for their decisions.

The SIS was supposed to be reworked on some level - granted, I haven't seen it - to allow for some latitude for kids to talk about themselves more broadly.

The hope is that with these writing samples, there is no correct answer and the admissions committee is looking for kids from different perspectives and with different goals and ambitions. The hope is that the only prep is just for kids to be the best versions of themselves and let the chips fall where they may.

How woke can you get.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

It seems like the new admission standards will greatly improve the caliber of student by better identifying aptitude instead of over prepped students. This should improve TJ's reputation.

But how? What metrics will they use to identify truly gifted students now that weren't available before? How will any new metrics prevent prepping, considering that essays can be prepped and GPA will also reflect tutored/prepped kids? I'm not at all opposed to reforming the TJ admissions process to eliminate overly prepped students, but I'm not seeing how the changes will do anything aside from giving the TJ selection panel less data for their decisions.

The SIS was supposed to be reworked on some level - granted, I haven't seen it - to allow for some latitude for kids to talk about themselves more broadly.

The hope is that with these writing samples, there is no correct answer and the admissions committee is looking for kids from different perspectives and with different goals and ambitions. The hope is that the only prep is just for kids to be the best versions of themselves and let the chips fall where they may.

Anonymous wrote:

It seems like the new admission standards will greatly improve the caliber of student by better identifying aptitude instead of over prepped students. This should improve TJ's reputation.

But how? What metrics will they use to identify truly gifted students now that weren't available before? How will any new metrics prevent prepping, considering that essays can be prepped and GPA will also reflect tutored/prepped kids? I'm not at all opposed to reforming the TJ admissions process to eliminate overly prepped students, but I'm not seeing how the changes will do anything aside from giving the TJ selection panel less data for their decisions.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It will be hard for FCPS to maintain its reputation, whether at TJ or elsewhere, when they've so clearly indicated they don't believe in merit any longer.

It seems like the new admission standards will greatly improve the caliber of student by better identifying aptitude instead of over prepped students. This should improve TJ's reputation.

What!?!? It's the number 1 high school in the country right now! You must be joking.

Two things:

1) It's the number 1 high school in the country because publications like USNWR and Newsweek judge "college readiness" based on - you guessed it - standardized exam performance

2) While TJ still enjoys a strong reputation nationally, all you need to look at to see how its reputation has been damaged locally is the fact that applications have droppped 20% since 2000 while the population of their draw districts has exploded.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It will be hard for FCPS to maintain its reputation, whether at TJ or elsewhere, when they've so clearly indicated they don't believe in merit any longer.

It seems like the new admission standards will greatly improve the caliber of student by better identifying aptitude instead of over prepped students. This should improve TJ's reputation.

+1. With any luck the Admissions Office will have a greater pool of students from which to select now that several barriers have been removed, which should result in a stronger class regardless of the resulting racial composition.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It will be hard for FCPS to maintain its reputation, whether at TJ or elsewhere, when they've so clearly indicated they don't believe in merit any longer.

It seems like the new admission standards will greatly improve the caliber of student by better identifying aptitude instead of over prepped students. This should improve TJ's reputation.

What!?!? It's the number 1 high school in the country right now! You must be joking.

Really? Then why does a school like Blair blow TJ away at every head-to-head comparison with their magnet? TJ is mostly slightly above average over prepped kids with pushy parents and that is the problem.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It will be hard for FCPS to maintain its reputation, whether at TJ or elsewhere, when they've so clearly indicated they don't believe in merit any longer.

It seems like the new admission standards will greatly improve the caliber of student by better identifying aptitude instead of over prepped students. This should improve TJ's reputation.

What!?!? It's the number 1 high school in the country right now! You must be joking.

Anonymous wrote:It will be hard for FCPS to maintain its reputation, whether at TJ or elsewhere, when they've so clearly indicated they don't believe in merit any longer.

It seems like the new admission standards will greatly improve the caliber of student by better identifying aptitude instead of over prepped students. This should improve TJ's reputation.

It will be hard for FCPS to maintain its reputation, whether at TJ or elsewhere, when they've so clearly indicated they don't believe in merit any longer.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

It's the school's problem to solve in part because the solution is to take those kids and move them back to a level that's more appropriate, but they get strong parental resistance - and sometimes resistance from the kid who hasn't yet learned how to fail publicly and has a large part of their identity wrapped up in their math advancement. It can be a huge shot to the ego, but the alternative is advanced classes where you have students who are both younger from an age and maturity perspective and also have massive gaps in their comprehension.

The solution is to keep the class rigorous and let those kids earn poor grades. They can always retake the class the next year at a more appropriate grade level. There isn't a perfect answer for this. FCPS can either allow for acceleration, which means that gifted kids get what they need, but a bunch of non-gifted kids risk blows to their ego, or FCPS can put up barriers to acceleration, which means that gifted kids are much less likely to be able to access the coursework they need, but the other kids will have their egos protected. I'd prefer to see FCPS err on the side of serving gifted kids and letting everyone else take responsibility for their own choices.

Or just stop overselecting for advancement. When you do that, parents won't feel the need to artificially advance their kids, and then you'll have fewer of these issues.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

It is part of the problem because parents are aiming for these classes so that their kids can apply for TJ. Then the kids take the test prep classes so that they can do well on the test. They are accepted into TJ and end up not having the fundamentals that they really need, mainly because they were pushed ahead by their parents with the goal of getting accepted at TJ.

There is a balance between supporting your kids interests and strengths and pushing to advance your kid. I think many people are worried that the use of Mathnasium and Kumon and other programs are not helping kids if it is giving the appearance of being advanced when they are not. We did AoPS this year with our Third grader and I was impressed with the class. I don't know if they would tell a parent that their kid needed to be in a lower grade or would not do well in the program. There were a couple of kids who I heard the Teacher suggest they should stay online after class so that they could go over the material some more because the child was not understanding the material. I thought that was a good thing for the child but I wonder what they tell the parents at the end of the year since it was the same kids over the course of the year.

The ideal is that kids are allowed to advance at a pace that makes sense for them as long as they have really learned the material.

For the first bolded, the obvious answer is for FCPS to develop a math test that more accurately pinpoints just how well the kid understands the math. IIRC, Vern Williams offered to write one for TJ admissions, but FCPS didn't want that type of math test. Once the kids are in TJ, I'm pretty sure they're retested for math placement, and kids who think they belong in pre-calc are recommended to redo Algebra II.

For the second bolded, AoPS absolutely will hold kids back if they don't get high enough grades in the class. Several kids in my kid's AoPS Algebra class were taking the class for the second time, since they didn't do well enough the first time through.

Good to know about AoPS. I appreciated that they did an evaluation of DS skills before he joined the class and how the classes were run. I thought it was great that the Teacher worked with students after class to make sure that they were grasping the concepts. I thought the entire class was well run and structured. I think that it is a good thing that they don't progress kids until they understand the material. I hope that parents can accept that with good grace and understand it is in their kids best interest.

Anonymous wrote:

It's the school's problem to solve in part because the solution is to take those kids and move them back to a level that's more appropriate, but they get strong parental resistance - and sometimes resistance from the kid who hasn't yet learned how to fail publicly and has a large part of their identity wrapped up in their math advancement. It can be a huge shot to the ego, but the alternative is advanced classes where you have students who are both younger from an age and maturity perspective and also have massive gaps in their comprehension.

The solution is to keep the class rigorous and let those kids earn poor grades. They can always retake the class the next year at a more appropriate grade level. There isn't a perfect answer for this. FCPS can either allow for acceleration, which means that gifted kids get what they need, but a bunch of non-gifted kids risk blows to their ego, or FCPS can put up barriers to acceleration, which means that gifted kids are much less likely to be able to access the coursework they need, but the other kids will have their egos protected. I'd prefer to see FCPS err on the side of serving gifted kids and letting everyone else take responsibility for their own choices.

Anonymous wrote:

It is part of the problem because parents are aiming for these classes so that their kids can apply for TJ. Then the kids take the test prep classes so that they can do well on the test. They are accepted into TJ and end up not having the fundamentals that they really need, mainly because they were pushed ahead by their parents with the goal of getting accepted at TJ.

There is a balance between supporting your kids interests and strengths and pushing to advance your kid. I think many people are worried that the use of Mathnasium and Kumon and other programs are not helping kids if it is giving the appearance of being advanced when they are not. We did AoPS this year with our Third grader and I was impressed with the class. I don't know if they would tell a parent that their kid needed to be in a lower grade or would not do well in the program. There were a couple of kids who I heard the Teacher suggest they should stay online after class so that they could go over the material some more because the child was not understanding the material. I thought that was a good thing for the child but I wonder what they tell the parents at the end of the year since it was the same kids over the course of the year.

The ideal is that kids are allowed to advance at a pace that makes sense for them as long as they have really learned the material.

For the first bolded, the obvious answer is for FCPS to develop a math test that more accurately pinpoints just how well the kid understands the math. IIRC, Vern Williams offered to write one for TJ admissions, but FCPS didn't want that type of math test. Once the kids are in TJ, I'm pretty sure they're retested for math placement, and kids who think they belong in pre-calc are recommended to redo Algebra II.

For the second bolded, AoPS absolutely will hold kids back if they don't get high enough grades in the class. Several kids in my kid's AoPS Algebra class were taking the class for the second time, since they didn't do well enough the first time through.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
TJ teachers say the same things, mostly about their students who are entering in Pre-Calc or above in the 9th grade. There are exceptions, of course, but it doesn't take them long to separate the "gifted" from the "advanced" - the latter of which is not really a compliment.

Sure, but why is that necessarily the school's problem to solve? I'd rather leave the system as is, so the gifted kids can get much needed advancement, even if one side effect is that kids who chose to push ahead end up struggling. For TJ kids, I bet the majority of kids who enter in pre-Calc and then struggle are the ones who did summer geometry to get ahead. For the most part, these are kids who were not smart or advanced enough to be skipped ahead to 6th grade Algebra, and then massively shortchanged their understanding of geometry.

It is part of the problem because parents are aiming for these classes so that their kids can apply for TJ. Then the kids take the test prep classes so that they can do well on the test. They are accepted into TJ and end up not having the fundamentals that they really need, mainly because they were pushed ahead by their parents with the goal of getting accepted at TJ.

There is a balance between supporting your kids interests and strengths and pushing to advance your kid. I think many people are worried that the use of Mathnasium and Kumon and other programs are not helping kids if it is giving the appearance of being advanced when they are not. We did AoPS this year with our Third grader and I was impressed with the class. I don't know if they would tell a parent that their kid needed to be in a lower grade or would not do well in the program. There were a couple of kids who I heard the Teacher suggest they should stay online after class so that they could go over the material some more because the child was not understanding the material. I thought that was a good thing for the child but I wonder what they tell the parents at the end of the year since it was the same kids over the course of the year.

The ideal is that kids are allowed to advance at a pace that makes sense for them as long as they have really learned the material.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I have seen Teachers say that many of the kids who are taking Algebra in 7th grade have not seemed to grasp the fundamentals properly and struggle in more advanced math classes. The Teachers seem to think that is because parents were so invested in their kid being in Algebra in 7th grade that they used math programs to provide their kids with enough knowledge that they could get to Algebra in 7th. The concern is that parents are moving their kids too quickly and that it hurts their ability to learn the material properly.

I agree that the kids taking Kumon or doing IAAT prep workbooks may not be sufficiently prepared for Algebra. I highly doubt that any kids who've successfully completed AoPS pre-Algebra or the RSM equivalent would lack a sufficient understanding of the fundamentals. Both teach at a substantially higher level than FCPS. It's also likely that very bright kids who pass the IAAT and SOL benchmarks but took no outside math classes might struggle, since AAP 6th grade math is far from being a rigorous pre-Algebra program.

This is a pretty cogent analysis. It's one thing to get this stuff from Vern Williams - it's quite another to get it from Mathnasium or self-taught from a book.