Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:How can you be both "proficient" and "way above grade level" at the same time? Isn't that an oxymoron, and the crux of the issue here.

Touché!

Exactly. C2.0 is not impressing me.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Umm her son is now attending something called the First Presbyterian School. Go with God, all those of you who hate MCPS. I'm sure there are a lot of 4th Presbyterian kids at Harvard.

And since her daughter is at Holton Arms, where she presumably didn't get in mid-semester, this woman doesn't sound terribly committed to public schools to begin with. Note that she also takes the opportunity to trash kids from troubled families, why? Is that relevant to her choice to leave the board and MCPS? If this article was a bid for sympathy or support, she lost me.

She didn't trash anyone. She is merely stating a truth. It's not a truth we like to hear, but it is a fact. There is no judgment.

This.

Anonymous wrote:And no judgment that this was a board of Ed member who had long opted out of public Ed for her family. I'm sure that her vast expertise will be treasured on the board of her kids' private schools, or maybe not, but either way I'd prefer that my public education representatives actually use public education.

Agree

And no judgment that this was a board of Ed member who had long opted out of public Ed for her family. I'm sure that her vast expertise will be treasured on the board of her kids' private schools, or maybe not, but either way I'd prefer that my public education representatives actually use public education.

Anonymous wrote:Umm her son is now attending something called the First Presbyterian School. Go with God, all those of you who hate MCPS. I'm sure there are a lot of 4th Presbyterian kids at Harvard.

And since her daughter is at Holton Arms, where she presumably didn't get in mid-semester, this woman doesn't sound terribly committed to public schools to begin with. Note that she also takes the opportunity to trash kids from troubled families, why? Is that relevant to her choice to leave the board and MCPS? If this article was a bid for sympathy or support, she lost me.

She didn't trash anyone. She is merely stating a truth. It's not a truth we like to hear, but it is a fact. There is no judgment.

Anonymous wrote:How can you be both "proficient" and "way above grade level" at the same time? Isn't that an oxymoron, and the crux of the issue here.

Touché!

Anonymous wrote:Hi, I'm from NY but interested in MCPS. Can you tell me what's so bad (or good) about Curriculum 2.0? Thanks!

The real key is there is no differentiation and no clear path to move ahead like there was in the old 'math pathways' framework. MCPS talks about letting some kids accelerate, but there are no details and no evidence that it happens in practice anywhere. MCPS has a wide variety of educational readiness in it's student population, so one path will not work. It's impossible. Still, they persist with one-size-fits-all except for the 1-3% that get into a magnet. As a result, you have some very bored kids and some struggling kids and some teachers who are stuck trying to implement it and present the impossible to parents. In all likelihood, the curriculum will work for the average kid, just not for kids on outside the norm. If you want to get your kid into Algebra by 7th grade, there is no clear plan to do that from what I can see.

The other problem is that MCPS handed this curriculum over to a for-profit company called Pearson to write and market around the country. I still can't tell what MCPS got out of the deal, but you have to wonder how much local control is still left It's possible that Pearson may not want to build-in multiple tracks for special needs kids or advanced kids because that costs more. They may also be on the bandwagon for teaching kids by age, not by readiness. Who knows? The whole Pearson-thing is troublesome to me especially because it has not been explained or talked about at all.

In Montgomery County teacher unions the educational-industrial complex rule. Parents have very little say. BOE Voters like the status quo. There is no transparency. The current fad here is one-size-fits-all education. Every kid get's a white bread only education.

Anonymous wrote:Hi, I'm from NY but interested in MCPS. Can you tell me what's so bad (or good) about Curriculum 2.0? Thanks!

You can poke around. My impression is that Curriculum 2.0 is meant to give kids a more thorough grounding in basics, and not try to move them through topics as quickly as possible. It's also associated with less differentiation-- so that instead of grouping kids by math ability and accelerating half of them to next year's curriculum, everyone stays on this year's curriculum and the teacher tries to make sure everyone has mastered it thoroughly and also that the more advanced kids aren't bored. In addition, grading changed so that pretty much no one can do better than "proficient".

Hi, I'm from NY but interested in MCPS. Can you tell me what's so bad (or good) about Curriculum 2.0? Thanks!

Anonymous wrote:You can't fight City Hall. She fought longer and harder than most, and even got elected. There just aren't enough people like her who are willing to throw themselves into the fray. Too bad.

+1. She impressed me as the one Board member that didn't simply parrot the company line and thoughtfully evaluated each matter in front of her. I used to actually attend a few school board meetings and in the end I realized that you can't fight City Hall ...at least not while working full-time, trying to raise your kids, and hope change will actually happen in time to impact your kids. I'm not writing off MCPS as a whole because there are a lot of great principals and teachers. Yet, I also understand why parents would rather move their kids than fight the good fight and how dealing with the bureaucracy can influence you to be less public service minded.

The more I learn about MCPS, Starr and the BOE, I just feel sick. They just seem like this insular group of educators that run around spending money on the latest fad, giving themselves raises, and pushing out this ideological garbage that everyone is the same. They play games with the budget and they are not very transparent.

Anyway, obviously someone likes them, because the BOE get's re-elected all the time. The Berthaiume article is very depressing to me. We need to elect people with alternate view points.

How can you be both "proficient" and "way above grade level" at the same time? Isn't that an oxymoron, and the crux of the issue here.

Anonymous wrote:

This. Am thanking our lucky stars we didn't have any of this dumbing down, proficiency stuff. Am not happy about what may happen to our property values.

Oh dear. Our elementary has been piloting 2.0 for several years and the school keeps getting better and better. I don't care if my child gets a P for proficient or an old-fashioned A or B; he is reading way above grade level, excited about school, and thriving.

I wonder if she's receiving financial aid from Holton and Fourth? As a taxpayer, she should have been more publicly vocal about her opposition instead of people hearing about it little by little. She should have resigned instead of talking poorly about one of the best school systems in the country. Finally, she is somewhere her children will be able to be their best without all those troubled families and with all those wonderful math teachers. Ha.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think part of the problem is that MoCo is so big-- IIRC it's one of the 10 largest school systems in the country. I think "community superintendents" are a good thing if the system is that big, but it's a little crazy that we have to have them, when in probably 98% of other school districts they would just be the school superintendent. Doing anything in a system that big is always going to be incredibly hard.

I agree. The lack of local control/voice makes me crazy. I don't understand it, not at all.

My kids are in middle & high school magnets, and when I read about 2.0 I feel like we got the last train out of Dodge.

This. Am thanking our lucky stars we didn't have any of this dumbing down, proficiency stuff. Am not happy about what may happen to our property values.