Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am also positive gender plays a role in if a kid gets in. MCPS also tries to balance this out.

I think you're right - gender IS known to the reviewers, to make sure Takoma isn't all male and Eastern all female.

It’s pretty sexist to think one school would end up with only one sex without outside interference. How can that be possible?

Our CES (one of the most competitive CESs) this year had 5 kids accepted by TP/Eastern, all are girls. Given that the total number of boys is slightly more than that of girls, shall I consider this phenomenon sexist?

No, it's random. This whole thing is crazy. It's like an 80-year-old rich white guy crying foul when running for the Senate which is mainly 80-year old rich white guys.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am also positive gender plays a role in if a kid gets in. MCPS also tries to balance this out.

I think you're right - gender IS known to the reviewers, to make sure Takoma isn't all male and Eastern all female.

It’s pretty sexist to think one school would end up with only one sex without outside interference. How can that be possible?

Our CES (one of the most competitive CESs) this year had 5 kids accepted by TP/Eastern, all are girls. Given that the total number of boys is slightly more than that of girls, shall I consider this phenomenon sexist?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am also positive gender plays a role in if a kid gets in. MCPS also tries to balance this out.

I think you're right - gender IS known to the reviewers, to make sure Takoma isn't all male and Eastern all female.

It’s pretty sexist to think one school would end up with only one sex without outside interference. How can that be possible?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:sigh. my kid got 280 on mapm and 248 on mapr, 99% national % and between 95-99% for mcps. straight As from a CES. 5s on parcc. Asian boy in W district. outright rejected.

I'm so sorry, PP! That sounds completely discriminatory, because I KNOW there are extremely few students with 280 on their MAP-M. I have a discrimination story at the 3rd grade level for entry to a W district CES (Asian student with higher scores than mixed African-American; former rejected, latter accepted).

I hope you appealed and are party to the lawsuit.

Just a reminder that the applications are race blind. The process may look "unfair" from the outside, without all of the data points, but race was not known by the committee.

Should be MCPS “claims” the admission is race-blind.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:sigh. my kid got 280 on mapm and 248 on mapr, 99% national % and between 95-99% for mcps. straight As from a CES. 5s on parcc. Asian boy in W district. outright rejected.

I'm PP and this is why I suggested the CogAT is more important than the MAP scores. DC scored 99% in both National and MCPS. Had classmates at CES that were wait-listed with 98% MCPS score and others rejected below 97% MCPS. All scored 99 percentile nationally.

Please also remember that mcps admitted to playing with some magic "formula" to alter the CoGAT MCPS Percentile to fit in some SES or home school formula. So a kid who got 97% in a W district likely has an MCPS score that looks lowered because this number has been played with by MCPS. The only way you would be able to truly compare is if you know their raw score in each section, which MCPS did not release. So in terms of numbers that were not "played" with by MCPS, it would be the MAPs, the parcc and the cogat national percentiles.

This is so shady. When my kid applied several years ago we got his raw scores

Anonymous wrote:I am also positive gender plays a role in if a kid gets in. MCPS also tries to balance this out.

I think you're right - gender IS known to the reviewers, to make sure Takoma isn't all male and Eastern all female.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:sigh. my kid got 280 on mapm and 248 on mapr, 99% national % and between 95-99% for mcps. straight As from a CES. 5s on parcc. Asian boy in W district. outright rejected.

So surrounded by similar scoring cohort remaining at home MS or no?

There's a strong cohort at W feeders and with the enriched classes, it's like a magnet.

Not quite, but it’s been better than we expected.

It should be excellent. I'm told people pay hundreds of thousands more to live in those school boundaries because the schools are so wonderful.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:sigh. my kid got 280 on mapm and 248 on mapr, 99% national % and between 95-99% for mcps. straight As from a CES. 5s on parcc. Asian boy in W district. outright rejected.

I'm so sorry, PP! That sounds completely discriminatory, because I KNOW there are extremely few students with 280 on their MAP-M. I have a discrimination story at the 3rd grade level for entry to a W district CES (Asian student with higher scores than mixed African-American; former rejected, latter accepted).

I hope you appealed and are party to the lawsuit.

Just a reminder that the applications are race blind. The process may look "unfair" from the outside, without all of the data points, but race was not known by the committee.

Just a reminder that just because MCPS says it is, doesn't mean it actually is. This is why MCPS is currently under investigation for potential discrimination against Asian-American students at the magnet middle school level.

You should also know that MCPS students are categorized by race and ethnicity the first time their parents enroll them: either the parent checks the requisite box on the form, or the registrar present during enrollment checks what they think are the right boxes (and for mixed race families or certain Hispanics, may very well guess wrong!).

I know and please remember to wear that tin foil hat to prevent the Illuminati from controlling your thoughts too!

I am also positive gender plays a role in if a kid gets in. MCPS also tries to balance this out.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:sigh. my kid got 280 on mapm and 248 on mapr, 99% national % and between 95-99% for mcps. straight As from a CES. 5s on parcc. Asian boy in W district. outright rejected.

I'm PP and this is why I suggested the CogAT is more important than the MAP scores. DC scored 99% in both National and MCPS. Had classmates at CES that were wait-listed with 98% MCPS score and others rejected below 97% MCPS. All scored 99 percentile nationally.

Please also remember that mcps admitted to playing with some magic "formula" to alter the CoGAT MCPS Percentile to fit in some SES or home school formula. So a kid who got 97% in a W district likely has an MCPS score that looks lowered because this number has been played with by MCPS. The only way you would be able to truly compare is if you know their raw score in each section, which MCPS did not release. So in terms of numbers that were not "played" with by MCPS, it would be the MAPs, the parcc and the cogat national percentiles.

Even the "investigation" does not allege that MCPS used race explicitly. It alleges that MCPS used geography as a proxy for race by choosing kids who were outliers based on their home school.

In the case of PP, it seems both kids were coming from the same home school and therefore geography and peer cohort were not part of the equation.

If you want to believe that MCPS had a ton of reviewers for the CES program application, and all of them saw the race of the applicants AND kept quiet about it, then sure. Go ahead and engage in conspiracy theories. But the more reasonable conclusion based on the information PP provided is that the accepted child had other strengths and factors in play that the reviewers saw but that PP isn't privy to.

First, the investigation is whether MCPS changes in admission discriminates against Asian American kids. It will be looking at everything including whether geography became a proxy for race based discrimination but is not limited to this. If MCPS took other actions to deny minority (Asian American) students in favor of majority (white) students then this becomes part of it.

Second the admission committee did not review the profiles of every incoming 8th grade student in MCPS. The central office winnowed down the list that it gave to the committee. No one in MCPS has ever said that the group providing the pool of highly able students to the admissions committee was ever race blind. They were not and I certainly suspect that they were running the numbers as they tweaked how much to penalize some schools to get the racial make up they wanted while protecting the lower performing whites in the DCC.

Third, within local CES admissions there is a desire to get the racial numbers up for groups that are small in number. This has been going on forever. Principals and central office staff look for capable AA and Latino kids and have pushed them ahead of other higher scoring applicants. For the principals at the home ES, they get brownie points for pushing an AA or latino kid into a CES. They benefit further by keeping the higher scoring Asian kid at their home school to bump up their scores. The ES principals in the W clusters are ridiculously competitive with each other over getting the highest % in the 90s over their peer schools.

Fourth, this is happening at the high school level too. Central office staff supposedly tried to strongly pressure Blair SMAC to accept some students over more qualified students. The teachers and staff at Blair pushed back and succeeded this time but they'll eventually lose out to the central office.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:sigh. my kid got 280 on mapm and 248 on mapr, 99% national % and between 95-99% for mcps. straight As from a CES. 5s on parcc. Asian boy in W district. outright rejected.

I'm so sorry, PP! That sounds completely discriminatory, because I KNOW there are extremely few students with 280 on their MAP-M. I have a discrimination story at the 3rd grade level for entry to a W district CES (Asian student with higher scores than mixed African-American; former rejected, latter accepted).

I hope you appealed and are party to the lawsuit.

Just a reminder that the applications are race blind. The process may look "unfair" from the outside, without all of the data points, but race was not known by the committee.

Just a reminder that just because MCPS says it is, doesn't mean it actually is. This is why MCPS is currently under investigation for potential discrimination against Asian-American students at the magnet middle school level.

You should also know that MCPS students are categorized by race and ethnicity the first time their parents enroll them: either the parent checks the requisite box on the form, or the registrar present during enrollment checks what they think are the right boxes (and for mixed race families or certain Hispanics, may very well guess wrong!).

Even the "investigation" does not allege that MCPS used race explicitly. It alleges that MCPS used geography as a proxy for race by choosing kids who were outliers based on their home school.

In the case of PP, it seems both kids were coming from the same home school and therefore geography and peer cohort were not part of the equation.

If you want to believe that MCPS had a ton of reviewers for the CES program application, and all of them saw the race of the applicants AND kept quiet about it, then sure. Go ahead and engage in conspiracy theories. But the more reasonable conclusion based on the information PP provided is that the accepted child had other strengths and factors in play that the reviewers saw but that PP isn't privy to.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:sigh. my kid got 280 on mapm and 248 on mapr, 99% national % and between 95-99% for mcps. straight As from a CES. 5s on parcc. Asian boy in W district. outright rejected.

I'm so sorry, PP! That sounds completely discriminatory, because I KNOW there are extremely few students with 280 on their MAP-M. I have a discrimination story at the 3rd grade level for entry to a W district CES (Asian student with higher scores than mixed African-American; former rejected, latter accepted).

I hope you appealed and are party to the lawsuit.

Just a reminder that the applications are race blind. The process may look "unfair" from the outside, without all of the data points, but race was not known by the committee.

Of course it's race blind <wink> <wink>

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:sigh. my kid got 280 on mapm and 248 on mapr, 99% national % and between 95-99% for mcps. straight As from a CES. 5s on parcc. Asian boy in W district. outright rejected.

I'm so sorry, PP! That sounds completely discriminatory, because I KNOW there are extremely few students with 280 on their MAP-M. I have a discrimination story at the 3rd grade level for entry to a W district CES (Asian student with higher scores than mixed African-American; former rejected, latter accepted).

I hope you appealed and are party to the lawsuit.

Just a reminder that the applications are race blind. The process may look "unfair" from the outside, without all of the data points, but race was not known by the committee.

Just a reminder that just because MCPS says it is, doesn't mean it actually is. This is why MCPS is currently under investigation for potential discrimination against Asian-American students at the magnet middle school level.

You should also know that MCPS students are categorized by race and ethnicity the first time their parents enroll them: either the parent checks the requisite box on the form, or the registrar present during enrollment checks what they think are the right boxes (and for mixed race families or certain Hispanics, may very well guess wrong!).