Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Again, the W schools get less money. They are spending the little they get to offer more because there is demand. Other schools that get more money might not have the demand for 6 languages. Or maybe they do, but their much larger pot of money is spent on other things those schools seem more important for their students.

Totally misses the point. Within a school district, there should be roughly equivalent quality of education available to each student. That includes quality of teachers, quality of facilities, types of courses available, etc. You can point out inefficiencies, sure, but the fact that W gets less per student to deliver the educational service is an artifact of the ease of delivery to that population in comparison to other populations in the district.

As it stands in MD, districts are basically equivalent to counties (Baltimore City, I think, is an exception), with elements from the US and state governments providing certain supports, regulation & funding -- that's the US Federal system for many things, not just education. You can argue that a district should be broken up to serve only a particular HS pyramid. Or that it should be enlarged so that the state (or country!) manages and delivers the service. Or that it's OK to violate the equal protections clause of the Constitution. Each of these would require a large political effort and likely would result in a county/society not so nice as currently exists, but, hey, you could go for it.

Or you could work to ensure that the funding (tax!) levels are enough so that, taking into account the need to provide that roughly equivalent service to all, there's enough to make that service level great, both at the Ws and elsewhere in the county. There used to be a time when education funding measures (municipal bonds) were on the ballot, and they pretty much always passed. It's been over 20 years since the County Council has regularly funded the MCPS need. It's no wonder there are a lot of cracks in what was once a stellar educational system. Not Fairfax of that time, perhaps, but close. It's still pretty good, but not at the level it used to be. Changing demographics have made things challenging, to be sure, but that has nearly always been the case in modern times in the DC area, and the factor is dwarfed by the effect of general underfunding.

MCPS gets additional money for FARMS kids. The W schools don't have a high farms population so they cannot designate FARMS money that lowers class sizes and other things to W schools because they simply don't have the population that needs it. What those benefits. Move to a school that has them.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Again, the W schools get less money. They are spending the little they get to offer more because there is demand. Other schools that get more money might not have the demand for 6 languages. Or maybe they do, but their much larger pot of money is spent on other things those schools seem more important for their students.

Totally misses the point. Within a school district, there should be roughly equivalent quality of education available to each student. That includes quality of teachers, quality of facilities, types of courses available, etc. You can point out inefficiencies, sure, but the fact that W gets less per student to deliver the educational service is an artifact of the ease of delivery to that population in comparison to other populations in the district.

As it stands in MD, districts are basically equivalent to counties (Baltimore City, I think, is an exception), with elements from the US and state governments providing certain supports, regulation & funding -- that's the US Federal system for many things, not just education. You can argue that a district should be broken up to serve only a particular HS pyramid. Or that it should be enlarged so that the state (or country!) manages and delivers the service. Or that it's OK to violate the equal protections clause of the Constitution. Each of these would require a large political effort and likely would result in a county/society not so nice as currently exists, but, hey, you could go for it.

Or you could work to ensure that the funding (tax!) levels are enough so that, taking into account the need to provide that roughly equivalent service to all, there's enough to make that service level great, both at the Ws and elsewhere in the county. There used to be a time when education funding measures (municipal bonds) were on the ballot, and they pretty much always passed. It's been over 20 years since the County Council has regularly funded the MCPS need. It's no wonder there are a lot of cracks in what was once a stellar educational system. Not Fairfax of that time, perhaps, but close. It's still pretty good, but not at the level it used to be. Changing demographics have made things challenging, to be sure, but that has nearly always been the case in modern times in the DC area, and the factor is dwarfed by the effect of general underfunding.

Anonymous wrote:Again, the W schools get less money. They are spending the little they get to offer more because there is demand. Other schools that get more money might not have the demand for 6 languages. Or maybe they do, but their much larger pot of money is spent on other things those schools seem more important for their students.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because the rich people would lose their minds if Larla had to be bussed to a poor school after they spent crazy money on a house to be in boundary for a white school, sorry I mean good school.

I thought the way it worked was that you always got a spot at your local school if that is what you wanted. If I live in the Blair boundaries I am guaranteed a spot at Blair. The only kids that do something different have made that choice.

Anonymous wrote:Because the rich people would lose their minds if Larla had to be bussed to a poor school after they spent crazy money on a house to be in boundary for a white school, sorry I mean good school.

Anonymous wrote:The consortiums are in large part smoke and mirrors to attract students to schools that are sub par to those in Bethesda/Potomac etc. The W schools tend to have a lot more course offerings than the consortium schools. For example, it is the standard for W schools to offer 5-6 foreign languages. In a consortium school, they tend to offer just a couple of languages but they differ depending on the school.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The school choice is to encourage students who might otherwise not go to those schools go to them (i.e. smarter kids to bring up scores).

In terms of demographics (which are often strongly correlated to standardized test scores), the DCC neighborhoods are fairly similar overall. So it's not really changing anything much in the larger picture if a smart Northwood-zoned kid goes to Wheaton for engineering, while a Humanities-focused Wheaton kid shifts to Einstein or Kennedy for their IB programs, or an especially motivated Blair kid wants to go to Northwood for the MC2 community college program. Magnet programs aside, I'm not sure the DCC Choice program really does much to change test scores at any given school because there's so much movement among the kids with specific academic interests.

But Choice does allow MCPS to offer specialized programs at a single school, rather than trying to increase the number of offerings at each school to support a broad range of interests and talents. Which means kids with strong interests in a specific area have options they might not otherwise have.

Citation please.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The school choice is to encourage students who might otherwise not go to those schools go to them (i.e. smarter kids to bring up scores).

In terms of demographics (which are often strongly correlated to standardized test scores), the DCC neighborhoods are fairly similar overall. So it's not really changing anything much in the larger picture if a smart Northwood-zoned kid goes to Wheaton for engineering, while a Humanities-focused Wheaton kid shifts to Einstein or Kennedy for their IB programs, or an especially motivated Blair kid wants to go to Northwood for the MC2 community college program. Magnet programs aside, I'm not sure the DCC Choice program really does much to change test scores at any given school because there's so much movement among the kids with specific academic interests.

But Choice does allow MCPS to offer specialized programs at a single school, rather than trying to increase the number of offerings at each school to support a broad range of interests and talents. Which means kids with strong interests in a specific area have options they might not otherwise have.

Anonymous wrote:Going to a non-neighborhood school sucks. I did that, and hated ithe commute and not living near my friends. We moved to MoCo from PG solely because of schools and certainly would not have done that if I didn’t know they could attend a neighborhood school.
The dirty truth is that MoCo is using the rich folks’ tax base to find all the county schools and services. One of the top reasons people move to MoCo is for the neighborhood public schools. Without them, I’d like in DC and cut my commute in half . It’s also true for the state—MoCo pays a dispoprtionate amount of the state’s revenue. It’s too easy to leave MoCo and find a perfectly nice house elsewhere, so if you remove the main incentive for upper income people to live here, you’ll likely see it in your revenue stream.
Fwiw, I had never heard of a W school before moving here. We just wanted a suburban neighbor close to metro where kids attended the local schools—most of the kids in our PG neighborhood went to privates.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pure and simple: Wealthy people think they are inherently better, entitled, virtuous, smarter, harder working, and all-up more deserving of a top public school than poor and middle class people who cannot afford the W school neighborhoods. Consortiums would give poor and middle class families access to the schools that wealthy families have bought into in order to AVOID us.

The default should be that you attend your assigned neighborhood school. Parents and students in the DCC and NEC were given additional options that parents and students in other parts of the county don't have, so the whining is testimony to the fact that no good deed goes unpunished.

Anonymous wrote:Pure and simple: Wealthy people think they are inherently better, entitled, virtuous, smarter, harder working, and all-up more deserving of a top public school than poor and middle class people who cannot afford the W school neighborhoods. Consortiums would give poor and middle class families access to the schools that wealthy families have bought into in order to AVOID us.