Anonymous wrote:
Remediate them at one location. don't mix these kids with the kids that are higher performers if they can't keep up. no one wins.

Anonymous wrote:
Remediate them at one location. don't mix these kids with the kids that are higher performers if they can't keep up. no one wins.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Now is not the time for semantics.
Stop making excuses - - they can't read, write, or speak in English well. What they do know is from TV, thus they perform poorly on all the tests.
They are way below others and their peers. In fact, they cannot read, write or speak in any language well.
We are shoveling monetary and tangible resources at them for the last 10 years, we cannot keep up, it is overwhelming the system and no end is in sight. The new reputation of MoCo and MCPS is "focus on ELS students." It is the magnet district for the hemisphere. Bienvenidos.

It has very little to do with language. In most cases, these kids are reading and writing, quite frankly, at the same level as other kids of their same SES. I.E. they are from poor families, and like MANY (not all) kids from poor families, they don't have great academic background knowledge or high literacy skills.

I don't know how much money your school district is spending on teachers and resources for ESL students, because I live and work in a different county. But even if you fired all the ESL teachers and stopped the program completely, you would still have kids who were not reading and writing on grade level, although their oral fluency was fine. What do you want to do with all these kids (a ground which frankly, includes many poor children including African American ones, and other poor minorities, as well as the occasional poor white child in MoCo)?

You can't just dismiss them from school -- seriously, that's not allowed by federal law. If your county provides a free public education to residents, you aren't legally allowed to just exclude a bunch of kids because they have poor background knowledge and low literacy scores in preK. Putting them all into a special school to learn English won't actually help the problem, because they already speak English.... especially the African American ones, who really don't speak Spanish, you know?

So you are going to have to provide SOME remediation and special programs to bring them up to speed. If you don't, your scores in Montgomery County are going to continue to go down, down, down, and your property values will be dragged down with them.

Anonymous wrote:
Now is not the time for semantics.
Stop making excuses - - they can't read, write, or speak in English well. What they do know is from TV, thus they perform poorly on all the tests.
They are way below others and their peers. In fact, they cannot read, write or speak in any language well.
We are shoveling monetary and tangible resources at them for the last 10 years, we cannot keep up, it is overwhelming the system and no end is in sight. The new reputation of MoCo and MCPS is "focus on ELS students." It is the magnet district for the hemisphere. Bienvenidos.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you don't speak English - you need to learn before you attend an MCPS school. have one or two schools in the county that cater to those that don't speak English.

FWIW I am an ESOL teacher. The majority of my students speak English fairly fluently when they enter Kindergarten -- probably 80%! Yet they qualify for ESOL services because their literacy scores are low.

These are the kids who are not managing to pass the MSA by grade 3. They don't need to learn English. They need to improve their reading and writing skills. They need extra tutoring and instruction, not English language classes. Your solution would not change much.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you don't speak English - you need to learn before you attend an MCPS school. have one or two schools in the county that cater to those that don't speak English.

FWIW I am an ESOL teacher. The majority of my students speak English fairly fluently when they enter Kindergarten -- probably 80%! Yet they qualify for ESOL services because their literacy scores are low.

These are the kids who are not managing to pass the MSA by grade 3. They don't need to learn English. They need to improve their reading and writing skills. They need extra tutoring and instruction, not English language classes. Your solution would not change much.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We moved from a DCC school to a W school. Teacher quality was the same, the admin. was similar, the curriculum was nearly identical. The DCC school had smaller class sizes and more children being pulled out for help with English and with reading. From what I saw, the teachers and admin were dedicated to having these children read and achieve English fluency. What I also saw however was low turnout on back to school nights. When I volunteered, I encountered children who did not have books at home or even crayons. Now, I did not know most of these families personally, but I find it hard to believe that it would beyond the ability of most families in MoCo to purchase a few used books and a packet of crayons for their child. We can throw tons of resources (because smaller class sizes, additional teaching staff, free breakfasts all cost a lot) at the children but unless this effort is reinforced by parents who partner with the schools to educate their children, it will not help these children achieve their full potential. I'm not sure how you "legislate" this! If there was one other thing the county could do, it might be universal preschool. Again though, the benefits of universal preschool would ideally be magnified and leveraged by parents.

I don't buy the "no books" "no crayons" thing. Sorry, low income kids routinely get free books sent home with them from various charities along with loads of other stuff throughout the year. They have them but the books are likely buried under a ton of other crap - plastic toys, barbies, xbox, etc.

Anonymous wrote:

We can throw tons of resources (because smaller class sizes, additional teaching staff, free breakfasts all cost a lot) at the children but unless this effort is reinforced by parents who partner with the schools to educate their children, it will not help these children achieve their full potential.

If your assertion is true then any money spent on this group is a waste. Failing is failing so the county may as well re-allocate $$ back to the areas with higher performing students.

Parental involvement and home education is critical ONLY when the educational system is deficient, which is exactly what is going on here. We just don't want to admit t. Its far easier to call whatever we do a success on our part and a failure on the lower SES parent's part. This simply isn't true but its more convenient for us.

The lower performing schools where kids are receiving free before and aftercare have these kids for 11 hours a day. The 2 remaining hours in the day when the child is awake and with their parents does not need to be spent reading and coloring if the 11 hours are used effectively.

Anonymous wrote:If you don't speak English - you need to learn before you attend an MCPS school. have one or two schools in the county that cater to those that don't speak English.