Anonymous wrote:I like the new process so much better. The old MS magnet application asked, among other things, what state and national awards your *5th grader* had won. There were three blank lines for filling this in. And we wonder why there are Tiger parents.

Both my 5th graders (at the time) had the equivalent of a national award and several state level achievements. It made a difference I think.

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MCPS refused to release the MS magnet test data on the admirred and rejected students after multiple requests. Everyone is speculating but they they got no data to support their claim. MCPS owns the data and has total control over your child’s school life; it can be cc2.0 or magnet admission.
Unless MCPS touches the UMC and MC white students’ benefit, they will not face real resistance. UMC familes can affort private schools and can bring a lawsuit.
However, Asian families, most of them are first generation of immigrants, cannot afford private schools in this area and 100% depend on public school. It is daunting task to navigate the school system which is totally different from their own school experience. When they saw their child’s education opportunity is robbed by MCPS under the name of diversity, an angry reaction is the least you can expect. Fortunately, for MCPS, the angry voice from Asian parents may be the only reaction from Asian parents. The affected Asian parents will not bring a lawsuit to MCPS, because they cannot afford, cannot find a lawyer to take their case, or decided to let it go because their own child already missed the chance and need to move on.

Dear PP, you are right, there will be no lawsuit from Asian parents!

Asian-heritage families who live in Potomac can't afford a lawyer?

Most of Asian immegtant families in Potomac or North Potomac are working families with two professional jobs. After paying for the $500-900K houses, mortgage, child care, Music/Sport/enrichment classes for kids cost them most of the income after tax and retiremen saving. $45,000 cash for a private school each year,? It is beyond most of the Asian families.

Consider then the low income AA, African, or Latinx family downcounty with a gifted child who is getting Magnet as their only opportunity.

The better approach would be to have more intervention and enrichment for K-2 in low performing schools to ensure that gifted children are challenged and nurtured so that they can easily qualify for the Magnet programs. If you just change the selection criteria using a bogus peer group rationale you could end up with what has happened this year : roughly the same number of AA and HI students and more white students from DCC schools. Meanwhile many Asian and white students in W schools with higher scores did not get in. Before you respond with the standard “but their scores are higher because they went to cram schools “ I just want to say that prepping is not as common as you might imagine and the results of prepping are not as positive as you might imagine. I know of kids who did prep who got in ( and it is not a high number) and I know of kids who prepped who did not. My child got into RMIB, Blair SMAC and CAP without any prepping and he was not alone

I don't disagree w/ you generally, but prepping from the the Asian group is common and successful. My kid just finished at TPMS and was a little freaked out by how many Asian kids were carrying A++ study books geared towards the HS magnet test all Fall. Most kids got into magnet. I'm sure these families prepped for MS exam as well. And, before anyone cries "sour grapes," my kid got into magnet, CAP, both Wheatons & RM. And, did not do a test prep class.

My issues w/ the new system is that in trying to remove emphasis from the test (I'm OK w/ that), it actually increased emphasis on the test by omitting the essays and teacher recs. These are where my kids were able to stand out. I think these are important aspects of application data that should be considered.

The bigger issue is that MCPS needs more enrichment. More magnet spots and more home school enrichment.

I like the new process so much better. The old MS magnet application asked, among other things, what state and national awards your *5th grader* had won. There were three blank lines for filling this in. And we wonder why there are Tiger parents.

Anonymous wrote:The new selection criteria has resulted in a higher caliber student at the magnets than was previously possible since the system was exclusive and easily gamed..

Truth makes the tiger moms kray kray.

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The presence of mini-magnets in the DCC makes living there (as in, owning property and not just bussing in) a viable option for families that value education. That is actually a smart approach on the part of MCPS. However, if tomorrow they will start messing with admission criteria to make the racial make-up more representative of the area, those programs will also lose their attractiveness.

Are you saying that MCPS is breaking the law by using race as a factor in admissions? If so, you should tell the Department of Justice. They are very interested in such topics, for some groups of people, these days.

The county absolutely does not use race as a selection criterion.

How do you know? If it was true, why MCPS doesnt release test data? I would be happy to see the talented URM students attending magnet. Frankly speaking, lack of diversity in magnet is not good for its students.

Anonymous wrote:The new selection criteria has resulted in a higher caliber student at the magnets than was previously possible since the system was exclusive and easily gamed..

PP doesn’t want to hear that! His/her DC was not selected and it can only be due to anti-Asian biased social engineering. After all, poor children of color have absolutely no chance of ever attending a college.

There is no evidence that MCPS has overlooked URM kids for gt selection previously. When my DC was in ES, he said the teacher told the kids who were advanced to take the test for HGC. He was my first child in MCPS and in the US, I never heard anything about HGC in MCPS before he brought home the application. That was decade ago.
In MCPS most teachers have been happy to identify URM gift students in their classes and nurture their talent.

You are conflating "advanced" with "gifted" and making the common mistake of assuming a (almost certainly young, white, female) elementary school teacher has the desire, will, or training to identify gifted kids who are also poor/working class or kids of color.

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Anonymous wrote:The idea that the tests are sufficient to identify "truly gifted" students is ridiculous. The addition of the "peer cohort" criterion shows this for what it really was -- a social engineering effort. Which is not wrong in and of itself but dressing it up as a more objective process is not accurate.

And I agree with the overall point that MCPS is failing the smart kids, whether or not you want to call them gifted or whether that term really fits. The advanced courses and tracking so that kids are grouped and not lumped into classes needs to be offered at all home schools. I've had kids go through both a well-regarded W feeder middle school and a magnet middle school, and the W feeder middle school was a waste of three years.

Just the opposite! The new and improved process does a superior job identifying truly gifted students by opening up the selection process to a much larger group than in previous years.

Sure, a bunch of affluent parents are angry because they can't buy their kids way into the magnets any longer, but this is a step in the right direction.

Again, you don't know that the new and improved process does a superior job of identifying truly gifted students. You are correct that it opened up the selection process to a much larger group. However, you're assuming that the tests given are precise and accurate in measuring giftedness, and that truly gifted children will outperform not-gifted or not-as-gifted children on those tests. Neither assumption is demonstrably valid. Further, by excluding non-test factors such as teacher recommendations and essays, you're taking away other mechanisms by which truly gifted -- but not amazing standardized test-takers -- can differentiate themselves. Finally, MCPS took a process that, however weak, involved apples-to-apples objective comparisons only between test scores, and threw the subjective "peer cohort" factor in to remove children who otherwise qualified for the magnet from the pool of students eligible to attend the magnet.

And if you don't think there was an unspoken and unwritten goal of increasing at least certain types of diversity, then you didn't go to the open house where MCPS administrators tried to explain the process. One MCPS employee said with satisfaction how happy she was that the process resulted in greater diversity (although it reduced Asian American representation). They're doing the social engineering by the back door that they can't legally accomplish through the front door by using race/ethnicity as an explicit criterion.

The new selection criteria has resulted in a higher caliber student at the magnets than was previously possible since the system was exclusive and easily gamed..