Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:1000

If the STEM magnet is in a rich school, it's a brain drain from poor schools. If it's placed in the poorest school in that region, the rich kids will stay home and the magnet is going to be a failure - think Watkins Mill IB program.

Expanding should happen in small limited schools if Blair and Poolesville cannot meet the needs, not in 6 schools for each type - STEM, Humanities, Biotech and so on.

If these people had any sense they will expand this in 2 or 3 schools and go from there.

You realize they are doing this because its all for show and the schools they are putting the magnets at have those classes so there is no true change to any of the schools except bussing in a few dozen students from other schools and calling it equity. All schools should have stem, humanities and the arts.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:1000

If the STEM magnet is in a rich school, it's a brain drain from poor schools. If it's placed in the poorest school in that region, the rich kids will stay home and the magnet is going to be a failure - think Watkins Mill IB program.

Expanding should happen in small limited schools if Blair and Poolesville cannot meet the needs, not in 6 schools for each type - STEM, Humanities, Biotech and so on.

If these people had any sense they will expand this in 2 or 3 schools and go from there.

MCPS is trying to expand CTE programs so students meet the 45% goal in the MD Blueprint. That’s why more than half of the programs have an industry recognized credential listed under “student outcomes” in that long document MCPS released.

The academic magnets aren’t the priority in this process and they don’t seem to care if the new ones are comparable to current, successful programs.

https://www.gwdb.maryland.gov/policy/gwdb2024blueprintgoalpolicyoverview.pdf

Anonymous wrote:1000

If the STEM magnet is in a rich school, it's a brain drain from poor schools. If it's placed in the poorest school in that region, the rich kids will stay home and the magnet is going to be a failure - think Watkins Mill IB program.

Expanding should happen in small limited schools if Blair and Poolesville cannot meet the needs, not in 6 schools for each type - STEM, Humanities, Biotech and so on.

If these people had any sense they will expand this in 2 or 3 schools and go from there.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The issue with magnet programs having a spot for every student who has the interest and the ability for the curriculum is that you've then drained home schools of all of the academically strong kids. What if you don't want to do a STEM magnet because your primary interest is music or English or history, but you just want to be able to take a good Calc class? If all of your classmates who are good at math left for the STEM magnet, you won't have that. I think it's ok for these programs to be selective and choose the most qualified students, not all qualified students.

Then you’ll be in class with the other kids who like English, Art, history and who are also capable of doing Calculus. Or are you expecting the kid you mentioned in this scenario to be some rarity. News flash, they aren’t.

I don't think you quite understood where pp is coming from. Instead of sending news flashes maybe you should try harder at reading.

The concern is quite justified. With so many magnets there two possible outcomes. Let's use STEM as an example. If the magnet is placed at school with good reputation, most qualified students will rush to it thus draining other schools in the region of academically strong kids. If the magnet is placed at school with poor reputation, very few will move thus making the magnet obsolete. Neither outcome is good. I am not saying that 100 slots that we currently have is optimal, but this idea to improve accessibility by letting every interested kid in the magnet is misguided.

Having more magnets is good, but the transportation and structure, if you are also an arts or other interest student, is a huge issue. Plus, with the longer day, it impacts extracurricular activities, especially those outside school.

Ideally all schools would have advanced classes so the smarter students will stay, but they don't and MCPS isn't caring about those schools. Only specific schools are getting the extra classes and remodeling and the rest just have to continue to deal with what they have and its up to the parents to figure it out.