Anonymous wrote:The new selection process fills me with optimism for MCPS and its future. More kids benefit and overall standards are raised.

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Correct.. and they happen to be Asian American students. MCPS' own stats show this. Someone posted up thread... some 30+% of Asian Am. students score very high on tests. How many URM score very high on tests? The demographic of the magnet students should reflect high achievers by MCPS' own statistics, not the demographic of the entire district.

I never thought that I would have to point out on DCUM that there are lots of white kids at Hoover, Frost, Cabin John, Westland, and Silver Creek.

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Correct.. and they happen to be Asian American students. MCPS' own stats show this. Someone posted up thread... some 30+% of Asian Am. students score very high on tests. How many URM score very high on tests? The demographic of the magnet students should reflect high achievers by MCPS' own statistics, not the demographic of the entire district.

Anonymous wrote:The new selection process fills me with optimism for MCPS and its future. More kids benefit and overall standards are raised.

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Anonymous wrote:I think the correct question to ask is if the achievement gap was mystically closed this year. I think not.

No, that's not the correct question. Closing the achievement gap was not the purpose of the pilot change to the MS gifted magnet admissions process.

good joke.

Starr and Smith are on the record saying that was their goal. They spent 2017 instigating that and here in Spring 2018 we see the results of their new selection process.

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Yep. There is real evidence that Asians need to score higher to get into these programs. Just like they have to score higher to get into the same colleges, or medical schools.

No, not just like. Unlike colleges or medical schools, MCPS is not allowed to use race as a factor in admissions decisions. And the people who made the Takoma/Eastern admissions decisions did not know the racial/ethnic categories of the applicants.

They could guess. If you used to accept 15 kids from Cold Spring into Takoma and all of them were Asian in the past you could guess that if you only accepted 1-2 of them this year by claiming there is a "strong peer cohort" then you would have 13-14 additional slots for non-Asian kids.

The people who made the Takoma/Eastern admissions decisions also did not know which elementary schools the applicants attended.

could you cite all the sources that claim this? If they didn't where the students' home schools were, then how would they know whether that student had a cohort in the home school?

This has been covered, but let us cover it again. They knew what middle school those children WOULD BE attending based on their address, but not which elementary school they were leaving.

So, since you insist on focusing on Cold Spring, the evaluators knew that Child Y was slated for Cabin John MS. Since Cabin John is plurality white, it seems like a hard case to make that kids slated to attend Cabin John were discriminated against for being Asian.

What does it matter whether they knew the home ES or MS? Hoover and Frost have a high Asian/white population and very low URM one. Not hard to figure it out.

It matters because MCPS applied the same "cohort" standard to Hoover, Frost, Cabin John, Westland, Silver Lake, and every other middle school with a large number of high performing kids. Now, you may disagree with the idea of a cohort, or that kids who are outliers at their schools *need* the curriculum more than kids who have a large group of similarly high fliers, but you cannot argue that kids zoned for Hoover were subject to a different standard than another middle school with similarly high-scoring kids.

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Anonymous wrote:I think the correct question to ask is if the achievement gap was mystically closed this year. I think not.

No, that's not the correct question. Closing the achievement gap was not the purpose of the pilot change to the MS gifted magnet admissions process.

good joke.

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Anonymous wrote:Less interested in YOY change. How does TPMS magnet demographics compare to the county’s?

p this is a better indicator of whether we’re headed in the right direction

Are Asians still vastly over-represented at the magnets as a percentage of the County's total population?

so we are using % of total representative pop as criteria now? no wonder mcps is all f'ed up

Looking at the Maryland Report Card results for PARCC from 2017 for Grade 5 math in MCPS
There were 1319 students total in MCPS who "exceeded expectations" which seems like the bare minimum to be considered for TPMS magnet
Of these 494 were Asian (out of a total of 1653 Asian students), 550 were White (out of a total of 3476 white students), 102 were 2 or more races (out of 620).
So of the 1319 students who exceeded expectations 1146 came from these three groups which means only 173 students from other groups exceeded expectations.
http://reportcard.msde.maryland.gov/ParccTrends.aspx?PV=71:5:15:AAAA:1:N:6:13:2:2:5:1:1:2:3

By 8th grade it is still bad
347 Asians (out of 969), 294 whites (out of 1797) and 45 mixed race (out of 281)
686 students from these three groups exceeded expectations. The total number of Grade 8 who exceeded expectations 735 (49 from all other groups exceeded expectations).

The achievement gap is to blame for the poor representation of certain groups in the magnet programs. MCPS needs to treat the problem instead of obscuring the symptoms by changing selection criteria

NP here. I did not write the above post, but I must say it is very valid. But I would be interested to hear the other side's argument against this.

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MAP-M is an 'adaptive' test that basically gives significant score advantages to kids who were prepped on the side. Is this also the case with PARCC?


Well the JHU report pointed out that there were serious flaws in the MCPS 2.0 math curriculum leading to students not learning how to execute the skill, retaining knowledge or having large holes where MCPS failed to teach the concept or focused more on process than the actual concept or skill. Students who have been learning outside math school in on-line math programs, Kumon or Singapore etc would have an advantage.

MCPS created this gap on its own.

This isn't a reason though to keep the highest performance students out of the most advanced courses.


No, MCPS did not. Anymore than MCPS's deficient PE curriculum led to a gap between the soccer skills of students who do soccer outside of school vs. students who only do soccer at school, or MCPS's deficient music curriculum led to a gap between the skills of students who have private lessons on the violin vs. students who only do instrumental music at school.

Yes, MCPS did create this particular gap all on its own. One of the findings of the JHU report was that the flaws and fundamental problems in the curriculum were disproportionately hurting already lower performing students. The higher performing students who already had learned math at home or were in outside program only showed residency because they learned outside the system. When MCPS fails to teach math, it hurts everyone but it hurts the kids that aren't getting a back up education at home.

The answer to this isn't to punish or hold back the kids that learned at home. The answer is to punish the incompetent people that created the terrible curriculum, apologize to the entire community and offer free tutoring to any poor kid who wasn't already able to learn on their own at home.

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+1 the geographic discrimination was a proxy for race and a way for MCPS to reduce Asians whom they have already said were "over represented" in higher performance categories.

It's a lousy proxy for race. Most kids at Cabin John, Frost, and Hoover aren't classified as Asian. Most kids classified as Asian in the downcounty aren't at Cabin John, Frost, and Hoover.

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Anonymous wrote:The county altered the testing methodology to be:

1) more inclusive i.e. tests way more applicants now
2) new criteria reduces the advantage of kids who prep

It stands to reason with the larget sample that median scores are now much higher too.

Median score is very unlikely to go up when you test more people. It is certainly not going to go up now when you deny entry of all those 99% kids from the W schools.

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+1 the geographic discrimination was a proxy for race and a way for MCPS to reduce Asians whom they have already said were "over represented" in higher performance categories.

This has been covered, but let us cover it again. They knew what middle school those children WOULD BE attending based on their address, but not which elementary school they were leaving.

So, since you insist on focusing on Cold Spring, the evaluators knew that Child Y was slated for Cabin John MS. Since Cabin John is plurality white, it seems like a hard case to make that kids slated to attend Cabin John were discriminated against for being Asian.

What does it matter whether they knew the home ES or MS? Hoover and Frost have a high Asian/white population and very low URM one. Not hard to figure it out.