If you live in MoCo, a lot has been happening in the past few weeks regarding gifted issues.
Notably, a group of students from the Blair Math and Science Magnet staged a protest in Rockville against planned budget cuts. (Big kudos to them!) You can read the Post’s coverage here. And here’s a link to their website, Save the Magnets!. Unfortunately C. and I didn’t participate, as C. had a final rehearsal for her Shakespeare play. We’re sorry we missed it because as C. says, “I always like a good protest.”
On the surface it would seem that the proposed cuts are rather minor. The Post says, “$350,000, or the equivalent of 3.5 teaching positions…part of a $10 million reduction in academic programs to balance an unavoidable increase in other costs — most notably, teacher salaries — in a tough budget year.”
But a follow-up piece in the Sunday Opinion written by a former magnet student and now teacher, “The Price of a Good Magnet Program,” digs deeper.
As an educator, I now fully appreciate the pedagogical rationale for the structure of the magnet program. A major buzzword in science education is “inquiry” — essentially the idea that students learn science best by doing science. In practice, however, I have found that too much inquiry can be frustrating for scientifically inclined students — like those in the magnet — who want to learn as much content as possible as quickly as possible. The magnet program’s structure gets around this problem by having a separate research course that is integrated into the “content-driven” courses. This research program requires students to design, analyze and report on their own experiments and culminates in an optional summer internship allowing magnet students to work with real scientists, in real laboratories, on real scientific problems — a program that has led to the magnet’s phenomenal success in the Intel Science Talent Search.
Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry Weast asserts that his budget cuts will not change the magnet program, because they “only” increase the magnet teachers’ course loads to five courses per year — the same number as most county high school educators — rather than the current four. Such a perspective underestimates the time and effort magnet teachers put into teaching the integrated science-research program.
Frankly it’s puzzling why MCPS would go after the magnets, which play a huge role in the PR machine that is MCPS. Relatively speaking it *is* a small amount of money. Especially in light of the millions of dollars devoted to the MPCS Communications Department. One parent listserv has taken special delight in ferreting out and detailing the perambulations of various MPCS staff around the country, giving presentations at education conferences to tout the success of MCPS.
Friday, April 18, 2008:General Session: Maintaining Effective Media Relationships
Jack Dale, superintendent, Fairfax County Public Schools, Falls Church, Va.
Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, superintendent, Pomona Unified School District, Pomona, Calif.
Greg Toppo, reporter, USA Today, McLean, Va.
Jerry Weast, superintendent, Montgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, Md.
At this session, you will learn how to develop and manage positive working relationships with the media. Learn how to implement a comprehensive media relations plan, including how to establish and maintain a message on behalf of your school districts.
And here’s the PowerPoint presentation given by the superintendent at a Harvard conference last year: http://www.hbs.edu/pelp/docs/Weast070620Harvard.pdf
The answer may lie in the recently announced cuts to programs at the other end of the educational spectrum. RICA (the John L. Gildner Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents) in Rockville is a special education school for students with emotional disabilities serving Montgomery County and several nearby counties in the state of Maryland. There are several similar therapeutic schools in MCPS. Writes a parent, “This latest round of staffing cuts looks like a pattern we’ve seen before – the deterioration of special programs in MCPS. The system stops investing in programs… The referrals drop off and the quality goes down hill, then the system claims the programs don’t work. In the end they are under-utilized even though they are desperately needed. All of these cuts are part of a misguided attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all instructional model that ends up fitting none of our children — a model for continued failure that must be stopped if our children are to receive anything close to the education they deserve.”
Some may recall that last year parents of GT/LD students led an unsuccessful fight to keep open special high school learning centers programs in the high schools. You can read an example of the result here.
The average cost per RICA student for FY 2008 is $32,030. By comparison, $350,000 from the magnets is small beans. But bottom line, all of these programs are perceived to be expensive. Certainly there is the sentiment out there that gifted kids will turn out fine regardless, that they already are advantaged, so what are they complaining about?
Meanwhile, the Board of Education this month adopted a resolution to reconstitute its Special Education Ad Hoc Committee as a standing Committee on Special Populations. The committee is now “charged specifically with reviewing issues and instructional programs designed to meet the needs of special populations that require special education services, gifted and talented instruction, alternative programs, ESOL services, and multilingual supports.”
That one’s interesting. MCPS has repeatedly asserted that it’s “not about labels, but about services”–in essence that there are no “gifted and talented” students–and everyone can benefit from rigorous instruction delivered in a heterogeneous settting. This move seems to acknowledge that GT students do exist, that they are in fact a “special population” requiring “gifted and talented instruction.” However if the IEP/GT/LD process is any guide, I can’t even imagine the hoops needed to “prove” that one’s student is part of a “special” GT population.
Is the RICA program the same thing as the Mark Twain school?? I have heard complaints about the plan to close the Mark Twain school.
Mark Twain is a different school, but like RICA it is among the specialized schools operated by MCPS. You can see them all here: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/schools/special/