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Posts Tagged ‘NCLB’

Why You Should Fill Out that Application for the Highly Gifted Center Program

Posted in Gifted, School, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 5, 2009 | 10 Comments »

Last week I thought I had really put my foot in it with a friend.  She has an extremely bright and creative 3rd grader and I realized that the deadline (Monday, November 9) for the Centers for the Highly Gifted was fast approaching .  So I gave her a call and in the course of the conversation sort of wove in, “So…are you going to apply?”  When she said “No, I don’t know what I would put on the form” I just about had a heart attack.  Reflecting on my reaction, I worried I had seriously overstepped.

But then late yesterday afternoon she sent me an email.  Could I come over that evening to talk about the application?  She and her husband were stumbling on the first question:  “What advanced learning need has your child demonstrated that you believe MAY NOT BE EASILY MET IN HIS OR HER LOCAL SCHOOL PROGRAMS.”   Sure, I wrote her.  She emailed back; another friend was  also going to come over.  By the time I arrived, there was yet another friend there for soup and chat.  (My friend is like that.)  Little did I know that I was going to be the evening’s “featured speaker.”

However it turned out really well.  We had a good, thoughtful discussion about giftededness, MCPS, the Centers, their home school, education.  For my part, it was very informative to hear their concerns about both home school and Center program, and to get their impressions of the MCPS presentations they had sat through.  And they told me they appreciated my perspective and the chance to actually talk this stuff through, because the focus had been so much on the process of applying.

So what were my main points?

  • My starting point for all of this is that the Center might not be great for every GT kid, but at minimum a parent shouldn’t cut off the opportunity by not even applying.  If your child gets in, you can always say no.  If they attend but don’t like it, they can always go back to their neighborhood school.
  • There was some concern that kids in a GT program would get an “attitude,” that they would feel superior to other kids.  My response?  Kids in a regular classroom who are always at the top, who always finish their work before others, are getting no favors.  Contrary to what one might think, condescension (not to mention behavior problems) can actually breed in that situation.  Whereas when you put gifted kids with other kids at their readiness level, they may realize for the first time that they aren’t the best, that there are others smarter than them.  Learning to work and even struggle a bit is a good thing, as opposed to coasting through, never learning work habits and then having the consequences hit them later in life when the lesson is harder and it really matters.
  • Bottom line: Every child has a right to learn something during the six hours they are required to be in school.  They shouldn’t be used as tutors or “good influences” for other kids to their own detriment.
  • Diversity.  Yes, this has been a concern with GT programs in the county–that the Centers and Magnets are overwhelming White and Asian.  Encouragingly, my friend and her friends reported that the parents who showed up at the Center information meetings were extremely diverse.  Which brought me to my next point….
  • I think I planted some seeds of an “aha” moment when I explained that principals have an incentive NOT to have GT kids leave the building, especially minority kids.  Think about it.  Under No Child Left Behind schools live and die by their test scores.  Why would a school encourage a high achieving child–especially a minority child–to leave?  I mentioned it because….
  • I had heard through the grapevine that parents at this particular school had gotten the hard sell from their principal, that “whatever the Center can do, we can do  better.”   Sorry.  Just. Don’t. Buy. It.  In my humble opinion, the “GT” that could be offered would be the thin gruel of a smidge of William and Mary and math acceleration.  End of story.  Whereas at the Centers, students receive substantive writing and writing instruction; use of WordlyWise vocabulary books; creative, content-rich interdisciplinary science and social studies; truly differentiated and appropriately challenging reading instruction.  And of course grouping with peers, and the stimulation and understanding that comes with that, and teachers who understand more about giftedness than the average teacher.  Slam dunk.

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Who’s Deluding Whom?

Posted in In the News, School, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 30, 2009 | 3 Comments »

Well the hits keep coming for MCPS.  This morning’s paper carried the headline Md. Tests A Blow To Two Counties: Schools Fall Short In Montgomery And Pr. George’s.

Ouch.

Educationally speaking, Montgomery and Prince George’s counties are a world apart. But when it comes to hurdling Maryland’s ever-rising bar for academic achievement, the two school systems have one thing in common: They tripped up this year.

Both counties failed to meet Maryland’s standards for elementary, middle and high school students, according to state data on standardized tests taken in the past school year.

The results amount to a warning for Montgomery, which will be designated a “system in improvement” if it fails again next time. That would be an ugly label for a county that markets itself as having one of the best large school systems in the United States.

What tripped up MoCo this year?  “The county fell short specifically because its elementary, middle and high school special education students failed to meet benchmarks. Three other categories of middle school student also failed to meet targets.”  That would be Limited English, African Americans, and FARMS students–in math.  The 2009 Maryland “report card” summarizing the results is here.

Special ed parents, no surprise, are angry.  They predicted these outcomes as MCPS systematically dismantled special ed programs and supports over the past few years.  They’ve had enough with the placid “monitoring of the situation”–they’d like some actual action.

Meanwhile at Springbrook High School, the one high school that did not make AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) a parent reports that the “principal and Community Superintendent Dr. Ursula Hermann and the local PTSA have maintained a studious silence.  I would guess that 75% of Springbrook parents are not aware of the failure.  Those who know of it believe that MCPS encourages silence so that parents in the NEC consortium won’t flee Springbrook in the pending consortium choice process.”  (Note:  “consortium choice process” is where 8th graders get to apply to choose from several high schools.  Springbrook is in the “red zone“).

Interestingly, this morning the Post’s new education blog, The Sheet, published a post on how Americans view their public schools.  A recent PDK/Gallup poll (September 2009) found that people rate their local schools AYP much more positively than they do schools in the United States in general.  Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, however, says that “Too many people don’t understand how bad their own schools are” and need to be “woken up.”

I’m with Arne on this one.  People don’t want to know the truth.  Especially when real estate values are so closely tied to school reputation.  They pay for math and writing tutors while patting themselves on the back about their great schools.  And MCPS is in the business of marketing the MCPS “brand”–one that looks more like Bethesda and Potomac and a whole lot less like White Oak and Wheaton.  A few have figured it out, though. This from a DC Urban Moms & Dads thread

We’re all supposed to buy the line that MCPS is all wonderful schools, but guess what? They are desperately overcrowded, the downcounty consortium is nothing special, and the highly-touted immersion programs are impossible to get into. It feels like a rip-off!

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Graduation Rate Falls, Embarrassment for MCPS

Posted in In the News, School, tagged , , , , , , , , , on September 25, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Ouch. That has to hurt.  Amid all the recent Blue Ribbon School hoopla about yet another red zone school that has made stunning progress (we won’t mention the unusually high staffing helped used to achieve that–see the application) comes the news that, as my feed reader so nicely put it,  “Montgomery Graduations Sink to Lowest Rate in Decade.”

Hmmm.

Montgomery County’s high school graduation rate has fallen to its lowest level in more than a decade, according to state data, continuing a trend of declines that county officials said they will investigate.

From a high of about 93 percent in 2003, the graduation rate had fallen to 87 percent for the class that graduated in the spring, according to state data released this week. The decline was most pronounced among Hispanic students, whose graduation rate was 88 percent in 2003 but 77 percent for the Class of 2009.

Montgomery ranked 11th among Maryland’s 24 jurisdictions. It placed behind neighboring Howard and Frederick counties, both of which are smaller, but ahead of similarly sized Prince George’s County, where the graduation rate was 85 percent.

(The Post article on graduation rates mentions a high school in my red zone area with a graduation rate below that of the state’s minimum standard. And yet you wouldn’t believe the heroic boosterism efforts by some of the parents in that school.)

The MCPS response?  We’re looking at the data.

This comes on the heels of news this week that only 11 students in the entire state of Maryland did not pass the Maryland state mandated graduation tests, the HSA’s.  Eleven!

Seems that NCLB predictions are coming true.  Students who can’t take the higher standards (not that they are high at all) are dropping out.  The MCCPTA president puts it succinctly:  “If you’re increasing rigor on the one hand, what are you doing on the other side to make sure students are receiving their diplomas?”

What does this all mean from the GT perspective?  Well, if you live in the “red zone” even MORE resources are going to be drained away from high achievers and GT education.  Against the backdrop of the magnets being gutted, it’s looking grim for high achievers in this part of the county. Meanwhile over in the green zone, business as usual.

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Rubber, Meet Road: MSA Results Announced

Posted in In the News, School, tagged , , , , , , , , , on July 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

Yes, it’s that time of the year, the time when the MSA results are announced.  Not surprisingly, it was front page news in the Washington Post this morning.

Md. Scores In Reading, Math Show Big Strides the headline blares.

But let’s take a closer look.

Montgomery County continued to fare strongly in most categories, although 12 of the county’s 38 middle schools failed to make “adequate yearly progress,” a yardstick under the federal No Child Left Behind law that is used to measure schools in a variety of ways….

At several other Montgomery middle schools, the scores of Hispanic students or others with limited English proficiency failed to show adequate yearly progress.

“12 of the county’s 38 middle schools failed to make “adequate yearly progress.”  That’s give or take one third of MCPS middle schools!  Here’s the MCPS press release spin on things.  Instead of their pokey .pdf link, use this handy dandy link to the 2009 Maryland Report Card, where you can break things down every which way.

To keep in mind: a quote from last year’s obligatory MSA story

“Fact number one is that Maryland sets the bar defining proficiency very close to the ground,” said Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. “State officials are under enormous political pressure to show progress.” Fuller added, however, that the upward trajectory on both the national and state tests suggests “that kids in Maryland are learning more over the course of the year now than they were in the 1990s.”

A better measure of how Maryland is doing?  The NAEP or National Assessment of Educational Progress (wikipedia).  For comparison sake, take a look at 2007 8th grade reading, just to choose an example.

  • On the 2007 NAEP, Maryland had 3% advanced, 30% proficient, 42% basic, 24% below basic.
  • On the 2007 MSA, 23.9% advanced, 44.3 % proficient, 31.7% basic.

Hmm.  Something appears to be out of whack.  Meanwhile, over at the Baltimore Sun, Lisa Bowle asks “Is advanced the new proficient?” Answer:  yes.  Look no further than the  MCPS Seven Keys to College Readiness hoopla.  Check it out. According to MCPS, a student should be “advanced” on the MSA reading in grades 3-8 in order to be “college and work ready” (the latest edu-buzz phrase); in other words, not need remediation in college.  So are the MSAs a meaningless exercise?  As they stand now, yes.

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D’oh.

Posted in In the News, School, tagged , , , , , , on April 20, 2009 | 8 Comments »

This morning Jay Mathews writes about standardized testing.  Based on the story’s title, Improvement on Tests More Telling Than Pass Rates, I was hoping he would have something to say about kids who score “advanced” year after year on standardized tests.  Instead the article focuses on underperforming students, and reveals just how out of touch he is:

I have been hearing for some time about this practice of devoting special attention to what are called the “on-the-bubble” kids. They are close to scoring proficient on the annual test, which affects the school’s rating under the No Child Left Behind law. Some schools give them extra teacher time, leaving less help for lower-performing students, such as Shawn, who have no chance of increasing the passing rate. I sometimes shrugged this off as just one more sign of poorly led schools. A good principal, I said, would put an end to such nonsense.

But Fine’s story surprised me, because she is working at one of the city’s best-led public schools. Its founder, Irasema Salcido, has made great strides with impoverished children. That Salcido and her team hired Fine, one of the best writers I have seen among full-time teachers, indicates their good judgment. So does their decision to use Fine as a department chair and teaching coach in her four years at the school. So if focusing on bubble kids was standard operating procedure at Cesar Chavez, it was a bigger problem than I thought.

Reading that, all I could think was “d’oh.”  Has Jay been living under a rock?  Parents…and teachers…have been talking about this for years.

Jay’s answer?  Value-added assessments.  I’m all for that.  That’s why I’ve been a booster, for example of greater sharing of MAP-R results and increasing the availability out of level testing.  The devil is in finding the way to do it.  Jay goes on to tout the monitoring systems of International Baccalaureate programs.  Now I’m a big high school IB fan too.  But I have yet to see where the monitoring/assessment–other than the diploma exams in 11th and 12th grade–come into play.  I’m particularly fuzzy on how the IB works in middle and elementary grades.  I know that schools have to go through a lot of hoops to be approved as an IB school.  But as a parent, again, how do I know?  How do I know how my school and/or its teachers are being evaluated? Where can I see their submissions to the IB officials, and the IB evaluation of my school’s program?

“Trust us” is not enough.

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MSA Silly Season

Posted in School, tagged , , , , on March 12, 2009 | 4 Comments »

Yes, it’s MSA silly season again.  That time of the school year where the entire focus of the school becomes preparing for the Maryland School Assessments.

  • Two weeks ago a friend with a child in one of the elementary immersion programs wrote me that her child’s class — third graders about to do their first MSA — will spend an entire month practicing for the test, with absolutely no regular reading/science/social studies done during that time.  She confirmed this with the teacher.  Now it’s true that these kids have had the entire curriculum so far in a foreign language, so it makes sense that they would need to review the English names for things and some English vocabulary.  But an entire month? My friend finds this “appalling — not a GT issue, per se, but an issue for all the kids.”
  • The child of another friend came home and reported that her class was ushered into a classroom and told that if they did not do really well on the MSA  they would be relegated to double periods of math and reading in 6th grade and would not have any electives.  Um, totally not true.

And of course there are the MSA pep rallies and incentives like iPod shuffles.  What’s happening at your school?

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Need to Know Basis

Posted in Gifted, School, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

This shoe has nothing to do with the subject of the post, really, but I just think it's fab.

Greetings from the Palomar Hotel Arlington.  I’m sitting here in my fabulously plush zebra print terry robe, on the bed clad in super-soft zebra print Frette sheets.  My organization has its big donor weekend, (actually Thursday p.m. to this afternoon) and so I checked in to avoid having to schlep to the ‘burbs late at night and then schlep back in to town early every morning.

At the end of a reception last night (where I wore these fierce zebra pattern high heels with a chic, understated black sheath…if not here, now, when?), I had a nice chat with the wife of my boss, an older, whip-smart lawyer.  They have a very, very smart and creative first grader and naturally the topic was, “So how are the kids?”  I gave a general update and then she launched into hers saying, she said, “Can I say it?  I hate school.  I hate school.”  I had found a kindred soul, lol.  It only takes having your child reach school age to discover you have more in common with someone than you thought.

She’s in Arlington County and she shared how she had repeatedly been stonewalled with a smile when she asked for basic information, as in what kind of testing was happening when.  After getting the runaround, she discovered that a series of rather poorly attended Superintendent coffees was being held.  She went to one and got to spend 2 hours with the Super and about 8 other parents at someone’s home.  She asked him why this information couldn’t be found on the website?  Why could all these other jurisdictions do it in Colorado, in Wisconsin… and not theirs?  He turned to a staff member and said, “Let’s do it.”  Victory.

More recently, she was helping in her daughter’s classroom, turned around, and to her surprise her daughter was gone, whisked away by a staff member.  At home, she probed a bit and learned that her daughter was regularly taken out for individual reading.  The mom checked with a friend…that friends’ daughter also was being taken out.  She followed up with the teacher to learn what was happening.  “Oh yes, we regularly do this,” the teacher said.

Well, who knew?  Why?  What for?  On what basis?  As the mom said, when she takes her child to her pediatrician, she wants to be—and expects to be—informed about, say, what tests are being administered to her child.  And why. Maybe this is a great thing they are doing, in which case why not let people know?

Bottom line, there needs to be better communication to parents.  It shouldn’t be this hard.  I’ll repeat what Jay Mathews recently wrote, namely (#4) that an occasional teacher email or phone call to parents.  It would have more positive impact on home/school connections than any boatload of canned “parent seminars.”

Which relates to the direction that MPCS is going, whereby they plan to give parents less information around the second grade that-must-not-be-named (GT) screening while claiming it will be more.  It also is relevant to the issue of instructional grouping at the school level, which is at the discretion of the principal.   Parents almost never are told how their child is being grouped, often because that would mean referring to the abilities of the other children in the class.  Parents are told their student is “placed where he/she is meant to be placed.”  Really?  How do I know?  On what basis? That’s the line I was given by the principal when M. was in 5th grade, and I wish I had questioned it.

And then there was the math.  Her child is struggling with addition–and yet she is getting great grades.  Um…there seems to be a disconnect.  And yes, my boss’s wife is getting the same “counting on fingers is a math strategy and we encourage kids to use multiple strategies.”  Sounds familiar. So all in all we had a good whinge about NCLB, and teaching to the test, and math acceleration, and GT that isn’t GT, and all that good stuff (wry grin).  Reconnected, if only briefly, to my mom self.

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“Montgomery’s Math Miscalculation” – Read It.

Posted in Gifted, In the News, School, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 1, 2009 | 8 Comments »

The Washington Post has been undergoing design changes, so I nearly missed the Local Opinions piece by Eric Walstein, “Montgomery’s Math Miscalculation,” hidden in the Metro section of today’s paper.  Walstein is a teacher in the vaunted MCPS Science, Mathematics, Computer Science high school magnet program and he has some damning words for what’s been happening to the math curriculum in MCPS.  Writes Walstein:

I have the privilege of teaching some of the best young minds in the United States. But even as standardized test scores have risen and the county has claimed great strides in math instruction, our program has had to offer a week of remedial math classes during the summer for our entering ninth-graders….

Students found many of the ideas of algebra and geometry foreign, reporting that many core ideas had never been taught. This process of giving summer math help has been going on for five years now, and the knowledge trend has been down each year. This is a direct consequence of policy decisions of the Montgomery County Board of Education to eliminate course objectives, to push students to take algebra earlier — often before they are ready — and to rely heavily on calculators….

A Montgomery school official once told me that calculators are important because they give more students “access to math.” That’s wrong. They give students access to answers disconnected from math concepts. Many of my current students complain that curriculum acceleration made them move too quickly without proper understanding. Take the calculators away, as we did, and even the county’s brightest bulbs now get a failing grade on material they supposedly have learned with top marks.

As I’ve written here before, this echos the concerns that many parents have been voicing about the math curriculum:  too fast, too superficial, with whole swaths glossed over before true mastery has been achieved.  And these are magnet students Walstein is talking about here.  The same ones that have been tested to within an inch of their lives to get into this program and who will no doubt, once Walstein and Co. are through with them, go on to reap Intel Science awards.

A few weeks ago M. received the course selection materials for next year, which she brought home to me.  The recommendation for math?  That she take Algebra in 7th grade.  Now I love my kid and thinks she’s the smartest thing since sliced bread, but based on her grades and what I know about her math abilities I have to say I had serious reservations about that recommendation.  Of course it’s all moot now.  She’ll be homeschooling and we’ll be able to take it at a pace and depth that we know she’ll be really learning it, rather than hitting some MCPS target for “accessing” accelerated curriculum.

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