http://www.fcps.edu/news/fy2015/docs/bosremarks040814.pdf

Shut the fuck up

Thank you for posting this. It brings a lot of clarity to the challenges the schools face, and why funding them appropriately is so important.

Thank you for posting this. It brings a lot of clarity to the challenges the schools face, and why funding them appropriately is so important.

Thank you for posting this. It brings a lot of clarity to the challenges the schools face, and why funding them appropriately is so important.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but with regards to the lower teacher salaries in fcps - don't they have better benefits than surrounding counties. Benefits that include a pension? I thought this was the reason their paycheck a are smaller when compared to those of surrounding counties.

Most all surrounding localities have a pension program for teachers, FCPS's is on par with them, and all of them have been reduced in recent years (especially in Virginia, McDonnell cut matching to the VRS system on all state employees). I would say we do have very good medical benefits and our teaching contract is about a week less than Montgomery County, but these are small potatoes when it comes to comparing. With my experience and education, I make about 19k less a year than my contemporary in Montgomery, and almost 21K less than my contemporary in Arlington.

Bravo Wrote:
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> Thank you for posting this. It brings a lot of
> clarity to the challenges the schools face, and
> why funding them appropriately is so important.


This is an interesting take on this article. Take a look at per student spending. FCPS is fairly high, but there is no correlation between spending and student achievement. Look at the DC schools, the spending there per student is significantly high than other jurisdicitons and yet their student achievement is much lower.

The point is that just pouring money into a school system is not necessarily the answer to student achievement.

True, but per pupil spending is affected by many different circumstances. For ibstance, in Mr. moon's statement to the BOS (not an article), students who receive special education or ESL services (mandated by federal law), cost several thousand $ more per pupil. When you have a larger population of said pupils, to keep per pupil spending across the board low is impressive.

A teacher Wrote:
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> Most all surrounding localities have a pension
> program for teachers, FCPS's is on par with them,
> and all of them have been reduced in recent years
> (especially in Virginia, McDonnell cut matching to
> the VRS system on all state employees). I would
> say we do have very good medical benefits and our
> teaching contract is about a week less than
> Montgomery County, but these are small potatoes
> when it comes to comparing. With my experience
> and education, I make about 19k less a year than
> my contemporary in Montgomery, and almost 21K less
> than my contemporary in Arlington.

Then maybe you should consider sending your resume to Arlington or the Volksrepublik of MoCo.

The biggest takeaway from the speech for me

40% free and reduced lunch is the tipping point to win a school starts to deteriorate

The question is how do you fix this

We have two interesting case studies right next door that show what Fairfax County can become.... Both are areas with exploding ESL populations as well which is another indicator. If you have too much the school is usually doomed

In Alexandria the public schools are crap. There is a two tier system where people with means send their kids to private school and the leftovers attend public school. The Public High School TC Williams has been almost taken over by the state twice. Hopefully it can be turned around but most of the efforts have failed so far.

You can already see this two tier affect in areas of Fairfax County such as Sleepy Hollow which has crappy middle and high schools and the wealthy are taking their kids out of the system after Sleepy Hollow elementary school

In Arlington they somehow manage to make it work

So the question is what is Arlington doing and how can we adopt it. Personally I don't think the answer is just having higher teacher salaries but I could be wrong

Specifically I would take a look at the schools in South Arlington. How are they continuing to be successful with the low quality that is coming in.

This is the common sense analysis that is often performed in business which the news media/politicians are too lazy to do and most of the citizens that can do it have more important things to do with their time. Maybe we can get some smart retired people who care to look into it

Wow I just found helicopter parent central

but if you are interested in this type of stuff its pretty interesting

I really feel for these kids growing up in Fairfax County must be nuts with parents like this

http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/forums/show/45.page

Hmmmmm Wrote:
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> This is an interesting take on this article. Take
> a look at per student spending.

Per pupil spending is not a valid metric, moron.

Anyone serious here anymore Wrote:
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> Maybe we can get some smart retired people who care
> to look into it.

The first thing they will recommend is that an off-line echo chamber be secretly set up where right-wing asshats can vent their ignorant and hateful spleens, thinking that their words are being heard when in fact they are not. Meanwhile the actually sane and rational people discuss and debate actual issues and come up with appropriate, affordable, and workable solutions to them. This is the type of "two-tiered" system that we would actually benefit from. Most school system problems after all are some variant of two basic problems: the simple fact that student demographics grow and change over time, and the fact that the corpus of knowledge that needs to be passed on does as well.

It's nice to see G2 back and posting in the regular forum.

Teacher again Wrote:
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> True, but per pupil spending is affected by many
> different circumstances. For ibstance, in Mr.
> moon's statement to the BOS (not an article),
> students who receive special education or ESL
> services (mandated by federal law), cost several
> thousand $ more per pupil. When you have a larger
> population of said pupils, to keep per pupil
> spending across the board low is impressive.


Rather than being 'impressive' more likely it means that it's simply coming at the expense of the other students. It's surely not coming as a result of any efficiencies so there's not a lot of other places for it to come from.

Agreed closed cycle. Anyone who teaches or has children attending schools in the southeastern part of Fairfax County know that the resources are going where the loudest voices are. Ironic that the areas that get the most resources have the greatest amount of people who don't want to fund the resources.