On Montgomery County public magnet schools: a guest post by Daniel Gottesman
Scott’s foreword: I’ve known fellow quantum computing theorist Daniel Gottesman, now at the University of Maryland, for a quarter-century at this point. Daniel has been a friend, colleague, coauthor, and one of the people from whom I’ve learned the most in my career. Today he writes about a topic close to my heart, and one to which I’ve regularly lent this blog over the decades: namely, the struggle to protect enrichment and acceleration in the United States (in this case, the public magnet programs in Montgomery County, Maryland) from the constant attempts to weaken or dismantle them. Thanks so much to Daniel for doing this, and please help out if you can!
Without further ado, Daniel Gottesman:
Scott has kindly let me write this guest post because I’d like to ask the readers of Shtetl-Optimized for help. I live in Montgomery County, Maryland, and the county is getting ready to replace our current handful of great magnet programs with a plethora of mediocre ones.
Montgomery County has a generally quite good school system, but its gifted education programs are really inadequate at the elementary and middle school level. Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) offers nothing at all for gifted children until 4th grade. Starting in 4th grade, magnet programs are available, but there are not enough spaces for everyone who meets the minimum qualifications. A few years ago, the elementary and middle school magnets were switched to a lottery system, meaning the highest-achieving students, who most need special programming, might or might not get in, based purely on luck of the draw.
The remaining bright spot has been the high school magnets. Montgomery County has two well-known and high-performing magnets, a STEM magnet at Montgomery Blair high school and an International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Richard Montgomery. The Richard Montgomery IB program draws students from the whole county and the Blair Magnet draws from 2/3 of the county (with the remaining 1/3 eligible to go to another successful but less well-known magnet at Poolesville). And these programs have so far resisted the lottery: They pick the best students from the application pool.
So with inadequate magnets in the lower grades and stellar magnets in high school, you can guess which one is up for a change.
MCPS now wants to reconfigure the high school magnet programs by splitting the county up into 6 regions. Students will only be allowed to apply to programs in their home region. Each region will have its own STEM magnet and its own IB program, as well as programs in the arts, medicine, and leadership. And actually there are multiple program strands in each of these subjects, sometimes in different schools. The whole plan is big and complicated, with close to 100 different programs around the county, more than half of them new.
The stated purpose of this plan is to expand access to these programs by admitting more students and reducing travel times to the programs. And who could object to that? There are definitely places in the county that are far from the current magnets and there are certainly more students that can benefit from high-quality magnets than there is currently space for.
The problem is that making high-quality magnets has not been a priority in the design process. The last time MCPS tried adding regional magnets was about 7 years ago, when they added 3 regional IB programs while keeping Richard Montgomery available to students all over the county. It was a failure: Test scores at the regional IB programs are far below those at Richard Montgomery (the worst-performing regional IB had only 24% getting a passing grade in even one subject in 2024, compared to 99% at Richard Montgomery) and all 3 are underenrolled. Now MCPS has decided they can solve this problem by preventing students from going to Richard Montgomery to try to force them to go to the regional IBs. In addition, they want to repeat the same mistakes with the STEM and other magnets. The best programs in the county will shrink and only be accessible to a small fraction of students, leaving everyone else with new programs of likely highly-varying quality.
And if that were not enough, they want to do this revamp on a ridiculously short timeline. The new programs are supposed to start in the 2027-8 school year, and between now and then, they need to recruit and train teachers for these 100 programs, create all the curricula for the first year of the programs (they are only planning to do one year at a time), and much much more. The probability of a train wreck in the early years of the new system seems high.
Equity is certainly a concern driving this change. And let me be clear: I am totally in favor of improving equity in the school system. But I agree with Scott on this point: strong magnet programs in the public schools are pro-equity and weakening magnet programs is anti-equity. Magnet programs are pro-equity even if the magnets are disproportionally populated by more affluent students, which is admittedly the case in MCPS: Affluent students will always have access to enrichment outside school and to private schools for the most affluent, whereas the public magnet programs are the only source of enrichment for those without those resources.
If MCPS really wants to address the difference in achievement between richer and poorer students, the way to do that is to create gifted programming starting from kindergarten. If you wait until high school, it is unreasonable to expect even brilliant students to catch up to their also highly-capable peers who have been doing math and science camps and extracurriculars and contests and whatnot since they were little. Some can manage it, but it is certainly not easy. Unfortunately, MCPS’s notion of equity seems more focused on optimizing the demographic breakdown of magnet programs, which is most easily achieved by techniques which don’t improve — and usually degrade — the quality of the education provided.
So how can you help? The Board of Education (BOE) is supposed to vote on this plan on Mar. 26. Those of us opposed to it are hoping to sway enough members to vote to tell MCPS to investigate alternatives. For instance, I have proposed a model with only 3 regions, which could also substantially improve access while preserving the strong existing magnets.
If you live in Montgomery County, write to BOE members telling them you oppose this change. You can also sign a petition — there are many, but my favorite is here.
If you are an alumnus of one of the MCPS magnets, write to the BOE telling them how your education there was valuable to you and how a smaller program would not have served you as well.
If you are unconnected to Montgomery County, you can still spread the word. If the BOE gets enough press inquiries asking about the many things that don’t add up in the MCPS proposal, perhaps they will recognize that this is a bad idea.
If you are really really interested in this topic and want to learn more: Last fall, I put together a long analysis of some of the flaws in MCPS’s plan and their claims, and of the alternative 3-region model. You can find it here.
Follow
Comment #1 March 14th, 2026 at 9:34 pm
The problem I see with the kindergarten ones is that, at least in my neighborhood, they tend to be gamed. Entrance is based on silly IQ-style tests like COGAT, and thus there’s this cottage industry of cram programs that spend hours per day practicing “paper folding” problems since they make up 1/6 of the test.
The difference in performance between the kids who go through those cram schools and those who don’t is stark, such that the selection criteria depends way more on whether the kid has gone through a cram school than any other quality. But it seems like a race to the bottom for three and four year old kids who (IMO) should be outside playing, not cramming for tests, especially otherwise-useless IQ tests like these.
Note that otherwise I entirely agree with the sentiment in this post. It’s just the gaming of the system and inevitable waste of our children’s childhoods that result from it. I’d love to hear any approaches communities have had to solve that problem. Or is that just the way it works?
Comment #2 March 15th, 2026 at 12:52 am
It’s not quite on point, but readers might find this short documentary interesting nonetheless.
Comment #3 March 15th, 2026 at 8:39 am
@Dax 1: I think a certain degree of that is inevitable, and it’s a problem at all grade levels. Thomas Jefferson (in Northern Virginia) eliminated their admission test but there is still a huge TJ prep industry there. I haven’t seen the same for Blair here yet but I am sure it exists. And of course college prep is also a big industry.
One thing that I think should help, although I have no experience or data to back up this intuition, is to be able to enter at any stage. When there’s a single decision that determines the next few years (and some people get the idea that it will *also* determine all the years after that), there is a lot of pressure to prepare. If you can enter a year later just as easily, even people who want to prepare may not feel the pressure to over-prepare.
I should also say that I would not recommend a full-blown magnet program for kindergarteners for MCPS, both because I am not at all sure that is a good idea and because I very much doubt MCPS would go for it. I am imagining more of a self-paced parallel enrichment curriculum plus a pull-out program.
Comment #4 March 15th, 2026 at 2:06 pm
Montgomery Blair HS is well-known as an incubator for US IMO team members: 6 have been students there, the fourth most of any high school in the US (after Stuyvesant, Phillips Exeter, and Thomas Jefferson).
Comment #5 March 15th, 2026 at 4:20 pm
The idea of using a lottery to “level the playing field” is common among those advocating for equity. For example, Carla E. Brodley argued in a CACM article [1] against GPA-based enrollment in CS majors. Instead, she proposes that once students exceed some minimum GPA threshold, admission to oversubscribed CS programs should be determined by lottery:
—————-
“Finally, if a university can see no way around capping enrollments, then at a minimum they can implement caps in an equitable manner. The computing department can determine what is the minimum GPA needed … for all students with a GPA above this threshold, the department can easily and equitably choose who gets to pursue the major via a lottery. This may still result in unhappiness among students … And, maybe, just maybe, the unhappiness of the students (and their parents!) might inspire the university’s leadership team to rethink how to deploy teaching resources after all.”
—————-
Carla is the Dean of Inclusive Computing at Northeastern, recipient of the ACM Francis E. Allen Award for Outstanding Mentoring, and a co-PI on a $1M NSF grant promoting BPC (which is DEI tailor-made for CS). In other words, she’s a representative figure within the equity movement in computing.
Two observations:
1). If you try to redefine equity as supporting magnet schools or selective programs, you are likely already losing the argument. That is not where much of the DEI movement has landed, as seen in the recent de-tracking and dismantling of advanced math and science programs.
2). People who oppose these policies need to push back in organized ways. Join groups like Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and Heterodox Academy, and consider starting campus chapters. Whatever the intentions behind DEI initiatives, there is substantial evidence that their implementation often produces poor policies and outcomes.
Daniel, I wish you well in Montgomery County, and I’d sign that petition in a heartbeat if I lived there.
—————-
[1] Why universities must resist GPA-based enrollment caps in the face of surging enrollments, Communications of the ACM, Aug. 2022.
Comment #6 March 15th, 2026 at 8:09 pm
Unsolicited suggestion for someone to contact: popular journalist Jerusalem Demsas went to Richard Montgomery (according to Wikipedia), has published a fair number of articles about education policy on her Substack, and generally seems like a sensible person.
Comment #7 March 15th, 2026 at 8:39 pm
lin #6: Yes, I’ve become a big fan of Jerusalem Demsas’s writing over the past few months. She seems sensible about basically everything.
Comment #8 March 15th, 2026 at 8:40 pm
Your basic political choice in most of the Western world today, is to move things to the left or the right. Contrary to intuition, there is no neutrality possible: to do nothing is, in the medium and long run, simply to assent to the leftward motion that is structurally incentivized under a government funded by taxation.
The current iteration of the left, i.e., late Obama era, is almost entirely race based and race obsessed. You are simply not allowed to operate any enterprise that reveals the much lower rate at which the Democratic Party’s pets can pass cognitive selections such as test-based admission into a science high school.
It is futile to maintain support for the Democrats while trying to “fix” or “save” this one pet issue. Anyone smart enough to have gained entry to these specialized schools as a teenager should be able to understand that your only option to save such schools from the great Wheel Of George Floyd is to stop the left and all of its works.
Comment #9 March 16th, 2026 at 10:46 am
All Politics Is One Dimensional #8: I think the truth is close to the opposite of what you say. Namely, to whatever extent any of us as individuals can affect political outcomes at all, we’re less likely to do so by pulling on the one-dimensional left/right tightrope that everyone else is pulling on, and more likely to do so by focusing on a special-interest issue that has lower salience and/or partisan polarization. I mean, look at how much things changed over the past 15 years within both the Democratic and Republican parties, just via internal dynamics and the primary process! Often, as with the MAGAfication of the Republicans and the Mamdani-fication of the Democrats, these changes were vastly for the worse, but there have been bright spots. E.g., look at what happened in San Francisco, where even deep-blue voters revolted against wokery and elected technocratic moderates. Or look at Andrew Yang, who’s trying to push back on wokery, lowering of academic standards, etc. within the Democratic party, and who might get a second look now that the whole world can see how prescient he was to talk about AI-caused job loss. I have many, many options for who to support and how to make a positive difference before I cast my lot with the authoritarian thugs.
Comment #10 March 16th, 2026 at 4:04 pm
@Daniel – thank you for sharing. I have kids in MCPS. We are a decent drive from Blair but my son did a robotics club there and enjoyed it. I recall some folks there expressing concerns about the potential impact of the coming changes.
I think the 4th grade programs you mentioned are referred to as CES today. My son was selected in that lottery and had a nice time in 4th and 5th grade. Interestingly, I don’t think the math in the CES is enriched in any particular way. I believe they had something like 4/5 and 5/6 where math was somewhat accelerated (5th and 6th grade math compacted), but pretty sure that exists in the non-CES programs.
He did not win the lottery for the middle school magnets – I think Tacoma might be one of the only ones with CS (it seems sort of wild to me that kids who might be interested in CS/coding often cannot get access until high school). CES and the Tacoma magnet are performance threshold + lottery. There are several other middle school magnets that are lottery only. I suspect they may have some of the challenges you discussed when mentioning efforts to make programs parallel to Richard Montgomery IB.
I will read your proposal with great interest as my son starts 8th grade next year and I think would be among the first cohort to experience the new programs.
Thanks for all your efforts.
Comment #11 March 16th, 2026 at 4:10 pm
The reduction in wokeness in San Francisco was nice (e.g., good riddance to Boudin, who seems to be positively invertebrate). But “less woke than San Francisco used to be” is a pretty low bar to clear.
Andrew Yang could plausibly be a strong candidate, and if Democrats actually nominated someone like that, I’d seriously consider voting for him in 2028. But right now he’s not even on PredictIt’s list of the 17 most likely Democratic nominees, so he doesn’t seem particularly relevant to the current political landscape. We’ll see.
Comment #12 March 17th, 2026 at 4:48 am
Max #11
I am sure you know that Boudin was adopted by Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn when his parents were convicted of murder during a Weather Underground Brink’s robbery. My belief is that Bill Ayers (of Obama autobiography fame) is the largest singular contributor to the current one dimensional character of US politics by his amazingly successful influence on US education. His goal was to change the US through the soft underbelly of the educational system and he, with the like minded, did exactly that.
Comment #13 March 17th, 2026 at 7:51 am
One of my daughters is in a school that has far more applicants the slots. She entered in sixth grade and entrance based solely on an age difficult mathematics exam with an average score of 20%. My view is this is a fair entrance requirement and does a good job of sorting students. They start programming in the sixth grade and algebra covered in 6th and 7th. I believe they could still do a better job of accelerating their best students but perfect is the enemy of good.
Comment #14 March 17th, 2026 at 10:23 am
Scott #9:
Disagree with putting “MAGAfication of the Republicans and the Mamdani-fication of the Democrats” on any kind of equal level. The vast majority of Republicans support (or at least tolerate) MAGAfication, whereas Mamdani-fication is a niche segment of Democrats.
Comment #15 March 17th, 2026 at 2:09 pm
Raul #14
“ The vast majority of Republicans support (or at least tolerate) MAGAfication, whereas Mamdani-fication is a niche segment of Democrats.”
Uhm…last polls I can find had Trump with 39% favorable nationally among Republicans and Mamdani (I often see different spellings) at 52% favorable nationally among Democrats.
Comment #16 March 18th, 2026 at 8:51 am
Maryland leans heavily to the blue, DEM, side, i.e. towards equalization of outcome, not just chances. Maybe starting to overcome this might be a good place to ensure brilliance further down …
In other words, I am totally with #8.
Comment #17 March 18th, 2026 at 9:39 am
OMG-Trump’s favorability in EVERY poll is above 80% with Republicans. It is like 40ish percent overall.
Comment #18 March 18th, 2026 at 12:40 pm
Dave,
You are right and apologize for the stupid error. CNN may be beaming thoughts into my head. 🙂
Comment #19 March 20th, 2026 at 11:30 am
I’m a MoCo resident and (many years ago) attended Bronx Science. I knew in high school that I was headed for a career in physics or math, but my experience at Science taught me much more. There are fundamental social, political, and psychological lessons to be learned at a school like that, and I’m vehemently in favor of the smartest kids learning those lessons. And -perhaps not changing the subject- did you know that Zohran Mamdani is a Bronx Science graduate?
Comment #20 March 25th, 2026 at 7:22 pm
Commenting as a long-time lurker on this blog who attended some of the schools mentioned here, and now happens to be a PhD student in quantum info theory. (I didn’t attend any special elementary schools, but was able to bus to the local middle school for “Math 7” in 5th grade, and attended the STEM programs at both TPMS and MBHS.)
To start, I appreciate that people in this field take the time to write and advocate on behalf of these issues, it’s weirdly one of the things that drew me to academia in the first place. I also had a great experience with the Blair magnet program especially, and I feel like I wouldn’t even dream of being here had I not gone there (not to mention that I would have missed out on many decade+ long friendships, many of whom remain the most important people in my life). I also agree that the current proposal seems too hasty and I generally am in favor with slower “experiments” with fewer variables and more accountability.
However, I do want to add a few thoughts that aren’t really represented in this discussion so far. First, I think this conversation hasn’t engaged much with some of the arguments in favor of the proposal. I think it’s relevant that the Blair STEM magnet has always been a bit unique even among public STEM magnet schools in the U.S., ever since it was started in the 1980s. We are a small minority (~100 students/cohort) among the larger student body (~800 students/cohort), which also includes some other specialized programs like the Communication Arts Program. (Actually while I was there, every non-magnet or CAP student at Blair was still part of a non-application-based “academy”.) And of the ~100, not everyone pursues STEM in college. This has always made the experience a bit different from something like TJHSST, our close neighbor with around ~500 students/cohort, even though both are great for math team and other STEM extracurriculars. I personally found the diverse high school body an enormous benefit, both directly in terms of high quality electives across many areas and indirectly in terms of exposure to different viewpoints. Also, while there is also some expected friction that goes with this, Blair students who aren’t part of the magnet are also allowed to enroll in the “magnet” electives, as long as they have the equivalent prereqs (e.g. Calc BC or basic high school chem class). Granted, I don’t know whether this actually affected the school choice decisions of students who lived in the downcounty consortium but were not admitted to the magnet.
I bring this up not because I don’t think having a critical mass of good peers and teachers is important, but because to me the MCPS programs suggest both that this critical mass might be smaller than some people imagine, and that unconventional programs created with diversity in mind can also have upsides. And in the long term, if you believe that more students benefit from these programs than there is currently capacity for, then we should focus on how to expand the programs *while also ensuring consistent hiring*, and the repute of new programs will improve over time.
This leads to the second point: something I don’t see brought up very much is the underlying reasons why we don’t have a larger pool of qualified STEM teachers in the first place. (E.g. how education training programs are designed at the bachelor’s level, or that teaching at public schools in less desirable locations might feel like a bit of a thankless job if you have the option to instead pursue a well-compensated career in tech.) Public schools are only really equitable if the teachers are consistently qualified. This is really the same issue that impedes equity across different school districts, and which leads to the “feeder” phenomenon in which kids having access to resources earlier in life is compounded over time. Many of our teachers even had graduate training in STEM, which was how they were able to teach early undergrad-level material (probably similar to what hiring for community colleges is like). While I imagine that finding people with comparable backgrounds who want to spend their entire day with 15 year olds is really hard, I think as someone currently in academia, it might be impactful to improve how these jobs are advertised.
Again to be clear, I mostly agree with the points in the post and I think it is important to have these discussions. There are however a lot of nuances that I don’t think can be boiled down to “anti-equity” or “weakening the program” outright.
Comment #21 April 3rd, 2026 at 8:41 pm
The all-liberal board of education voted to go ahead with their plan, i.e to skinsuit the magnet programs, by 7 to 1. One Jewish lady on the board cited Hillel’s “if not now, when” quote for this purpose, and another one mentions Tikkun Olam in her biography.
McKinsey-style Powerpoint presentations on better plans are no match for the Black And Brown Coalition of Montgomery County, which had been demanding for months that the plan be implemented ASAP even if imperfect.
The defintion of insanity is to keep on voting for the Golem that is coming for everything you hold dear.