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.
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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?