Is class placement really that simple? Which ever score is higher and there you go?
If you use test scores as one factor to group students but also try to balance classes based on sex and national origin, the parents of high-scoring students who did not make into the high-scoring class will object that their children were discriminated against.
Very true.
And, to your other post, yes, SES is correlated with academic achievement. But I think it's fair to say that those who have maximum opportunity to develop their innate gifts (for which we use SES as a proxy) are different from those who do not have maximal opportunity but attain the same achievement, in terms of the remaining ceiling/potential. For the situation named above, alternatively one could consider whether the overselection of male, foreign-born students in the (putatively) high-math group reflects their differential opportunity to develop math talent. That is, the (putatively) high-reading group has not received optimum support for developing math talent (say, due to being educated in the broken North American math pedagogy system), while the foreign-born students have benefited from supplement by parents educated in other, more-effective math instruction systems. The preponderance of males might reflect cultural biases in the home culture towards math and boys.
Of course, we don't really know if the first class is high-math, nor do we know if the second class is high-reading or high-both.
More productively, there might be value in examining the fit of the current ELA instruction with OP's DD. If that is a problem, then perhaps one could start a conversation about re-testing now, or adjusting her placement after the fall MAPs.
BTW, I found some resources that suggest that MAP scores become less accurate with frequent re-administration, due to a reduction in item pool. I suspect that that implies further that the decrease in accuracy may happen more quickly with high-achieving students, since presumably they would use up the top of the item pool more quickly.
