Any Parents Privately Disappointed with College Placement?
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
|
Guys, or maybe Gals, there's a serious troll on DCUM today. She's slamming Egyptian women on a deodorant thread, catholics on two seperate threads, and Mater Dei and Bullis in really nasty ways for no good reason and with zero info. OK, maybe it's two really pathetic people, not a single pathetic person. But either way, there's a non-negligible chance that this is a wind-up.
That, or the person who posted about private kids being smarter than the cream of the publics really is an idiot.... |
Anonymous
|
Yup, the first cut at the privates is access (money/location) and that effectively disqualifies a lot of kids long before they start looking at scores.
So the elite privates may have the smartest rich kids -- but not the smartest kids per se. And the smartest rich kids are a small fraction of the smartest kids. As well as a small fraction of rich kids who go to private schools. Tthe smart kids who go to public schools outnumber the smart kids who go to private schools. And the average kids in privates outnumber the smart kids in privates. Sure, the best privates have "more cream" than most privates (and a higher average) but not as much cream as the best publics (where admission is often a function of test scores). |
Anonymous
Huh? 
|
Anonymous
| You can't make a man - or a DCUM mom - understand what she doesn't want to understand.... |
Anonymous
I THINK you were trying to say that there are more smart kids in public schools than private schools, because public schools are free. However, your post was rather disjointed and confusing, so it was hard to tell. You might want to clarify...
|
Anonymous
|
Most smart kids go to public school.
The "elite" privates *may* get most of the smart rich kids (but clearly some go to publics in affluent neighborhoods). At any rate, only a small fraction of smart kids are rich. And only a small fraction of rich kids are smart. The smartest rich kids who go private tend to cluster at a few schools. Leaving most private schools full of kids distinguished more by their family's wealth/status than by their intelligence. And even at the most academically elite private schools, there just aren't that many super-high achievers academically-speaking -- measured in absolute terms, as a percentage of the class, or compared to elite public magnet/selective admission schools. |
Anonymous
| At my local private high school, over 10% of my class (myself included) went to one of HYP together, and every single one of us went directly on to H or Y for graduate school. None of us had any legacy status, we had no connections, and we were among the less wealthy in our private school class. A few kids in our high school class went to good but not stellar-ranked schools, but for the most part the "less academically-oriented" went to UVA or, gasp. William and Mary. I say "gasp" because i would be thrilled if my kids have the option to go tot W&M, and remain astonished that UVA and W&M were out "back-up" schools. Sometimes, it's not about connections or wealth, it's just about a school private or public, doing a tremendous job in inspiring its students. |
Anonymous
All true. But whenever I meet someone who I learn is a graduate of St. Albans or NCS or Prep or Stone Ridge, I always expect them to have poise and grace and a certain lustre. I can't say that I'm always proven right. But that's the first thing that comes to mind. I can't say the same thing of even a Churchill or Whitman or BCC grad. |
SAM2
Member Offline
Member Offline
There's a ton of evidence proving you're wrong. Here's just one set, using the number of Presidential Scholars 2000-08 (http://wdcrobcolp01.ed.gov/CFAPPS/PSP/search1a.cfm): DC (http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/DC_09_03_03_01.pdf) Public schools have 56% of students, but only 10% of Presidential Scholars (2 total) Private + religious schools have 43% of students, and 90% of Presidential Scholars (18 total) MD (http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/MD_09_03_03_01.pdf) Public schools have 83% of students, but only 76% of Presidential Scholars (28 total) Private + religious schools have 17% of students, and 24% of Presidential Scholars (9 total) VA (http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/MD_09_03_03_01.pdf) Public schools have 90% of students, and 95% of Presidential Scholars (20 total) Private + religious schools have 10% of students, but only 5% of Presidential Scholars (1 total) Total for DC/MD/VA Public schools have 86.5% of students, but only 64% of Presidential Scholars (50 total) Private + religious schools have 13.5% of students, and 36% of Presidential Scholars (28 total) (Note that I've lumped private & religious schools together, which actually is not really fair to them, because many of the religious schools don't even hold themselves out as focused on top-tier academics. But some do, so they're have to suffer this unfairness in my calculations.) None of this is meant as criticism of public schools. They clearly have lots of extremely smart kids and are capable of great teaching. I went to public school, and several of my close relatives are public school teachers. If PP had simply been posting that public schools have tons of super-high achieving students, I'd completely agree with her. But PP's claim that private schools are lacking in super-high achieving students is just absolute horseshit. |
Anonymous
|
SAM2, I believe the discussion was comparing the top publics with the top privates. In that case, if you use something like SATs, I'm not sure it's so cut and dried.
What are presidential scholars, anyway? |
SAM2
Member Offline
Member Offline
I was using the SAT data only to get estimates of how many kids are in public vs. private. I was not comparing SATs between public and private. I agree with you that SATs would really measure the middle of the class and not the super-high achievers, so they would not fit in this discussion. My apologies -- I should have made that more clear. Presidential Scholars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_scholar . Only something like the 60-100 students with the highest SAT scores in each state are even eligible to apply. Ultimately only 121 nationwide are selected each year. They seem to fit the definition of super-high achiever pretty clearly, so they make for convenient comparisons in this discussion. |
Anonymous
|
I do think that comparing privates to *all* publics is a bit unbalanced. After all, most parents who are weighing the choice between private and public are not even considering Ballou.
Even given this comparison, the VA stats were better for publics, and the MD stats were within spitting distance. What seemed to really tip the balance were the DC stats. As we know, there are some good public high schools in DC, but a lot of really bad ones. Parents who can afford private most definitely aren't looking at the bad DC publics. So if the question concerns peer groups, and achievement within classes of schools, a DC-wide measure seems a bit unfair. |
Anonymous
| What I take away from these stats is that there is a higher pct of presidential scholars in public than private in VA. Given that there are way more kids in public, this means that the *absolute number* of presidential scholars is higher in public than private, in VA. In MD, the pcts aren't far off, so again the *absolute number* of PS kids may be higher in public than private in MD, too. Given that the public presidential scholars are probably concentrated in a few schools, I couldn't say for sure there's a meaningful difference going on here. DC is definitely in a league of it's own. |
Anonymous
| 8:37 here again. If only 120 presidential scholars are accepted per year, that's what, 2-3 per state? Does the DC region have a higher concentration? Still, this would make for pretty volatile numbers. |
Anonymous
|
I don't think Presidential Scholars is a very useful stat (too political), But assuming the accuracy of SAM''s report (which I do -- I haven't double-checked), it would confirm what I said.
50 public school kids in the region were Presidential Scholars. 28 private school kids were. Locally, most smart kids go to public. 50>28. The only context in which I made a proportionality claim was elite privates vs. elite publics (as a PP noted). And while I don't know about Presidential Scholars data (too small a sample for this sort of analysis anyway), but when you look at National Merit semi-finalist data, the % at TJ greatly exceeds that of the academically highest-achieving local privates. Blair is trickier, if I remember correctly -- if you treat the magnet as a school of its own (and I honestly don't know to what extent that's reasonable -- don't know about the program, coursework, etc.), then it's also doing better than the best local privates on that measure (% of the class that earns NMSF status). In any event, both TJ and Blair obviously do better than any local private on absolute numbers which are more significant in practice (that's what constitutes each smart kid's cohort and shapes course offerings) than percentages. What SAM has shown is that local privates get more than their fair share of smart kids (assuming random distribution of smart kids across all schools). Sure -- it's not random distribution. The children of economically privileged families, for a variety of reasons, are disproportionately likely to perform well on the SATs. And, presumably, among families that are not economically privileged, the parents of the smartest kids are probably disproportionately likely to seek out private school options for their kids and the kids in this group who do exceptionally well on standardized tests are the most likely to be offered such options. |