No benefit for attending a top ranked high school

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10/21/2017 20:49

Subject: Re:No benefit for attending a top ranked high school

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Anonymous

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP here. This thread is a few months old but I find it fascinating and am wondering if others have more to share. Ultimately the bottom line here is that we are all trying to do what's best for our kids based on our own experiences.

My experience: I'm from a solidly middle class family and went to a super mediocre public high school. Huge, not well-regarded locally, problems with gangs. There were some good teachers, but I skated through with straight A's pretty easily. Landed at a top private college (now top 15, was top 10 when I attended) to follow my dream of attending med school. Man, I got rocked pretty hard when I first started college; I would agree with similar reports from others in this thread that I had some catch-up to do, as I realized fast that I really didn't know how to study as I had never had to work that hard. But.....I had a crew of friends who also started off pre-med, many from wealthy families that attended well-regarded private schools or nationally ranked publics, and I am the only one who made it through the pre-med track. I'm now a physician. So despite a rocky start it all worked out in the end.

My kids aren't high-school aged yet, but I intend to send them to our local public high school (very solid and well-regarded locally but not the best in the state....I'm not in DC). The selling point? Its diversity. One of the things that really shocked me when I got to undergrad was how blindingly white and economically privileged the majority of the students were, after having spent my formative years in extremely diverse public school environments, diverse not just racially but also socioeconomically. College was such a bubble. I don't want that for my kids as they grow up, nor the kind of fake, curated diversity that the local private schools seem to have. The literature on this shows that it's really the perseverance of the kid and their parents' education and level of involvement that leads to academic success, not the school itself. So it's my hope that attending a super-diverse, good-but-not-excellent public school can strike the best balance.

I hear what you're saying, but I have known many kids from excellent, involved families who have succumbed to negative peer pressure during their high school years and ended up not reaching the same level of educational/financial success as their parents. You want your kids to "be around" low SES kids, but what if it goes beyond just exposure? What if your kids actually become part of the group that get high across the street before school and doesn't value academic success? What if your daughter decided to become a hairdresser instead of going to college because that's the norm among her group of friends? Don't be too confident that your parenting will shield them from actually becoming part of the low SES group that you are trying to "expose" them to. Again, I have seen it happen many times.

PP here (the one you quoted). I hear your point as well, but I don't see how enrolling in an elite school will automatically make a kid immune to any of this either.

For what it's worth, the vast majority of the kids in my high school did not attend college and did not value academic success, as you put it. This includes some of my close friends. There was a very large vocational ED program at my high school that enrolled more kids than the AP classes. I am only the second person in a very large family to attend college, so I didn't get a lot of strong encouragement from family either. None of this stopped me from chasing what I wanted.

On the flip side, my DH grew up in an upper-middle class household and attended a $$$ private school through high school, the kind of place where everyone seems to go on to an Ivy for undergrad. DH has done well for himself, but some of his high school friends, despite getting that elite HS boost into great colleges, are STILL really trying to get a foothold in life, even now when firmly entrenched in their 40s. And *every* person I know who attended an elite private school has story upon story about the way sex and drugs ran rampant, even in the "smart/nerdy" social circles.

All anecdotal evidence, of course, but still goes to show that there are no guarantees in life. I could send my kids to top private schools and they may still want to pursue a nonacademic path off the fast track. I could send my kids to our local public HS and they may shine brighter there than anywhere else. Ultimately I agree with others about trying super hard to find the happy medium -- I don't want my kids to look back at their HS years and remember it being an unhappy pressure-cooker. At the end of the day they're still kids! I had actually been encouraged by a few teachers to apply to a competitive local magnet high school, but I declined to do it because I wanted a "real" high school experience, and not once have i regretted that decision.