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Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)
how bad are alexandria city public schools anyway?
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Anonymous
Life is too short to have drunken fights next door at 1am, where one person screams to the other, "Give me my goddamned money!" The drug dealer across the street added extra charm too. Glad the Alexandria City thing is working for you. |
Anonymous
wait, i thought you posted in another thread that this happened in a S Arlington neighborhood zoned for Oakcrest? or are you just making things up? |
Anonymous
|
Re: Polk School Inquiry -
Several of the ACPS elementary schools in particular seem to consistently win considerable higher praise than others. (Some might claim a correlation with parent socio-economics, but no opinions here and it definitely doesn't boil down to any one statistic). The higher-ranked schools in terms of test scores generally seem to be Barrett, Mason, MacArthur, Maury, and Lyles-Crouch. Lyles-Crouch basically can't be accessed by anyone outside of its Old Town catchment district; it's simply full. Barrett is becoming full. Maury had at one time been failing but Sherman reorganized it and it is now highly regarded. All five are in the east-end, and all five feed into GW middle school. In the west-end, I suspect that Adams is expected to exhibit the best objective performance overall, now that the school has been reorg'd under a much much better principal than her predecessor. I think many parents might view the weakest single elementary school, on many levels, as Jefferson-Houston. Each ACPS school posts its school statistical report card on its web site. You should look carefully. Remember, if you're in the catchment district of a "failing" school, you may well have the right to opt into a different one. Overall, we have found the system to be simply spectacular, and far stronger academically than well-known private schools where our DC was previously enrolled. Even though she had been private-school straight-A, she entered the ACPS system a year behind in math. Please understand that, in Virginia, there are no legal or regulatory standards of any kind to which any private school or any private school teacher is subject unless the school is a special-ed contractor to a public school system. |
Anonymous
|
Re: Polk School Inquiry -
Several of the ACPS elementary schools in particular seem to consistently win considerable higher praise than others. (Some might claim a correlation with parent socio-economics, but no opinions here and it definitely doesn't boil down to any one statistic). The higher-ranked schools in terms of test scores generally seem to be Barrett, Mason, MacArthur, Maury, and Lyles-Crouch. Lyles-Crouch basically can't be accessed by anyone outside of its Old Town catchment district; it's simply full. Barrett is becoming full. Maury had at one time been failing but Sherman reorganized it and it is now highly regarded. All five are in the east-end, and all five feed into GW middle school. In the west-end, I suspect that Adams is expected to exhibit the best objective performance overall, now that the school has been reorg'd under a much much better principal than her predecessor. I think many parents might view the weakest single elementary school, on many levels, as Jefferson-Houston. Each ACPS school posts its school statistical report card on its web site. You should look carefully. Remember, if you're in the catchment district of a "failing" school, you may well have the right to opt into a different one. Overall, we have found the system to be simply spectacular, and far stronger academically than well-known private schools where our DC was previously enrolled. Even though she had been private-school straight-A, she entered the ACPS system a year behind in math. Please understand that, in Virginia, there are no legal or regulatory standards of any kind to which any private school or any private school teacher is subject unless the school is a special-ed contractor to a public school system. |
Anonymous
And there are no drugs in FC? Give me a friggin' break. BTW, I don't think my elderly neighbors have such a problem. |
Anonymous
| Contact the PTA folks at Polk and also get a tour with the Principal when the current school year gets underway. ACPS is very receptive to this. I am not zoned for Polk - actually zoned for Tucker, but opted out of the modified school calendar and we are at Charles Barrett ES. I passed by Polk once and the building looks incredible, but don't know anything about it. We are incredibly delighted with CBES. |
Anonymous
|
Maury has been "up and coming" for the past 3 years but hasn't arrived. I know plenty of people in Rosemont who will not send their children there.
Lyles-Crouch - if you live in boundary and they have an opening then your child can attend. If there is no opening, then your child is sent to Jefferson-Houston. Did you know that Jefferson-Houston was supposed to be some type of magnet type school with an Arts focus? How sad is that? NO one wanted to send their kid their that's why their enrollment was so low. Cora Kelly is a Math and Science focus school - what a joke! There scores are terrible. If the City had actually really tried and put the right money and effort into those two schools they wouldn't have had some much white flight out of the City schools. My opinion - yes, parents want diversity but the right kind of diversity - upper middle class minority children - and I don't blame them for that. |
Anonymous
I'm no huge fan of ACPS but some of the information quoted above is, I belive incorrect and misleading. According to the latest from ACPS, Cora Kelly scored 97% in the math SOLs this past academic year, which was a significant improvement on previous years. And check your own grammar and spelling. And, someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I don't belive a student can be "sent" to Jefferson Houston. If you read through the MOE information on the ACPS website the options are more nuanced than that. |
Anonymous
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It depends what you mean by "bad." For us, "bad" is a school with a rigid curriculum that squashes out children's individuality, creativity and love of learning for its own sake. We left the ACPS system because we felt it was doing just that to our children: much more attention was given to making them stand in line, keep quiet and finish more worksheets than to anything else. For another parent, the things we saw as "bad" might be "good." Some people view such characteristics as signs of rigor, and may be quite happy if children are being taught with a focus on doing well on standardized tests. So I think the most important thing is to think very hard about what you want for your children and what your children are like. 12:06 is unhappy b/c her Burgundy grad is less advanced in math skills than some of her public school peers. Not a scientific sampling, here, of course; we don't know how many of the public school kids are equally unadvanced. All we really know from 12:06 is that in a 9th grade with hundreds of kids, "maybe fifteen or so" seem to be more advanced in math than her daughter. Does this really tell us anything? I'm not sure it does. Maybe it just tells us that the PP's daughter isn't that good at math, or is pretty good at math but not as good as fifteen other kids. who knows? |
Anonymous
| Hi! Mom of Burgundy grad here. DD was 1 year behind ACPS peers because Burgundy (and I would imagine most K-8 privates) don't offer geometry to 8th graders. If it had been, she would have taken it. Some Burgundy kids now at TC took Pre-calculus over the summer so that they could take calculus as 11th graders this year, thereby bringing them into the most advanced math group at TC. The point I was making is that ACPS does offer advanced courses to its students. DD is being challenged at TC; she took two APs as a sophomore and scored 5s on both of them. Some private schools do not allow 10th graders to take AP courses. I stand by my statement that TC is a terrific school for self-motivated kids (and I am a big Burgundy fan as well). |
Anonymous
| "Future" Polk Parent here: Thanks for the comments. I toured last year, and will do so again this year. |
Anonymous
| I know some Alexandria parents who's children had a wonderful experience in elementary school (usually at Lyles-Crouch or one of the other highly regarded schools), and some who had a terrible experience, but I don't know anyone (not one) who lasted all the way through middle school. Even those who loved elementary school and went in with a really good attitude. Just sayin. |
Anonymous
| You must not know many people in Alexandria then. I know plenty who've made it all the way through, including those from last year's T.C. Williams class who are going to Haverford, Virginia, Virginia Tech, William and Mary, Duke, Johns Hopkins, NYU, Boston College and UNC, to name a few. "Lifers" from ACPS were also accepted at Cornell and Penn, but chose Virginia. Others who started somewhere else but graduated from T.C. are going to Duke, Wesleyan, Columbia and Middlebury. |
Anonymous
Yes, this is the "Yale or Jail" phenomenon at TC. It's true that college placement is good for a select few who benefit from what amounts to an apartheid system. The broader point is, this isn't the norm and the school is filled with students for whom college/university is neither obtaintable nor desired. Some of us prefer to have our children in a more universally college prep environment. |
Anonymous
| Well that's not the real world. But mommy will try to shield her little snow flake from it for as long as possible apparently. |