2020 National Merit semifinalists in DC

[Anonymous]

I see things differently and would be far less hard on DCPS simply because the threshold for semi-finalists is the HIGHEST IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. The one-year of data in this discussion are simply too small of a sample size to make any valid conclusions about DCPS at this point. The cut off this past year was 223, meaning that that the semi-finalists probably got no more than one or perhaps two questions wrong. They probably are in the 99.8% of all entrants. Is a 99.8% threshold a good indicator to judge DCPS? That seems like quite a high threshold to hold DCPS responsible for. I'd like to know how many of the kids got in the, say, 50%, 75%, 90%, 95% threshold. I have to wonder if DCPS is actually higher than other school districts.

I see other states have much lower cut off rates and higher semi-finalist acceptance rates (more than DC's 1%). In the 2018-19 year, Sidwell has the most semi-finalists at 14; GDS had 11; and School without Walls had 7.

An important question is whether the methodology used by NMS has inherent biases against DC resident kids by employing the highest cut off in the country and by not accounting for DC having a disproportionately high number of highly selective, national-level private schools dominated by kids from outside of Washington, although most of the kids in the DC cohort are clearly DCPS resident kids.

Also, my apologies for the mistake of indicating there were 37 semi-finalists, when there were 39. The actual percentage would be 10.2%, rounded to 10%.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We know that in the past two years, DCPS students represent a small minority of semi-finalists:
Go to page 1 of the thread. 39 NMSF in most recent batch. 4 from public schools. Do you have different data?

2 DCPS (1 each at SWW and Wilson) and 2 charter (1 at BASIS, 1 at Latin) are NMSF from the class of 2020. My math says that's 11%.

I would love to know whether any of the DC resident finalists form private schools attended a DCPS for elementary or middle. But I really don't think this is a great way to judge the quality of schools, public or private.

At least two Janney and one Deal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We know that in the past two years, DCPS students represent a small minority of semi-finalists:
Go to page 1 of the thread. 39 NMSF in most recent batch. 4 from public schools. Do you have different data?

2 DCPS (1 each at SWW and Wilson) and 2 charter (1 at BASIS, 1 at Latin) are NMSF from the class of 2020. My math says that's 11%.

I would love to know whether any of the DC resident finalists form private schools attended a DCPS for elementary or middle. But I really don't think this is a great way to judge the quality of schools, public or private.

At least two Janney and one Deal.

This is great! What school are they attending?
I know the NCS list and out of 5 semi-finalists, 4 live in MD or VA. The sole District resident did not attend DCPS.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I see things differently and would be far less hard on DCPS simply because the threshold for semi-finalists is the HIGHEST IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. The one-year of data in this discussion are simply too small of a sample size to make any valid conclusions about DCPS at this point. The cut off this past year was 223, meaning that that the semi-finalists probably got no more than one or perhaps two questions wrong. They probably are in the 99.8% of all entrants. Is a 99.8% threshold a good indicator to judge DCPS? That seems like quite a high threshold to hold DCPS responsible for. I'd like to know how many of the kids got in the, say, 50%, 75%, 90%, 95% threshold. I have to wonder if DCPS is actually higher than other school districts.

I see other states have much lower cut off rates and higher semi-finalist acceptance rates (more than DC's 1%). In the 2018-19 year, Sidwell has the most semi-finalists at 14; GDS had 11; and School without Walls had 7.

An important question is whether the methodology used by NMS has inherent biases against DC resident kids by employing the highest cut off in the country and by not accounting for DC having a disproportionately high number of highly selective, national-level private schools dominated by kids from outside of Washington, although most of the kids in the DC cohort are clearly DCPS resident kids.

Also, my apologies for the mistake of indicating there were 37 semi-finalists, when there were 39. The actual percentage would be 10.2%, rounded to 10%.

OK, genius, why was DCPS routinely turning out 7, 8 or 9 finalists just five years ago? The threshold for semi-finalists was the same then, and our public schools were lower performing overall. BASIS hadn't even produced a graduating class when the DC public semi-finalist "boom" was on. What's happened is that we're seeing fewer finalists as the years go by.

Why be so sympathetic to DCPS, the school system that refuses to fund GT programs in the only jurisdiction in this Metro area with no law on gifted education. MD and VA both mandated GT education for the qualified in the 90s, which Michelle Rhee liked to mention. The very same system that will not support academic tracking at the middle school level, other than for math and possibly ELA, and celebrates Honors for All at Wilson.

I see cause for DCPS and DCPCS not turning out dozens of semi-finalists, but four system-wide? Inexcusable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I see things differently and would be far less hard on DCPS simply because the threshold for semi-finalists is the HIGHEST IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. The one-year of data in this discussion are simply too small of a sample size to make any valid conclusions about DCPS at this point. The cut off this past year was 223, meaning that that the semi-finalists probably got no more than one or perhaps two questions wrong. They probably are in the 99.8% of all entrants. Is a 99.8% threshold a good indicator to judge DCPS? That seems like quite a high threshold to hold DCPS responsible for. I'd like to know how many of the kids got in the, say, 50%, 75%, 90%, 95% threshold. I have to wonder if DCPS is actually higher than other school districts.

I see other states have much lower cut off rates and higher semi-finalist acceptance rates (more than DC's 1%). In the 2018-19 year, Sidwell has the most semi-finalists at 14; GDS had 11; and School without Walls had 7.

An important question is whether the methodology used by NMS has inherent biases against DC resident kids by employing the highest cut off in the country and by not accounting for DC having a disproportionately high number of highly selective, national-level private schools dominated by kids from outside of Washington, although most of the kids in the DC cohort are clearly DCPS resident kids.

Also, my apologies for the mistake of indicating there were 37 semi-finalists, when there were 39. The actual percentage would be 10.2%, rounded to 10%.

OK, genius, why was DCPS routinely turning out 7, 8 or 9 finalists just five years ago? The threshold for semi-finalists was the same then, and our public schools were lower performing overall. BASIS hadn't even produced a graduating class when the DC public semi-finalist "boom" was on. What's happened is that we're seeing fewer finalists as the years go by.

Why be so sympathetic to DCPS, the school system that refuses to fund GT programs in the only jurisdiction in this Metro area with no law on gifted education. MD and VA both mandated GT education for the qualified in the 90s, which Michelle Rhee liked to mention. The very same system that will not support academic tracking at the middle school level, other than for math and possibly ELA, and celebrates Honors for All at Wilson.

I see cause for DCPS and DCPCS not turning out dozens of semi-finalists, but four system-wide? Inexcusable.

Do you really think if DCPS had better classroom instruction then more kids would be scoring what is basically a perfect PSAT score? Can you directly correlate what a kid learns in the classroom with the PSAT or SAT? I'm just not convinced that the PSAT measures this. I think it measures intelligence and outside enrichment (be it extensive reading or even PSAT classes--of which hundreds exist across the DMV). The PSAT doesn't test high level math concepts (if I'm correct it's only up to Algebra 2). It's not as if a kid needs to be on the TJ math track in order to have been taught the concepts. I'm just not convinced at all that school quality can be correlated with PSAT performance.

[Anonymous]

I am in total agreement regarding the GT situation in DCPS and the lack of tracking for GT kids. You are 100% on target regarding the lack of tracking in middle schools is clearly to the disadvantage of smart kids.

I also think the NMS methodology impacts DC resident kids negatively.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I see things differently and would be far less hard on DCPS simply because the threshold for semi-finalists is the HIGHEST IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY. The one-year of data in this discussion are simply too small of a sample size to make any valid conclusions about DCPS at this point. The cut off this past year was 223, meaning that that the semi-finalists probably got no more than one or perhaps two questions wrong. They probably are in the 99.8% of all entrants. Is a 99.8% threshold a good indicator to judge DCPS? That seems like quite a high threshold to hold DCPS responsible for. I'd like to know how many of the kids got in the, say, 50%, 75%, 90%, 95% threshold. I have to wonder if DCPS is actually higher than other school districts.

I see other states have much lower cut off rates and higher semi-finalist acceptance rates (more than DC's 1%). In the 2018-19 year, Sidwell has the most semi-finalists at 14; GDS had 11; and School without Walls had 7.

An important question is whether the methodology used by NMS has inherent biases against DC resident kids by employing the highest cut off in the country and by not accounting for DC having a disproportionately high number of highly selective, national-level private schools dominated by kids from outside of Washington, although most of the kids in the DC cohort are clearly DCPS resident kids.

Also, my apologies for the mistake of indicating there were 37 semi-finalists, when there were 39. The actual percentage would be 10.2%, rounded to 10%.

OK, genius, why was DCPS routinely turning out 7, 8 or 9 finalists just five years ago? The threshold for semi-finalists was the same then, and our public schools were lower performing overall. BASIS hadn't even produced a graduating class when the DC public semi-finalist "boom" was on. What's happened is that we're seeing fewer finalists as the years go by.

Why be so sympathetic to DCPS, the school system that refuses to fund GT programs in the only jurisdiction in this Metro area with no law on gifted education. MD and VA both mandated GT education for the qualified in the 90s, which Michelle Rhee liked to mention. The very same system that will not support academic tracking at the middle school level, other than for math and possibly ELA, and celebrates Honors for All at Wilson.

I see cause for DCPS and DCPCS not turning out dozens of semi-finalists, but four system-wide? Inexcusable.

Do you really think if DCPS had better classroom instruction then more kids would be scoring what is basically a perfect PSAT score? Can you directly correlate what a kid learns in the classroom with the PSAT or SAT? I'm just not convinced that the PSAT measures this. I think it measures intelligence and outside enrichment (be it extensive reading or even PSAT classes--of which hundreds exist across the DMV). The PSAT doesn't test high level math concepts (if I'm correct it's only up to Algebra 2). It's not as if a kid needs to be on the TJ math track in order to have been taught the concepts. I'm just not convinced at all that school quality can be correlated with PSAT performance.

Yes, I do think that better classroom instruction would correlate with more semi-finalists in the DC system, along with higher SAT scores, less because of the improved classroom instruction itself than because of whom the school system could then attract and retain.

I saw how better classroom instruction can play out in my little hometown in New England as a kid. Our humble high school was among the first public schools in the country to adopt the International Baccalaureate curriculum, in the late 1970s, which had the effect of pushing challenge down the chain, e.g. the town introduced serious MS language instruction and tracked English classes. As a direct result, our high school began to attract students who would almost certainly have attended a tony private school in the next town over, including low SES scholarship students from our town. Within just four or five years of the introduction of IBD as a school-within-a-school program at the high school, the number of semi-finalists we'd produce annually shot up from zero or one to four or five, including me. We also went from sending zero or one students to Ivy League schools in any given year, to half a dozen.

[Anonymous]

Sidwell and STA always have more NMSF than WIS as a percentage of enrollment even though WIS has IB from the earliest grades. BCC (another IB school) doesn’t do as well as Whitman

IB is great and prepares students incredibly well. It doesn’t do much for increasing NMSF though. Your example further evidence that NMSF is a bad way to judge high school curriculum or instructional quality.

[Anonymous]

The point that catering to high-end students by making policy changes to support their achievement (e.g, the introduction of middle school tracking across the board), and shifting resources into it, reaps rewards for a school system with considerable untapped potential at the top. If more strong DC resident students were to enter and stay in our public system, rather than running off privates and the burbs, breakthroughs could be achieved at the top. Honors for All at Wilson has been a big step backwards, and Walls' lack of transparency in admissions isn't helping either. BASIS' miserable facilities, weak English instruction and Darwinian academics (weed out half the middle school students!) don't inspire many families of the strongest elementary school students without access to Deal, nor does the lack of MS tracking outside math at Hardy, Stuart Hobson and Latin.

DC public schools simply don't treat their high achievers well compared to their counterparts in most major metropolitan centers in the country. If you've been paying attention, you won't be surprised that the semi-finalists count has dropped steadily in the last decade.

[Anonymous]

The Honors for All cohort at Wilson is only in 10th. Maybe 5-6 of those students will make NMSF. You have no way of knowing.

As for BASIS, they don’t weed out ‘half’ of MSers, but if they did what remains is mostly a high performing cohort. And about 5% of their seniors are NMSF in the last 2 years. Only supplementation for those kids was continuing music instruction begun in grade school.

[Anonymous]

5-6 semi-finalists from Wilson? Fantasy. Wilson has been producing 1-2 for many years.

BASIS high-performing cohort produces 1-2. No great shakes. Their main draw for families, and strength, is science instruction.

Yes, BASIS does weed out almost half their MS students, by design. I used to work there.

[Anonymous]

BASIS actually weeds out some of its strongest students. Kids tend to go to Walls for a better rounded HS experience, although some end of bored there in many classes.

BASIS' college counseling is a lot better than Walls, leading me to expect more PSAT takers and multiple semi-finalists this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:BASIS actually weeds out some of its strongest students. Kids tend to go to Walls for a better rounded HS experience, although some end of bored there in many classes.

BASIS' college counseling is a lot better than Walls, leading me to expect more PSAT takers and multiple semi-finalists this year.

Every student at BASIS and every student in DCPS high schools take the PSAT. The city pays.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:5-6 semi-finalists from Wilson? Fantasy. Wilson has been producing 1-2 for many years.

BASIS high-performing cohort produces 1-2. No great shakes. Their main draw for families, and strength, is science instruction.

Yes, BASIS does weed out almost half their MS students, by design. I used to work there.

1-2 out of 40-42. Still a far higher percentage than any other public, even the selective DCPS ones.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:BASIS actually weeds out some of its strongest students. Kids tend to go to Walls for a better rounded HS experience, although some end of bored there in many classes.

BASIS' college counseling is a lot better than Walls, leading me to expect more PSAT takers and multiple semi-finalists this year.

Every student at BASIS and every student in DCPS high schools take the PSAT. The city pays.

No they don't. Just ask Wilson juniors - more than half the kids don't turn up for the test even though the city will pay if they take it. You got that part right.