Marshall "3rd for Best School"
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Anonymous
Funny like your investment hahaha hahahahahh |
Anonymous
I can honestly say I have no idea what you're trying to say or what you think is funny. But I'm not interested in finding out. |
Anonymous
killin' it in marshall district 
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Anonymous
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I don't have a dog in this fight, but either there was a problem with the data last year or parents need to know why the IB participation rate fell from 99% to 58% in one year.
http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/virginia/districts/fairfax-county-public-schools/george-c-marshall-high-school-20451 |
Anonymous
Two years ago, when the report came out, I was pretty excited to see the high school we love recognized for its great academic record. I may have also felt just a tiny bit of glee that those who have been bashing our school for years would have to pipe down for a little while. I did NOT run out and investigate exactly how we earned that ranking or second guess the formula used to do so. And so, I may have done some erroneous touting of my own until being informed -- LOUDLY and repeatedly on these forums -- that the data was tainted and that many FCPS parents still view Marshall as second rate. Is it not possible that others made the same honest mistake? If it is, in fact, a mistake (still not entirely convinced, but let's not go there again). Why are you so hellbent on making Marshall admin out to be dishonest and unethical? For the record -- regardless of where we are on national rankings or what those in "better" zip codes have to say about us -- I will state emphatically that Marshall is an excellent school run by a principal that I like and respect. We have great arts programs, excellent academics, caring and responsive teachers, and a vibrant international community. We have many families from other areas who go to considerable effort to pupil-place students here. Our SOL scores speak for themselves, and our seniors regularly go on to competitive universities. Trolls and naysayers be damned, I'm proud to be a Marshall parent! |
Anonymous
Looks like Marshall's US News rating for 2012 was about as real as that cheerleader's implants. Surely you expected that response. |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
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Atlantic Monthly article explains why ranking high schools is meaningless and harmful:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/why-high-school-rankings-are-meaningless-and-harmful/276122/ 1. The inherent impossibility of measuring relative quality in schools. Quality is a very subjective matter, especially in something as intangible as education. And using a simple measure to rank thousands of schools certainly cannot capture the relative quality of schools or indicate which are better than others. 2. Focusing only on AP and other "advanced" courses is silly. Aside from the obvious and already noted objection that looking only at such courses fails to take into account all the other indicators of school quality, some people (I include myself here) say that many of these courses simply aren't all they're cracked up to be, which makes their use as a proxy for quality even more ludicrous. 3. The Challenge Index has been partly responsible for fueling the tremendous growth in AP enrollments around the country over the past ten years. Of course, many students take AP courses because they're genuinely interested in challenging themselves with what can be a rigorous course of study and because they're intellectually curious about the subject matter. Unfortunately, too many others take these courses because they're feverishly trying to impress college admissions officers by stacking their record with large numbers of AP courses. But many students who end up in AP courses are there because they are unwitting pawns of their principals, local school boards, or education bureaucrats, who are pushing more students to take AP classes to improve their schools' ranking on the Challenge Index and other such lists. Remember that the Mathews index doesn't take into account how students perform on the AP exams, just that they take them. The incentive to vacuum kids into these classes ends up packing AP courses with too many students who don't belong there. In short, by being partly responsible for the explosive growth in AP enrollment over the past decade, the Mathews ranking -- and, to a lesser extent, the others -- amplifies the absurdity that pervades contemporary public education in the United States, where cramming students' heads with information and then subjecting those students to standardized tests seems to have supplanted helping students to learn as the preferred modus operandi of many education officials, and where the behavior of school officials is shaped more by perverse incentives than by educational common sense. That's the reason to care about this. If it weren't for the fact that these sorts of rankings actually shape school behavior, everyone would be perfectly justified in ignoring Mathews and the Washington Post as they spend time and other resources assembling his list. The ranking itself is meaningless. But the harm it and other lists of its kind do to public education and the role they play in driving the College Board's revenues can't be overlooked. These lists may sell papers and draw readers to websites, but for those of us outside of that business, we've a duty to push back against this kind of reductionism wherever we see it. |
Anonymous
+1 and thank you. That was well said. |
Anonymous
| +100 Thanks for posting this. It's so true. |
Anonymous
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I would be wary of sending my kid to a school where the administration was either so stupid that it didn't realize it was loudly touting a phony ranking or so dishonest that it didn't care one way or the other. The error in the 2012 US News ranking was obvious, since US News identified the factual assumptions underlying the rankings on the school profiles. But the Marshall boosters denied repeatedly there was any problem, apparently because they were so excited to be in the same company as some of the neighboring schools. That approach kind of worked for a while, at least until US News updated its ranking with more accurate information on IB participation at Marshall and the ranking fell sharply this year. The emperor no longer had any clothes.
A prior poster made an important point that too much attention is placed these days on rankings by the likes of the Washington Post and US News. By treating a phony ranking as validation of the school's success and touting it so prominently, however, Marshall sought to focus even more attention on such rankings. Anyone looking at the situation from outside can see that the school won't gain the wider respect it so obviously covets until people there are honest and candid enough to admit when they screw up. For now, they continue to come across as very defensive and insular. |
Anonymous
I agree with this, with the caveat that there's no way to know if this boosterism was done exclusively by Marshall, or had some support/backing by FCPS as well. I'm guessing that FCPS is not exactly squeaky clean here, and therefore ALL FCPS would then be off limits. |
Anonymous
| Agreed. We were considering Marshall IB for our child in a couple of years but that is now off the table. My sister lives in Atlanta and has told me all about the cheating scandal down there, where the local superintendent ended up in jail. This sounds too much like that. |
Anonymous
This this this. |
Anonymous
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