Fleeing APS schools for FFX County

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Like any school system, FCPS experiences challenges around shifting population bubbles, but as whole I think the larger system gives them more resources to deal with them. People point out disparities between schools in wealthier vs. poorer areas of the county, but if you look at data of similar geographical areas or similarly large school districts, FCPS is quite notable for relative equity--the differences in achievement scores between the lowest 25% of its schools aren't as different from the upper 25% compared to other similarly sized districts (this likely has more to do with the high median income in the county rather than any specific quality of FCPS). I think people are noticing that the inequities are sharpening a bit as resources have gotten stretched thinner.
Having experienced both, I would say that FCPS as a whole is better run than APS as a whole, but individual schools vary.

Correct. If FCPS wasn’t meeting the needs of its lower-income and minority students better, the high schools other than TJ would max out as 5s on Great Schools, just like Yorktown, and more would be 3s and 4s like Wakefield and W-L.

No, the new GS methodology rewards economically segregated schools. It doesn't compare how disadvantaged students are doing to each other, between schools, or as compared to the statewide or system averages. It compares how they are doing relative to the non-disadvantaged students within their schools. So schools with more homogeneously wealthy populations have the highest scores, and schools with a statistically measurable cohort of disadvantaged students had scores that went down. To expect the same outcome from kids who are living completely different lives and being exposed to completely disparate enrichment and vocabulary and experience is absurd. This is completely wrong from an educational standpoint and rewards proficiency rather than growth, which is not a true measure of school performance or excellence. The schools with scores that went down the most were schools where economic disparity amount its students was the greatest, such as Yorktown, where there are a good number of families in the 1%, as well as a statistically significant number of families whose students qualify for fr/l and who live in subsidized housing in Rosslyn.

Please. So sick of hearing this.
Yorktown fRL percentage is smaller than other schools that didn’t take the same hit
West Springfield....
As a south Arlington parent you jerks couldn’t shut up at GS rating a few years ago.
Turns out Wakefield has the same outcome for snowflakes as Yorktown...
As far as I’m concerned Great Schools is just as relevant as it’s always been.

Yes, previous PP - you start by saying that GS rewards economically segregated schools.
Then you proceed to show that Yorktown is economically segregated. But Yorktown’s rating sank to a 5.
You could also have said that GS rewards more homogenous schools - again Yorktown is much more homogeneous than W-L.
Both scores are abysmal. 5 and 4. There are other schools on GS that have the same demographics as Yorktown and score 10/10.

Name the school.

New poster. Marshall is more diverse and has a higher GS score.

A 10 out of 10?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. Never thought I'd see this many responses, but my takeaway is: FFX uses larger class sizes and the AAP program to manage the potential overcrowding at schools. From everything I've heard in APS over the 4-5 years we've been part of it, there is no way they'd consider tracking and AAP. Seems like a non-starter, for whatever reason. But maybe we're getting to the point where we should consider expanding class sizes. I haven't heard many negative comments about it from FFX parents, seems like it hasn't been all that detrimental to the classroom.

And no surprise we're never going to have as many options as FFX does in terms of finding land to build new schools. They have so much more flexibility in that regard. I wonder if APS needs to at least consider making the 4th HS a combined 6-12 grade school. Perhaps that could open up more options and relieve some of the busing costs? Maybe have the 6-8 grades start at a different time, to stagger the buses? Just throwing out ideas at this point.

APS doesn't do "tracking" but residential housing segregation is essentially the same thing. I bet it would be eyepopping to find out what percentage of students in each elementary school had a preschool education. At a school like Jamestown it's probably well over 90%. At Barcroft or Randolph I'd be very surprised if it cracked 50%. Kids who go to preschool start out ahead (north Arlington) or wait for the others to catch up (south Arlington).

You’re speculating.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Like any school system, FCPS experiences challenges around shifting population bubbles, but as whole I think the larger system gives them more resources to deal with them. People point out disparities between schools in wealthier vs. poorer areas of the county, but if you look at data of similar geographical areas or similarly large school districts, FCPS is quite notable for relative equity--the differences in achievement scores between the lowest 25% of its schools aren't as different from the upper 25% compared to other similarly sized districts (this likely has more to do with the high median income in the county rather than any specific quality of FCPS). I think people are noticing that the inequities are sharpening a bit as resources have gotten stretched thinner.
Having experienced both, I would say that FCPS as a whole is better run than APS as a whole, but individual schools vary.

Correct. If FCPS wasn’t meeting the needs of its lower-income and minority students better, the high schools other than TJ would max out as 5s on Great Schools, just like Yorktown, and more would be 3s and 4s like Wakefield and W-L.

No, the new GS methodology rewards economically segregated schools. It doesn't compare how disadvantaged students are doing to each other, between schools, or as compared to the statewide or system averages. It compares how they are doing relative to the non-disadvantaged students within their schools. So schools with more homogeneously wealthy populations have the highest scores, and schools with a statistically measurable cohort of disadvantaged students had scores that went down. To expect the same outcome from kids who are living completely different lives and being exposed to completely disparate enrichment and vocabulary and experience is absurd. This is completely wrong from an educational standpoint and rewards proficiency rather than growth, which is not a true measure of school performance or excellence. The schools with scores that went down the most were schools where economic disparity amount its students was the greatest, such as Yorktown, where there are a good number of families in the 1%, as well as a statistically significant number of families whose students qualify for fr/l and who live in subsidized housing in Rosslyn.

Please. So sick of hearing this.
Yorktown fRL percentage is smaller than other schools that didn’t take the same hit
West Springfield....
As a south Arlington parent you jerks couldn’t shut up at GS rating a few years ago.
Turns out Wakefield has the same outcome for snowflakes as Yorktown...
As far as I’m concerned Great Schools is just as relevant as it’s always been.

Yes, previous PP - you start by saying that GS rewards economically segregated schools.
Then you proceed to show that Yorktown is economically segregated. But Yorktown’s rating sank to a 5.
You could also have said that GS rewards more homogenous schools - again Yorktown is much more homogeneous than W-L.
Both scores are abysmal. 5 and 4. There are other schools on GS that have the same demographics as Yorktown and score 10/10.

DP, but you really don’t understand the GS methodology, I’m embarrassed for you right now.

+ 1

Dp- no, they basically nailed it. Ytown is already highly segregated, and should be scoring similarly to McLean.

At the time of these test scores, it was not highly segregated enough to beat the GS methodology. If they can get their fr/l and URM down below a statistically significant percentage, their GS scores will "magically" go back up.

Exactly. Look at Langley by comparison. They only have a 2% low-income population, so GS doesn't look at their performance. This skews the race-based measures as well since low SES compounds the race effect in test scores, meaning a economically disadvantaged racial minority will, on average, perform far worse than an affluent racial minority.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Like any school system, FCPS experiences challenges around shifting population bubbles, but as whole I think the larger system gives them more resources to deal with them. People point out disparities between schools in wealthier vs. poorer areas of the county, but if you look at data of similar geographical areas or similarly large school districts, FCPS is quite notable for relative equity--the differences in achievement scores between the lowest 25% of its schools aren't as different from the upper 25% compared to other similarly sized districts (this likely has more to do with the high median income in the county rather than any specific quality of FCPS). I think people are noticing that the inequities are sharpening a bit as resources have gotten stretched thinner.
Having experienced both, I would say that FCPS as a whole is better run than APS as a whole, but individual schools vary.

Correct. If FCPS wasn’t meeting the needs of its lower-income and minority students better, the high schools other than TJ would max out as 5s on Great Schools, just like Yorktown, and more would be 3s and 4s like Wakefield and W-L.

No, the new GS methodology rewards economically segregated schools. It doesn't compare how disadvantaged students are doing to each other, between schools, or as compared to the statewide or system averages. It compares how they are doing relative to the non-disadvantaged students within their schools. So schools with more homogeneously wealthy populations have the highest scores, and schools with a statistically measurable cohort of disadvantaged students had scores that went down. To expect the same outcome from kids who are living completely different lives and being exposed to completely disparate enrichment and vocabulary and experience is absurd. This is completely wrong from an educational standpoint and rewards proficiency rather than growth, which is not a true measure of school performance or excellence. The schools with scores that went down the most were schools where economic disparity amount its students was the greatest, such as Yorktown, where there are a good number of families in the 1%, as well as a statistically significant number of families whose students qualify for fr/l and who live in subsidized housing in Rosslyn.

Please. So sick of hearing this.
Yorktown fRL percentage is smaller than other schools that didn’t take the same hit
West Springfield....
As a south Arlington parent you jerks couldn’t shut up at GS rating a few years ago.
Turns out Wakefield has the same outcome for snowflakes as Yorktown...
As far as I’m concerned Great Schools is just as relevant as it’s always been.

Yes, previous PP - you start by saying that GS rewards economically segregated schools.
Then you proceed to show that Yorktown is economically segregated. But Yorktown’s rating sank to a 5.
You could also have said that GS rewards more homogenous schools - again Yorktown is much more homogeneous than W-L.
Both scores are abysmal. 5 and 4. There are other schools on GS that have the same demographics as Yorktown and score 10/10.

DP, but you really don’t understand the GS methodology, I’m embarrassed for you right now.

+ 1

Dp- no, they basically nailed it. Ytown is already highly segregated, and should be scoring similarly to McLean.

You're missing it too. A big part of the GS equity measure is how disadvantaged students do relative to non-disadvantaged kids at the school, which means that the broader the advantage gap within the school population, the more it will hurt the school's GS score. If we accept the fact that race and socioeconomic status are correlated with educational performance (which they are, in any school environment), you can look at it as basically a spectrum from most advantaged to least advantaged based on race and socioeconomic status, and expect test scores to drop as you move from most to least advantaged. GS has set some bright line rules for what is "advantaged" or "disadvantaged" that don't take into account the range, though. So let's say you're comparing two schools, one of which has most of it's student body hovering just on either side of the bright line, whereas the other has more disparity, with students either very advanrtaged or very disadvantaged. For the school with greater disparity, even if all of the students are performing ahead of their similarly-situated peers within the state, it will take a big hit on the GS equity score if they still have the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students that you'd expect to see as a result of factors outside of the school environment. Conversely, the school with a lesser disparity could have all of its students performing worse than at the high-disparity school, but get a great equity score if all of their scores are similar because their student body as a whole is more similarly-situated that the brightline would suggest. Further complicating this is that GS doesn't factor in groups that make up less than 5% of the student body in their scoring, so you could have a school where all of the rich white kids do great and the poor/minority kids are failing abysmally, but they get a great GS equity score because GS literally ignores the fact that the disadvantaged kids exist at the school.

The result of all this can be that one school may have a higher overall GS score than another even though disadvantaged students do better at the lower GS school. That's one reason why the overall GS score is meaningless and you have to look at the underlying data to really understand the schools.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Like any school system, FCPS experiences challenges around shifting population bubbles, but as whole I think the larger system gives them more resources to deal with them. People point out disparities between schools in wealthier vs. poorer areas of the county, but if you look at data of similar geographical areas or similarly large school districts, FCPS is quite notable for relative equity--the differences in achievement scores between the lowest 25% of its schools aren't as different from the upper 25% compared to other similarly sized districts (this likely has more to do with the high median income in the county rather than any specific quality of FCPS). I think people are noticing that the inequities are sharpening a bit as resources have gotten stretched thinner.
Having experienced both, I would say that FCPS as a whole is better run than APS as a whole, but individual schools vary.

Correct. If FCPS wasn’t meeting the needs of its lower-income and minority students better, the high schools other than TJ would max out as 5s on Great Schools, just like Yorktown, and more would be 3s and 4s like Wakefield and W-L.

No, the new GS methodology rewards economically segregated schools. It doesn't compare how disadvantaged students are doing to each other, between schools, or as compared to the statewide or system averages. It compares how they are doing relative to the non-disadvantaged students within their schools. So schools with more homogeneously wealthy populations have the highest scores, and schools with a statistically measurable cohort of disadvantaged students had scores that went down. To expect the same outcome from kids who are living completely different lives and being exposed to completely disparate enrichment and vocabulary and experience is absurd. This is completely wrong from an educational standpoint and rewards proficiency rather than growth, which is not a true measure of school performance or excellence. The schools with scores that went down the most were schools where economic disparity amount its students was the greatest, such as Yorktown, where there are a good number of families in the 1%, as well as a statistically significant number of families whose students qualify for fr/l and who live in subsidized housing in Rosslyn.

Please. So sick of hearing this.
Yorktown fRL percentage is smaller than other schools that didn’t take the same hit
West Springfield....
As a south Arlington parent you jerks couldn’t shut up at GS rating a few years ago.
Turns out Wakefield has the same outcome for snowflakes as Yorktown...
As far as I’m concerned Great Schools is just as relevant as it’s always been.

Yes, previous PP - you start by saying that GS rewards economically segregated schools.
Then you proceed to show that Yorktown is economically segregated. But Yorktown’s rating sank to a 5.
You could also have said that GS rewards more homogenous schools - again Yorktown is much more homogeneous than W-L.
Both scores are abysmal. 5 and 4. There are other schools on GS that have the same demographics as Yorktown and score 10/10.

Name the school.

New poster. Marshall is more diverse and has a higher GS score.

A 10 out of 10?

Nope, Marshall is only a 7.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. Never thought I'd see this many responses, but my takeaway is: FFX uses larger class sizes and the AAP program to manage the potential overcrowding at schools. From everything I've heard in APS over the 4-5 years we've been part of it, there is no way they'd consider tracking and AAP. Seems like a non-starter, for whatever reason. But maybe we're getting to the point where we should consider expanding class sizes. I haven't heard many negative comments about it from FFX parents, seems like it hasn't been all that detrimental to the classroom.

And no surprise we're never going to have as many options as FFX does in terms of finding land to build new schools. They have so much more flexibility in that regard. I wonder if APS needs to at least consider making the 4th HS a combined 6-12 grade school. Perhaps that could open up more options and relieve some of the busing costs? Maybe have the 6-8 grades start at a different time, to stagger the buses? Just throwing out ideas at this point.

APS doesn't do "tracking" but residential housing segregation is essentially the same thing. I bet it would be eyepopping to find out what percentage of students in each elementary school had a preschool education. At a school like Jamestown it's probably well over 90%. At Barcroft or Randolph I'd be very surprised if it cracked 50%. Kids who go to preschool start out ahead (north Arlington) or wait for the others to catch up (south Arlington).

Nooooo, tracking is not the same as housing segregation.

Plenty of de facto segregation in FFX too. Back in my day in FFX, the school bullying at so called top pyramid was ferocious. Hope it’s under control now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Like any school system, FCPS experiences challenges around shifting population bubbles, but as whole I think the larger system gives them more resources to deal with them. People point out disparities between schools in wealthier vs. poorer areas of the county, but if you look at data of similar geographical areas or similarly large school districts, FCPS is quite notable for relative equity--the differences in achievement scores between the lowest 25% of its schools aren't as different from the upper 25% compared to other similarly sized districts (this likely has more to do with the high median income in the county rather than any specific quality of FCPS). I think people are noticing that the inequities are sharpening a bit as resources have gotten stretched thinner.
Having experienced both, I would say that FCPS as a whole is better run than APS as a whole, but individual schools vary.

Correct. If FCPS wasn’t meeting the needs of its lower-income and minority students better, the high schools other than TJ would max out as 5s on Great Schools, just like Yorktown, and more would be 3s and 4s like Wakefield and W-L.

No, the new GS methodology rewards economically segregated schools. It doesn't compare how disadvantaged students are doing to each other, between schools, or as compared to the statewide or system averages. It compares how they are doing relative to the non-disadvantaged students within their schools. So schools with more homogeneously wealthy populations have the highest scores, and schools with a statistically measurable cohort of disadvantaged students had scores that went down. To expect the same outcome from kids who are living completely different lives and being exposed to completely disparate enrichment and vocabulary and experience is absurd. This is completely wrong from an educational standpoint and rewards proficiency rather than growth, which is not a true measure of school performance or excellence. The schools with scores that went down the most were schools where economic disparity amount its students was the greatest, such as Yorktown, where there are a good number of families in the 1%, as well as a statistically significant number of families whose students qualify for fr/l and who live in subsidized housing in Rosslyn.

Please. So sick of hearing this.
Yorktown fRL percentage is smaller than other schools that didn’t take the same hit
West Springfield....
As a south Arlington parent you jerks couldn’t shut up at GS rating a few years ago.
Turns out Wakefield has the same outcome for snowflakes as Yorktown...
As far as I’m concerned Great Schools is just as relevant as it’s always been.

Yes, previous PP - you start by saying that GS rewards economically segregated schools.
Then you proceed to show that Yorktown is economically segregated. But Yorktown’s rating sank to a 5.
You could also have said that GS rewards more homogenous schools - again Yorktown is much more homogeneous than W-L.
Both scores are abysmal. 5 and 4. There are other schools on GS that have the same demographics as Yorktown and score 10/10.

Name the school.

New poster. Marshall is more diverse and has a higher GS score.

A 10 out of 10?

Nope, Marshall is only a 7.

Exactly. So the above statement is complete crap.

[Anonymous]

West Springfield is more diverse than Yorktown and has a GS score of 8.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:West Springfield is more diverse than Yorktown and has a GS score of 8.

GS is measuring performance gap, not performance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Like any school system, FCPS experiences challenges around shifting population bubbles, but as whole I think the larger system gives them more resources to deal with them. People point out disparities between schools in wealthier vs. poorer areas of the county, but if you look at data of similar geographical areas or similarly large school districts, FCPS is quite notable for relative equity--the differences in achievement scores between the lowest 25% of its schools aren't as different from the upper 25% compared to other similarly sized districts (this likely has more to do with the high median income in the county rather than any specific quality of FCPS). I think people are noticing that the inequities are sharpening a bit as resources have gotten stretched thinner.
Having experienced both, I would say that FCPS as a whole is better run than APS as a whole, but individual schools vary.

Correct. If FCPS wasn’t meeting the needs of its lower-income and minority students better, the high schools other than TJ would max out as 5s on Great Schools, just like Yorktown, and more would be 3s and 4s like Wakefield and W-L.

No, the new GS methodology rewards economically segregated schools. It doesn't compare how disadvantaged students are doing to each other, between schools, or as compared to the statewide or system averages. It compares how they are doing relative to the non-disadvantaged students within their schools. So schools with more homogeneously wealthy populations have the highest scores, and schools with a statistically measurable cohort of disadvantaged students had scores that went down. To expect the same outcome from kids who are living completely different lives and being exposed to completely disparate enrichment and vocabulary and experience is absurd. This is completely wrong from an educational standpoint and rewards proficiency rather than growth, which is not a true measure of school performance or excellence. The schools with scores that went down the most were schools where economic disparity amount its students was the greatest, such as Yorktown, where there are a good number of families in the 1%, as well as a statistically significant number of families whose students qualify for fr/l and who live in subsidized housing in Rosslyn.

Please. So sick of hearing this.
Yorktown fRL percentage is smaller than other schools that didn’t take the same hit
West Springfield....
As a south Arlington parent you jerks couldn’t shut up at GS rating a few years ago.
Turns out Wakefield has the same outcome for snowflakes as Yorktown...
As far as I’m concerned Great Schools is just as relevant as it’s always been.

Yes, previous PP - you start by saying that GS rewards economically segregated schools.
Then you proceed to show that Yorktown is economically segregated. But Yorktown’s rating sank to a 5.
You could also have said that GS rewards more homogenous schools - again Yorktown is much more homogeneous than W-L.
Both scores are abysmal. 5 and 4. There are other schools on GS that have the same demographics as Yorktown and score 10/10.

Name the school.

New poster. Marshall is more diverse and has a higher GS score.

A 10 out of 10?

Nope, Marshall is only a 7.

Exactly. So the above statement is complete crap.

Under the new GS scores, there is only one high school rated 10, and it's a by-application alternative high school in Richmond. TJ is unrated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:West Springfield is more diverse than Yorktown and has a GS score of 8.

GS is measuring performance gap, not performance.

+1. People still aren't getting it. You have to think of it like an inverse bell curve. At the extremes, either highly diverse (which tends to result in all students being clustered roughly together on the advantage scale) and almost completely homogenous (where there are too few disadvantaged students to be counted), GS scores will be higher because of the equity measurement. For those schools in between that are diverse enough for the impact to be measurable but where there's a significant advantage gap within the student body, equity scores will dip and will drag down the overall score. For school systems that care about GS scores, this provides an incentive to create zone schools to concentrate the affluent in some schools with no more than a handful of disadvantaged students to be measured and drag down the rating, and then cluster all of the less-affluent students together so that their lower test scores will be closer together. Gives the appearance of equity when really it's highly segregated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:West Springfield is more diverse than Yorktown and has a GS score of 8.

GS is measuring performance gap, not performance.

So we should ignore low GS scores and high GS scores too? GS measures both performance and performance gap but improperly calculates and overly weights it. Formerly, GS only measured performance in VA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:West Springfield is more diverse than Yorktown and has a GS score of 8.

GS is measuring performance gap, not performance.

Yorktown posters will not hear it. Don’t bother.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:West Springfield is more diverse than Yorktown and has a GS score of 8.

GS is measuring performance gap, not performance.

+1. People still aren't getting it. You have to think of it like an inverse bell curve. At the extremes, either highly diverse (which tends to result in all students being clustered roughly together on the advantage scale) and almost completely homogenous (where there are too few disadvantaged students to be counted), GS scores will be higher because of the equity measurement. For those schools in between that are diverse enough for the impact to be measurable but where there's a significant advantage gap within the student body, equity scores will dip and will drag down the overall score. For school systems that care about GS scores, this provides an incentive to create zone schools to concentrate the affluent in some schools with no more than a handful of disadvantaged students to be measured and drag down the rating, and then cluster all of the less-affluent students together so that their lower test scores will be closer together. Gives the appearance of equity when really it's highly segregated.

Homeowners care about GS scores, but school districts don't. FCPS cares about SOL scores, accreditation, etc., not gaming GS scores. Your redistricting fear is overblown.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:West Springfield is more diverse than Yorktown and has a GS score of 8.

GS is measuring performance gap, not performance.

+1. People still aren't getting it. You have to think of it like an inverse bell curve. At the extremes, either highly diverse (which tends to result in all students being clustered roughly together on the advantage scale) and almost completely homogenous (where there are too few disadvantaged students to be counted), GS scores will be higher because of the equity measurement. For those schools in between that are diverse enough for the impact to be measurable but where there's a significant advantage gap within the student body, equity scores will dip and will drag down the overall score. For school systems that care about GS scores, this provides an incentive to create zone schools to concentrate the affluent in some schools with no more than a handful of disadvantaged students to be measured and drag down the rating, and then cluster all of the less-affluent students together so that their lower test scores will be closer together. Gives the appearance of equity when really it's highly segregated.

Well don’t you worry. They’ve kicked all those poor kids out of Yorktown for the next boundary shift.
So your scores will be back up in no time.