2020 National Merit semifinalists in DC
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Anonymous
+1. Truth is DCPS does not challenge the high achieving students and have no goals whatsoever to do it. |
Anonymous
I have access to the NCS directory. Of the 5 NCS semifinalists, only 1 lives in DC---so 20%. (1 is from Arlington, 1 from Mclean, 1 from Gaithersburg and 1 from Chevy Chase MD). |
Anonymous
| NCS is a girls' school that has always drawn heavily from the wealthy Bethesda area. You're providing anecdotal evidence. We know loads of Upper NW families who send their children to co-ed privates in their neighborhoods because they aren't happy with Wilson and perhaps Deal. |
Anonymous
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Ok, so the NCS girls by-in-large don't live in DC and you can confidently say the same about St. Albans. A parents above said that 40% of the Sidwell kids live in DC. Of the 2 GDS kids, I know one lives in Maryland. Not sure about the other. The St. Anselm's kid lives in Kensington MD. One of the 2 Gonzaga kids is from Bethesda (don't know anything about the second). The one Maret kid I know on that list lives in Chevy Chase (again don't know anything about the second). That's as far as I got on the list. But point being, at least 50% of these kids don't live in DC. When you add up all the schools accounting for the Cathedral schools it's probably more like 30% DC, 70% elsewhere.
I get that you're unhappy about the DCPS performance and are trying to make a point but these DC national merit semifinalist kids are dis proportionally from elsewhere. |
Anonymous
And as was correctly pointed out above, in DC the top 1% are named semi finalists. In every other jurisdiction you must be top .5%. So the same proportional number of DC kids are named as everyone else. Finally the PSAT is an easy test to prep for and materials are widely available. So what’s your kid’s excuse? |
Anonymous
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Previous poster again and then I'm starting my day.
I know one of the Visi girls is also from MD. Not sure of the other. So for actual DC residents (may be less than this) Wilson 1 Walls 1 Latin 1 Basis 1 Visi 1 Gonzaga 1 Maret 1 NCS 1 GDS 1 St. Anselm's 0 STA ? out of 6 WIS ? out of 1 Sidwell is the outlier. If it's 40% then it's 5 kids from Sidwell. DC may have a higher percentage of kids but these schools are still producing the same number of DC resident semi-finalists each. It makes sense that the private schools would have a lower ratio. They have a stringent application process. The publics and charters take all comers. My oldest kid hasn't taken the PSAT yet. Not that I think I have a semi finalist on my hands but why is your default response when faced with facts to repeatedly insult my child? 
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Anonymous
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If your kid isn’t old enough to take the PSAT yet, why on earth do you care about this? The finalist list isn’t an indictment in the schools.
The PSAT is a test that you do well on if you’ve read a ton and have highly educated parents. And like taking tests. That is why, as a whole, DC public school students, 40% of whom are at risk, don’t have as many NMSF as their peers at private schools. |
Anonymous
| What concerns me about this data is that we're seeing fewer semifinalists in the District than we did five or six years ago. In 2013, there were 7 semifinalists in DC public, 4 from Walls and 3 from Wilson. School choice has exploded in the City in this time-frame, with greater numbers in both traditional schools and the charter sector, yet we're seeing worse outcomes on a standard national measure of school quality. You can claim that the PSAT simply measures parents' income until you're blue in the face without excusing these lackluster results. I'm not buying that every semifinalist in this Metro area comes from an affluent home and attends a school where PSAT test prep is stressed and you shouldn't either. |
Anonymous
If you look at the out-migration data from the DME and planning, there is still a significant number of families of older children MS and up, who leave the city. On another well-regarded measure of academic progress, the NAEP, DC is one of the few jurisdictions that is continuing to improve. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/dc-is-a-bright-spot-in-the-nations-overall-lackluster-standardized-test-results/2019/10/29/0c386ea2-fa51-11e9-8190-6be4deb56e01_story.html |
Anonymous
| Well the top independent schools have become far more competitive to get accepted to since 2013 and a lot of these students are coming from MD and VA. There is increasing disgruntlement (among some parents) with Mont Co and Virginia schools over the past 5 years. My guess is that the quality of student at the top independents has gone up. They used to be places where just the wealthy of Washington would send their kids. Now they draw primarily from the greater DMV and not just upper NW. If anything the quality of experience at Wilson (at least for the cohort that are now seniors) has gone up. If there is a shift in the amount of kids being national merit semi finalists from private vs public in DC, I think you need to look to the privates and not to a problem with the publics for your answer. |
Anonymous
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I don't think NMSF is a measure of school quality. I think it's a measure of student quality -- it is just reported based on where those students attend school.
5-6 years ago students from across the city still had a shot at getting into Wilson OOB. Latin and BASIS didn't even exist. I know 1 of the 2 charter students; they live EOTP. Last year BASIS had 3 NMSF out of a graduating class of 42. They were IB for Wilson, but their MS was Hardy, and they opted out of that. |
Anonymous
Latin started in 2006, Basis in 2012. Wilson started getting hard to get into around 2012. |
Anonymous
This 100% It has not much to do with the school. Schools don't have a PSAT or SAT curriculum to teach like they do for AP. |
Anonymous
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School quality and student quality go hand in hand of course. If our best public high schools were half as good as DCPS, DCPCS and parent boosters claim, they'd be producing more than a handful of NMSFs annually. Right now, only around .05% of DC public's high school juniors are clearing this bar, when the state average is .5-1%.
I don't see what the big deal is in scoring high on the (rather easy) PSAT. My siblings and I were semifinalists, as was my spouse and SIL. We attended ordinary public schools in heavily working class communities and then elite colleges, on Pell Grants. Our families were lower middle class. We had many terrific high school teachers, loved to read and worked our tails off at school. I've lived in DC for 15 years and am tired of the endless excuses for mediocre school/student performance. All that the NAEP results show are that things aren't as bad as they were in the 90s for both for low and high-performing students. |
Anonymous
OK, but the number of NMSFs in the DC burbs hasn't dropped in the last decade. More than one-quarter of TJ students, from Fairfax and Arlington, clear the bar annually then as now. More MoCo and VA parents may indeed be dissatisfied with their local schools than six or eight years ago, but their unhappiness hasn't been reflected in PSAT results. When you run your schools system without formal GT programs, as the District does, leaving school PTAs to pay for much of the enrichment for high performers down the chain, you're asking for crappy NMSF results. There is absolutely a problem with DC public schools failing to push and support the best and brightest, particularly at the ES and MS levels. The support for high performers is too little, too late, with affluent parents stepping in to provide too much of the enrichment for their own children. The arrangement hurts the most capable low SES students most. Honors for All at Wilson is emblematic of this serious problem. |