Is Walter Johnson the Cornell of the “W schools?”

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP has serious psychological problems.

OP is one of those high functioning lunatics you run into every now and then..good reminder they're out there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:WJ is a little bit more diverse than the other W schools (not counting BCC the honorary W), a little bit less of a pressure cooker, yet still full of high-achieving kids.

I'm a WJ parent and from what I've observed WJ parents are probably not as hard-core as Whitman or Churchill parents. We chose the WJ catchment area for this very reason.

Yes, this exactly.
—Another WJ parent and mcps teacher who looked very carefully at high schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is Walter Johnson the Cornell of the “W schools?”

Meaning, is it the least prestigious and some argue not even worthy of the “W School” title? Or is it excellent? I ask this because I have been hearing conflicting thoughts on this.

Anyone with direct experience with the school?

One can get an excellent education at any MCPS HS. Each has the same curriculum and the same pool of teaching talent. They all even have an adequately large high-achieving cohort. Sure, there are some differences in bulk test averages that correspond to an area's overall SES but you can do just as well in Calc BC at WJ as anywhere else.

Don't the best teachers want to work at the schools with the highest achieving students? Thus, your argument is off.

No they are the most entitled students and have the most interfering parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is Walter Johnson the Cornell of the “W schools?”

Meaning, is it the least prestigious and some argue not even worthy of the “W School” title? Or is it excellent? I ask this because I have been hearing conflicting thoughts on this.

Anyone with direct experience with the school?

That's silly, OP. Obviously Walter Johnson is the Dartmouth of the "W Schools." Or maybe the Penn of the "W Schools"?

Plus, where would the prestigiousness of these public MCPS high schools come from anyway? The prestige of having parents who reside in Bethesda or Potomac?

Isn’t WJ in Rockville or North Bethesda? Very different than Bethesda or Potomac.

Wootton is in Rockville. So what of it?

Yes, Wootton is unarguably in Rockville - within the boundaries of the incorporated municipality of Rockville. So unprestigious!

And Churchill starts with a C, not a W. Also unprestigious. I have never heard anybody refer to "Winston Churchill" High School the way everyone refers to "Walter Johnson" High School. Also, before Churchill was Churchill, it was Potomac High School, which starts with a P, not a W.

And Walter Johnson is in North Bethesda, according to the U.S. Census, although I personally think that south of 270 it's Bethesda, not North Bethesda. Also unprestigious!

So that just leaves Whitman, which is actually a Double W school (Walt Whitman), but I don't know why a school named after a poet would be more prestigious than a school named after a physicist, a pitcher, a pianist, a president, a prime minister, a patriot, a physician, or a plantation owner. Which, actually, why don't we refer to the P schools in MCPS? P for prestige, of course.

You realize Churchill is WINSTON Churchill, right?

[Anonymous]

OP is Jen Baker's parting shot at DCUM!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP is Jen Baker's parting shot at DCUM!

Jen Baker seems sane. OP, not so much

[Anonymous]

OP if you're this transparent on an anonymous message board I can't imagine what you're like in real life.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP if you're this transparent on an anonymous message board I can't imagine what you're like in real life.

I think this forum breeds trolling. You get to read dozens of posts suggesting that your house, your neighborhood, your jurisdiction, your schools, your kids’ schools, your job, your finances, and just about everything else associated with your life is somehow lacking, and people like OP respond with some random trolling just to drag the forum down a bit further. If nothing here can be taken seriously, then the other put-downs may sting less.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Is Walter Johnson the Cornell of the “W schools?”

Meaning, is it the least prestigious and some argue not even worthy of the “W School” title? Or is it excellent? I ask this because I have been hearing conflicting thoughts on this.

Anyone with direct experience with the school?

I see what you did here in Helping Cornell W (as in presidential candidate Cornell West) get the word out.

[Anonymous]

This thread is hilarious. Well done, OP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I really hate to break to you all but the "W" schools are just big public schools with large class sizes and a lot of rich kids.

W school = wealthy and white(ish).

Wealthier
Winston
Wonton
Whiteman

[Anonymous]

Lmfao to the person that claims teachers want to work at Whitman. Parents and kids are exhausting and demand too much. Many of the best, most passionate, and innovative teachers I know would never work in the Whitman cluster. That and it’s too far of a commute for many. Signed- a 15 year teacher currently working at a school that feeds into Whitman.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Whitman is the best by far. The others are... meh.. (If you include Winston Churchill, then that is also a great W)

What do you mean "If"? The W schools are known.

I want to know, if the W schools are Ivies, what is BCC? Northwestern? Chicago? Duke?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:One can get an excellent education at any MCPS HS. Each has the same curriculum and the same pool of teaching talent. They all even have an adequately large high-achieving cohort. Sure, there are some differences in bulk test averages that correspond to an area's overall SES but you can do just as well in Calc BC at WJ as anywhere else.

Don't the best teachers want to work at the schools with the highest achieving students? Thus, your argument is off.

It's not that simple. I worked at a high FARMs school and some of the best teachers are there, too. Teachers at high FARMs schools use skills that most teachers at W schools don't need to develop.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Can you really joke about Cornell if you didn't go to one of a handful of schools? It still looks bad then and most of the people here didn't...

Also, Cornell isn't the "worst" school in the Ivy League even if USNWR tried to tell everyone it was for so long (though not this year with their updated methodology).

Come on, admit it. It just is...

Actually, if you want to study CS, Cornell is ranked the highest of the Ivies. I think Princeton does reasonably well too but the others are frankly below UMD.

More seriously, Cornell is unlikely to be the lowest ranked Ivy moving forward with the shift to weighing outcomes more. It wasn't the lowest in any of the USNWR, Forbes, or WSJ undergrad rankings or the Times Higher Ed University rankings. I didn't go there but have thought people have overlooked it for too long. In that regard, Walter Johnson is kind of like Cornell.