Alexandria schools - why so bad?!

[Anonymous]

I live in DC, EOTP, and we need to move soon for schools. I've started casually looking into areas we might be interested in and I can't believe Alexandria schools are so low ranking! The houses in Del Ray are $1 mil+ but TC Williams is a 3 on GS! Is that right? Is it a safe school? I'm just trying to figure out what the deal is because I would love to live there but not if the schools are a problem. Thanks for any insight.

[Anonymous]

Don't use Great Schools as your guide. Lots of threads here about that site and many posts about how inaccurate it can be. Ranking and ratings won't help as much as posting asking for families' experiences at specific schools that are the ones assigned for a house that interests you. Also sone have posted here about recent chsmges to that site that some dislike. I say this as a parent who has never used it because it seems so disconnected from many people's actual experiences (full disclosure, we're not in APS, just so you know).

Visiting and also finding ways to talk to people whose kids are attending or have recently attended a school you'd use is a much better gauge but it's hard to do. Look for a neighborhood listserv type of site and poke around the PTA web page if they have one. Some schools do not give tours but you can ask. Maybe take your kids to play on the playgrounds at those schools in summer snd talk to parents you meet there. (where I live, anyone can use school playgrounds in summer but not sure about APS).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Don't use Great Schools as your guide. Lots of threads here about that site and many posts about how inaccurate it can be. Ranking and ratings won't help as much as posting asking for families' experiences at specific schools that are the ones assigned for a house that interests you. Also sone have posted here about recent chsmges to that site that some dislike. I say this as a parent who has never used it because it seems so disconnected from many people's actual experiences (full disclosure, we're not in APS, just so you know).

Visiting and also finding ways to talk to people whose kids are attending or have recently attended a school you'd use is a much better gauge but it's hard to do. Look for a neighborhood listserv type of site and poke around the PTA web page if they have one. Some schools do not give tours but you can ask. Maybe take your kids to play on the playgrounds at those schools in summer snd talk to parents you meet there. (where I live, anyone can use school playgrounds in summer but not sure about APS).

Alexandria schools are ACPS. And they're bad.

[Anonymous]

How old are your kids? We found that our local ACPS elementary (Maury) worked fine for our kids. GW would not have been a fit for our eldest, who has ADHD and is not a self-starter - we sent him to private school. However, it was a good fit for our youngest, who is highly motivated and can manage her own work without much help from adults. We are not at the high school stage yet, so cannot speak to that.

[Anonymous]

We moved from ALexandria City to Fairfax Alexandria and ultimately to McLean. I find many people move for better public schools in elementary or go private.

For years we said our could thrive but we ended up moving for better schools.

[Anonymous]

Look at the many threads on this topic and read the stories from those of us that have actually sent our children to the schools. We started in Alexandria, tried private and ultimately moved. I know one family who we knew in the pre-K and K years that stayed through high school. Everyone else ultimately ended up going to private school or moved. We loved Old Town but couldn’t send our children to public schools there.

[Anonymous]

Alexandria is full of public housing. It's like Hunger games with few rich and a lot of poors.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Alexandria is full of public housing. It's like Hunger games with few rich and a lot of poors.

Weird way of seeing things, but ok.

[Anonymous]

They are terrible, awful. Don't move here. Just pick a neighborhood in Fairfax or Maryland with a better Great Schools rating and move there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Alexandria is full of public housing. It's like Hunger games with few rich and a lot of poors.

Concentrated poverty= not good academic outcomes.

[Anonymous]

There are a lot of factors at play. There’s a lot of money in Alexandria, but comparatively few families compared to Arlington - lots of condos, and small, old but still $$$ townhomes. Del Rey is the outlier in terms of families but that’s about it. There are concentrated areas of poverty on the west end where you also have high ESOL populations. There’s just one huge high school for the whole city, so it gets students not just from the high-performing elementary schools but also from the schools that have a lot of poverty. And a lot of young families move before or shortly after elementary, or they choose private K-12.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Don't use Great Schools as your guide. Lots of threads here about that site and many posts about how inaccurate it can be. Ranking and ratings won't help as much as posting asking for families' experiences at specific schools that are the ones assigned for a house that interests you. Also sone have posted here about recent chsmges to that site that some dislike. I say this as a parent who has never used it because it seems so disconnected from many people's actual experiences (full disclosure, we're not in APS, just so you know).

Visiting and also finding ways to talk to people whose kids are attending or have recently attended a school you'd use is a much better gauge but it's hard to do. Look for a neighborhood listserv type of site and poke around the PTA web page if they have one. Some schools do not give tours but you can ask. Maybe take your kids to play on the playgrounds at those schools in summer snd talk to parents you meet there. (where I live, anyone can use school playgrounds in summer but not sure about APS).

Alexandria schools are ACPS. And they're bad.

Sorry, I meant ACPS. I know APS is Arlington but was typing too fast. Still, the point stands: Great Schools (or any rating and ranking site) is a tool that isn't necessarily useful. Some posters use it to decide where to live, which gives a ton of influence to just one source of supposed information.

One family (or web site) can say a school system is terrible yet the next family can say their own experience at a specific school was great. Very, very school-dependent and family-specific.

[Anonymous]

The short answer is that the Alexandria schools are so bad because the School Board is a hot mess and that mess rolls downward.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are a lot of factors at play. There’s a lot of money in Alexandria, but comparatively few families compared to Arlington - lots of condos, and small, old but still $$$ townhomes. Del Rey is the outlier in terms of families but that’s about it. There are concentrated areas of poverty on the west end where you also have high ESOL populations. There’s just one huge high school for the whole city, so it gets students not just from the high-performing elementary schools but also from the schools that have a lot of poverty. And a lot of young families move before or shortly after elementary, or they choose private K-12.

Ie they just need to build more schools and segregate the poor people out—a la Arlington

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are a lot of factors at play. There’s a lot of money in Alexandria, but comparatively few families compared to Arlington - lots of condos, and small, old but still $$$ townhomes. Del Rey is the outlier in terms of families but that’s about it. There are concentrated areas of poverty on the west end where you also have high ESOL populations. There’s just one huge high school for the whole city, so it gets students not just from the high-performing elementary schools but also from the schools that have a lot of poverty. And a lot of young families move before or shortly after elementary, or they choose private K-12.

Ie they just need to build more schools and segregate the poor people out—a la Arlington

Arlington schools are nothing special. The elementary schools > the middle schools > the high schools. Not a single high school in Arlington cracks the top 10 in the state.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/virginia