US News rankings are out with individual magnet program rankings as well

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Every year the W schools boosters cannot wait for the USNews rankings to come out to boast about how their schools rank higher than Blair.
They know they cannot compete and beat Blair on the field...but on paper, oh yeah

Blair envy is very strong with that group.

[Anonymous]

Churchill has been sliding backwards for four years. A lot of vacancies and replacements at the school that have impacted the quality of education students have received.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you look at Blair overall, can you really blame U.S. News? Their numbers (outside of SMAC) stink. The Magnet was supposed to "raise up" Blair for Silver Spring, but instead it's just a bad HS overall with an ineffective Magnet. A lot of parents in "W's" are just keeping their kids at their home school and tutoring on the side, so now AEI has egg all over their face for screwing up again. MCPS can try bussing for equity, but we'll see how that works out at the next board election.

That's strange when I look at the SAT average for the largest cohort common to Blair and the W's Blair scores higher.

Blair 1326
Walter Johnson 1275
Wootton 1262
Churchill 1257

https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2017/1771102HS%20Princ_SAT%20Partic_Perf%20Class%20of%202017.pdf

Table A.8
The "Blair 1326" SAT score is the average for "White" students at Blair
The average SAT score for "Black or African American" at Blair is 1032
The average SAT score for "Hispanic/Latino" at Blair is 1037
The average SAT score for "Asian" at Blair is 1290
The average SAT score for "2 or more races" at Blair is 1324

Table A.6
The average SAT score for all Blair students who took the test is 1142.

What's interesting to me is that, with a few outliers, scores are pretty static across schools by race. Black kids do about as well at Blair as they do at most of the Ws, except Wootton where they do worse than expected and Whitman where they do very well, which I'm guessing is a function of wealth.

Any school <5% of a demographic group lacks sufficient numbers from which to draw meaningful data

Also, a lot of the URM kids at Whitman are in a different SES class than the majority of URM kids at Blair. That also makes a difference in the test scores.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Blair 2nd to none…. Except the almost 200 higher ranked magnet programs. Not even top three in the county

that just proved that the ranking is not very meaningful.

You must be a Blair parent. Strange how no one outside the DCC seems to share the high regard for the school as the PTA does. I’m glad they’re happy

I am not in DCC or PTA or a STEM parent - but Blair's track record for award-winning teachers and students is objectively impressive. I am a Blair parent (and a parent of a child not at Blair) - Just this month Blair announced the following accolades:

2nd place in the 2022 National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium Engineering & Technology poster presentation (student)
2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search Teacher of Merit Award (2 teachers)
Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation Educator of Distinction Award
Presidential Scholars Program - Semifinalists (2)
NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing - student
Silver Chips, recognized by the CSPA (Columbia Scholastic Press Association) with the Crown Award for student publications
Actuarial Foundation Finalists for the 2022 Modeling the Future Challenge (2 student teams)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Blair 2nd to none…. Except the almost 200 higher ranked magnet programs. Not even top three in the county

that just proved that the ranking is not very meaningful.

You must be a Blair parent. Strange how no one outside the DCC seems to share the high regard for the school as the PTA does. I’m glad they’re happy

I am not in DCC or PTA or a STEM parent - but Blair's track record for award-winning teachers and students is objectively impressive. I am a Blair parent (and a parent of a child not at Blair) - Just this month Blair announced the following accolades:

2nd place in the 2022 National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium Engineering & Technology poster presentation (student)
2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search Teacher of Merit Award (2 teachers)
Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation Educator of Distinction Award
Presidential Scholars Program - Semifinalists (2)
NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing - student
Silver Chips, recognized by the CSPA (Columbia Scholastic Press Association) with the Crown Award for student publications
Actuarial Foundation Finalists for the 2022 Modeling the Future Challenge (2 student teams)

And two silver awardees of 2022 USAMO



https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/AMC/usamo/2022/2022%20USAMO%20Awardees.docx%20%281%29.pdf

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Every year the W schools boosters cannot wait for the USNews rankings to come out to boast about how their schools rank higher than Blair.
They know they cannot compete and beat Blair on the field...but on paper, oh yeah

Blair envy is very strong with that group.

there is no such things as Blair envy from the group you think has envy. If they wanted to send their kids to Blair they could have traded the cheapest starter home zoned for BCC and bought one of the nicest homes in the entire Blair zone. There is no exclusivity to the cheapest area in close in Montgomery County and one of the things that drags blair down is the copious amounts of low income housing zoned for it. People take less home not to go to Blair, the vast majority of people zoned for Blair can't afford nicer areas of the county or were willing to compromise their children's school for a nicer house.

The people with Blair envy are fellow DCC residents with worse options. To be honest most people not in a consortium paid 7 figures specifically not to go to school like Blair. Maybe we have different definitions of envy

[Anonymous]

Yawn. The Blair magnet and CAP kids I know are going to Vassar, Brown, UCLA, Northwestern, Barnard, Smith, Vanderbilt, Emory, WashU, and many other T20 schools. Most are DCC kids and many, but not all, are UMC. It's not what you think it is, but that's okay.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Yawn. The Blair magnet and CAP kids I know are going to Vassar, Brown, UCLA, Northwestern, Barnard, Smith, Vanderbilt, Emory, WashU, and many other T20 schools. Most are DCC kids and many, but not all, are UMC. It's not what you think it is, but that's okay.

You guys are arguing about very different things. The rankings were for Blair as a whole, not the magnet programs.
They then just rank-ordered the schools that had magnet programs. Therefore TJ was being compared with the entire Blair school not TJ vs Blar STEM Magnet. Apples and oranges comparison here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Blair 2nd to none…. Except the almost 200 higher ranked magnet programs. Not even top three in the county

that just proved that the ranking is not very meaningful.

You must be a Blair parent. Strange how no one outside the DCC seems to share the high regard for the school as the PTA does. I’m glad they’re happy

I am not in DCC or PTA or a STEM parent - but Blair's track record for award-winning teachers and students is objectively impressive. I am a Blair parent (and a parent of a child not at Blair) - Just this month Blair announced the following accolades:

2nd place in the 2022 National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium Engineering & Technology poster presentation (student)
2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search Teacher of Merit Award (2 teachers)
Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation Educator of Distinction Award
Presidential Scholars Program - Semifinalists (2)
NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing - student
Silver Chips, recognized by the CSPA (Columbia Scholastic Press Association) with the Crown Award for student publications
Actuarial Foundation Finalists for the 2022 Modeling the Future Challenge (2 student teams)

That's impressive! No other school comes close. Even TJ number one rank school by US News pales by comparison.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Every year the W schools boosters cannot wait for the USNews rankings to come out to boast about how their schools rank higher than Blair.
They know they cannot compete and beat Blair on the field...but on paper, oh yeah

Blair envy is very strong with that group.

there is no such things as Blair envy from the group you think has envy. If they wanted to send their kids to Blair they could have traded the cheapest starter home zoned for BCC and bought one of the nicest homes in the entire Blair zone. There is no exclusivity to the cheapest area in close in Montgomery County and one of the things that drags blair down is the copious amounts of low income housing zoned for it. People take less home not to go to Blair, the vast majority of people zoned for Blair can't afford nicer areas of the county or were willing to compromise their children's school for a nicer house.

The people with Blair envy are fellow DCC residents with worse options. To be honest most people not in a consortium paid 7 figures specifically not to go to school like Blair. Maybe we have different definitions of envy

Not really You're just misinformed. There are many tigers whose cubs didn't make the cut and suffer from this Blair envy. They typically live in Western Montgomery county in areas like Potomac. They love to complain about changes to the selection process or where the magnet is geographically located. The term sour grapes comes to mind.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If you look at Blair overall, can you really blame U.S. News? Their numbers (outside of SMAC) stink. The Magnet was supposed to "raise up" Blair for Silver Spring, but instead it's just a bad HS overall with an ineffective Magnet. A lot of parents in "W's" are just keeping their kids at their home school and tutoring on the side, so now AEI has egg all over their face for screwing up again. MCPS can try bussing for equity, but we'll see how that works out at the next board election.

That's strange when I look at the SAT average for the largest cohort common to Blair and the W's Blair scores higher.

Blair 1326
Walter Johnson 1275
Wootton 1262
Churchill 1257

https://ww2.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/sharedaccountability/reports/2017/1771102HS%20Princ_SAT%20Partic_Perf%20Class%20of%202017.pdf

Table A.8
The "Blair 1326" SAT score is the average for "White" students at Blair
The average SAT score for "Black or African American" at Blair is 1032
The average SAT score for "Hispanic/Latino" at Blair is 1037
The average SAT score for "Asian" at Blair is 1290
The average SAT score for "2 or more races" at Blair is 1324

Table A.6
The average SAT score for all Blair students who took the test is 1142.

What's interesting to me is that, with a few outliers, scores are pretty static across schools by race. Black kids do about as well at Blair as they do at most of the Ws, except Wootton where they do worse than expected and Whitman where they do very well, which I'm guessing is a function of wealth.

Any school <5% of a demographic group lacks sufficient numbers from which to draw meaningful data

Also, a lot of the URM kids at Whitman are in a different SES class than the majority of URM kids at Blair. That also makes a difference in the test scores.

When the form says less than 5%, they mean The numbers are so low they can't assign a value without identifying individual students. I think both posters are correct.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Every year the W schools boosters cannot wait for the USNews rankings to come out to boast about how their schools rank higher than Blair.
They know they cannot compete and beat Blair on the field...but on paper, oh yeah

Gerrymandering school boundaries to ensure less than 5% FARMS will help inflate standardized test averages when the county average is closer to 40%. This doesn't really mean much but it's the premise these silly rankings are based upon. It's unfortunate the rankings don't better reflect how well a school does with its students rather than the affluence or lack thereof of its constituents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Every year the W schools boosters cannot wait for the USNews rankings to come out to boast about how their schools rank higher than Blair.
They know they cannot compete and beat Blair on the field...but on paper, oh yeah

Blair envy is very strong with that group.

there is no such things as Blair envy from the group you think has envy. If they wanted to send their kids to Blair they could have traded the cheapest starter home zoned for BCC and bought one of the nicest homes in the entire Blair zone. There is no exclusivity to the cheapest area in close in Montgomery County and one of the things that drags blair down is the copious amounts of low income housing zoned for it. People take less home not to go to Blair, the vast majority of people zoned for Blair can't afford nicer areas of the county or were willing to compromise their children's school for a nicer house.

The people with Blair envy are fellow DCC residents with worse options. To be honest most people not in a consortium paid 7 figures specifically not to go to school like Blair. Maybe we have different definitions of envy

Not really You're just misinformed. There are many tigers whose cubs didn't make the cut and suffer from this Blair envy. They typically live in Western Montgomery county in areas like Potomac. They love to complain about changes to the selection process or where the magnet is geographically located. The term sour grapes comes to mind.

Don't the sour grapes make wine?

Love it! Notice how the magnet parents say "Blair" and not "Blair SMACS"?

I don't disagree that Blair SMACs has smart kids, right now. The irony is that the Blair magnet cherry-picked most of the "W" kids to obtain the competition results in the first place. ES and MS magnets are both lottery now. Hopefully the board will be half swapped out this September and the Magnet will return to a competitive admissions process again? My guess is that once the effect of the lottery starts feeding into HS admission decisions (starting with the freshman class of 2023), whatever "Blair envy" remains will evaporate pretty quickly?

SMACS is an island and world unto itself. There's no law that states it has to remain at Blair. It could always be relocated to help alleviate the overcrowding and reduce program costs? Pride comes before the fall.

[Anonymous]

Lol US News had to stay relevant somehow so they used old test score data dating all the way back to school years where some the test takers probably have bachelor’s degrees at this point. These rankings are a joke. So many schools that made such strong leaps in test scores over the last couple of years now have to have lower rankings because of test scores from several years ago (including when Maryland still administered the PARCC exams) are hurting their averages

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lol US News had to stay relevant somehow so they used old test score data dating all the way back to school years where some the test takers probably have bachelor’s degrees at this point. These rankings are a joke. So many schools that made such strong leaps in test scores over the last couple of years now have to have lower rankings because of test scores from several years ago (including when Maryland still administered the PARCC exams) are hurting their averages

+1. This is all about clickbait for their website.