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Forbes top prep schools
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Anonymous
I think you differentiate the NYC and DC schools too much as to selecting for connection/status vs. tests/performance. |
MatriculationStats
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Maybe that has been my diabolical plot all along! As a foreign terrorist, I'm here to distract the Washington elite from the task of governing the country by forcing them to focus on what kindergarten their beloved offspring attend. Once you all are sufficiently bamboozled into thinking that "The Big Three" consists of three one-room school houses located in rural West Virginia, my legions of loyal followers will strike just as the lunch bell rings simultaneously at the schools you obsess over. In all seriousness, exactly the same sorts of conversations occur on NYC message boards. "School X would have been rated higher, but because of its progressive nature..." "School Y was just having an off year." And then the same accusations that you note, using almost the exact same lingo, start to fly. That's fine. I can live with it. I've just compiled a few possibly meaningful statistics (assuming they're interpreted correctly) for your reading pleasure. |
Anonymous
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This is terribly rude and funny In the end, the DC "top" schools are selecting primarily on connections/DC social status, and only secondarily on IQ/performance. The NYC top privates on the list rarely touch kids under the 95% percentile, even for kindergarten, and thus they deliver superior results on scales like Forbes'. LOL - You really think NYC admissions is all about the test scores and that connections only play a small role? You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. Connections play a huge role in admissions for K in NYC. Since you don't seem to have any personal experience with the process you should check out some of the NYC message boards. You might learn something. |
Anonymous
| Can't wait to read a good NYC message board! What is the DCUM equivalent? |
Anonymous
check out the NY Schools board on urbanbaby.com. It can get pretty nasty over there. There is also youbemom.com. |
MatriculationStats
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http://www.urbanbaby.com, if you go to Talk and filter down to NYC Schools. I do have to agree with the above comment about K admissions in NYC. There's an awful lot of "who you know", "how much you have", and "who you are" that goes on. The obvious observation is that the older the childer gets, the greater the effect of the child's own qualities on any school admissions decision and the less the effect of the parent's qualities. Think about it. For N, it's almost all about the parents. For K, the child's qualities start to play a role. For middle school, the child's test scores and interviews are taken more seriously. For HS, even more so. For college, it's mostly about the child. Sure, even as late as college, there are some cases in which who the parent is will be the determining factor (what college will possibly turn down Sasha or Malia in a few years?), but for the vast majority, it's about the child. The degree to which a decision at any given age depends on the child or the parent of course varies from case to case, but doesn't that trend seem clear? |
Anonymous
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Clintons daughter did not get a rhodes scholarship, even though it was news that her dad had one. A lone child of priveledge among the best scholars of all time!!!
Politics can change. I wonder how Obamas daughters will feel mingling in college with the best of the best, when everyone thinks their daddys name was all it took to get in |
Anonymous
There's a big difference between getting a Rhodes scholarship and getting into Stanford. How about the Bush daughter that went to Yale (the other went to Texas)? I don't know what her academic record was like, but I doubt she felt any guilt about it. |
Anonymous
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I'm the poster who said NYC top schools wouldn't touch kids under the 95%, even for K. I understand the push-back from other posters, but as a NYC-DC transplant whose kids have been in both (private school) systems (and who has friends in administration or admissions in both systems), I actually find the differences between the two pretty interesting.
I don't dispute that who the parents are/what they have can play a role in NYC - but primarily by helping the (top) schools choose among kids in the 95%+. There are many, many more 95%+ kids applying than they have space for. Yes, if you are on the board or best buddies with the admissions officer, your 90% kid has a good shot (obviously). But probably not a 80% kid or a 75% one. (Again, I speak here, in generalizations, of the top NYC schools. There are lots of well known NYC privates that don't have stellar academics). Contrast that with the DC privates. In the reputed DC top 3 elementary schools - GDS, Beauvoir, Sidwelll- there are a pretty healthy proportion of kids who are not scoring anywhere near 95%. They are top socially, but aim to serve a broad range of abilities among "famous for DC" children. This obviously changes over time, as college admissions creeps closer, so that 9th grade admissions is more merit based. A Sidwell administrator came out and said this (albeit in passing) in a meeting I once attended: the expectation in the admissions office was that the children admitted in 9th grade would on average outperform the ones admitted in kindergarten, and they were assembling data on merit scholars, etc. to determine whether that was true. I do think that this is a philosophical difference in elementary admissions between the "top" NYC and DC privates. And I would argue that one consequence of that is that the DC top privates don't do as well in college admissions in the end as the NYC top privates, because they are serving a broader range of children from day 1. |
Anonymous
| Many of the 95%+ scorers in NYC that you refer to are "fake" in the sense that they are the result of intense tutoring. |
Anonymous
| Sorry, but the booster of NYC prep schools is posting so much hogwash I can't even begin to point out the problems with her analysis. It would take me too long. |
Anonymous
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07:31 - Good point, well taken.
09:10 - I don't mean to be a booster of the NYC schools. That the two systems seem to me different doesn't necessarily make one better than the other. Actually would be really interested to hear what is wrong with my point of view, or data that contradicts it. I don't have any interest in pursuing a false or inaccurate line of argument. |
SAM2
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I like the reasonable sound of your post, so I'll bite. I personally think you're right that the NYC elementary school system generally insists on higher admissions test scores than DC. My understanding is that the many public gifted/talented schools in NYC now use something like 98-99% as the cut-off for admission consideration, so I suspect that many of the very top private schools can insist on the same numbers. I don't know if that reflects a difference in philosophy from DC, or just a much bigger pool of applicants that allows certain top schools to insist on only very top scores (sort of like a more extreme market segmentation than in DC). I think PP is also right that (for right or wrong) test prep is much more commonplace in NYC. Looking at the Forbes list got me curious, so I started plugging some numbers for these other NYC/boarding schools into my working spreadsheet (http://fwd4.me/Jes). The results are very sketchy so far because of minimal data, but very interesting nevertheless. I don't use the same methodology as Forbes (Ivy+MIT+Stanford), so my percentages are different. But relative to one another, it does seem that many of the very top NYC/boarding schools have a higher percentage than most local DC privates. The percentage difference is not huge -- only a few % points -- but it's clearly a difference. A legacy factor may account for some of that difference, and geography for some more, but it's clear the NYC/boarding schools have very strong track records at getting seniors into top colleges. This is particularly interesting because the (very limited) data I've seen so far suggests that the NYC/boarding students scores on various academic measures (Presidential Scholar, SATs, NMSFs) are not so uniformly better than the DC scores. I don't have a clear working hypothesis yet to explain the disparity between college and academic numbers for NYC/boarding schools. It's interesting stuff. |
Anonymous
ITA. As a native NYer who graduated from a NYC private and whose DC have attended privates in both cities I would say that she has blinders on when it comes to NYC admissions. There really aren't many major differences between the two. The process is similar, the pool of applicants is similar and the outcomes are similar. In both cities you will end up with K classes full of connected DC and then you will have a smaller number of unconnected kids who get the remaing spots and you will have unconnected kids (95+) who are shut out. The reality in ny is that there are very few spots available at most schools after all of the sibs, legacies and other connected kids are taken into account. Admissions officers will be very honest about these numbers if asked. I don't know why that poster seems to think that all if the connected kids in dc are in the 70/80% and all of the connected kids in ny are above the 95%. Anyone who had personal experience with the process would know that this is absolutely untrue. Living in NYC you would know connected families with kids in the 80s who are admitted to all of the schools including those considered TT. You would also know kids with behavioral problem who are also admitted and you would hear similar stories from friends. To believe that all connected kids in NYC score 95+ is really extremely naive. As for 9th grade admissions you will hear the same comments in NYC. Most people understand that those kids tend to be superstars. By that age kids have a proven track record and the schools are really looking ahead to college exmissions. It becomes less about the family and more about the kids. That's not to say that connections won't help you, but they do play less of a role. The process of counseling out is also very similar in both cities. There are schools that are considered more nurturing and those that are considered pressure cookers. At those pressure cookers the kids who can't keep up tend to be counseled out by the end middle school. That also helps the schools college numbers. |
Anonymous
If you love NY so much, then go ahead and move back there. Trust me, no one in D.C. will miss you and your boring, long-winded drivel.
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