Reply to Woodson, Lake Braddock, West Springfield experiences

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Our DS (currently in college) graduated from WSHS and we never had the sense of it being a very high pressure environment. If a student felt high pressure it would have come from the household, not the school itself.[/quote]

The same is true at every FCPS high school.  The label "pressure cooker" only gets bandied about by parents at some schools - especially West Springfield, Robinson, and Lake Braddock - to take a shot at schools in wealthier areas and suggest their own schools are the "happy medium."  [/quote]

I think the pressure cooker concept comes more from the idea that selective colleges--including in-state publics--consider students within the context of their school for admissions.  Wealthier schools tend to have students whose families can invest in their development--they get tutoring when they are getting a B rather than when they are failing, high quality test preparation, outside college counselors etc. to keep up their academic performance and have more robust extracurriculars throughout the lifespan (e.g. played on travel leagues as kids, private music lessons in elementary) that make them more likely to be high achieving in high school.  It's not that the high school is the pressure cooker, but the student body you will be compared to is more likely to be.[/quote]

If everything was based on maximizing the odds of getting into UVA or VT, these same families would be looking at Edison, Hayfield, or Lewis to avoid the competition that exists at West Springfield, Robinson, and Lake Braddock.

But it isn't, and they don't.  Instead, they live in the West Springfield/Burke area, take pot shots at wealthier schools as "pressure cookers," and put down poorer schools as gang-ridden or too violent.  It's very much about suggesting that the porridge is just the right temperature at their schools, and too hot/too cold elsewhere, and little else.  It's how the DCUM game is played.  [/quote]

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