Reply to I'd love to be a fly on the wall during admissions decision meetings

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hi, all, it is 12:02 back again.  I will try to answer the additional questions while reiterating that practices might differ from school to school, and that I am no longer currently working in schools.  In other words, take everything I say with a large grain of salt!

16:24 -- Race and ethnicity does come up in the admissions discussions (I would think this is the case with every school that as part of its mission statement states a commitment to diversity, which I assume applies to pretty much every DC independent school), but it is often at the macro level rather than applicant-specific.  For example, admissions committees will discuss and strategize about outreach efforts (e.g., building relationships with charter schools; working with the Black Student Fund and Latino Student Fund; school visits).  Where it comes up explicitly may be as a discussion of an interesting international background (e.g., student was schooled in Hong Kong), or as part of a discussion of what the school believes that student will be able to contribute to the community.  My sense has also been that over time, the DC independent schools are beginning to go in the same direction as, for example, the Ivy League Schools in college admissions, and put more weight on socio-economic factors than race per se.  So a student coming out of a difficult background with respect to income and prior education will get more of a boost in admissions than a student with all the prior advantages.  Nevertheless, I think for most schools race on its own can still be a factor for groups historically underrepresented in private or collegiate education -- in practice this generally means African-American and Latino students -- but it is less of a factor than it used to be and more part of a larger discussion of socio-economic factors.

17:01 -- For third and fourth grade applicants, yes, there is significant attention paid to the ERB and WISC, as those tests are viewed as starting to be relatively good predictors of academic performance.  There's still a recognition that tests don't capture everything, though, so schools still rely heavily on other material (teacher recommendations and comments and their discussions with the prior school attended by the student).  And there's no question that a child who has an engaging interview can sway things as well.  Hard to really give a good example of what would put a child in the "NO" pile--most often it is a sense that the child is just not academically the right fit (say it appears that the child has great difficulty reading, which will be more and more of an impediment as the grade levels increase).  Sometimes a child makes it very clear in the interview that they do not want to go to the school -- this isn't the end of the discussion, as people realize that we don't generally ask 8 or 9 year olds to make major life decisions for themselves, but if you are trying to decide if a child would be happy at the school it can be seen as significant.[/quote]

NP. I have a question - with some schools become notorious for having an unkind parent community and unkind culture - I am curious why admissions would not know about red flags of certain families before admitting them - especially when their reputation is well known? Did a letter from one vip help get their child admitted - will that supersede what is actually best for the community? Asking because one or two bad apples can really affect a private school class and dynamic. [/quote]

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