Reply to Bullis, Sidwell, Landon, Maret, Georgetown Day, Potomac ... does this ranking make sense?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Bullis is a wonderful school that prepares students well for college and life success.  Please don't suggest that the number of Ivy admits is any measure of a school's abilty to nurture students to meet their potential. What St. Alban's, like most schools, doesn't tell you is - how many of the Ivy admits are legacies.

Our job as parents is to figure out which school will help our children reflect their true academic potential, identify passions and develop into responsible and caring community members.  The right answer is different for every family and child.  
[/quote]

I don't think you can have it both ways.  You argue that Ivy admissions is not a measure of a school's ability to nurture potential -- okay, I'd agree with that.  Then you basically suggest that the only reason STA has 10x as many Ivy admits as Bullis is that they are all legacies, which is absurd.  By way of comparing using another metric, check out the chart comparing the percentage of National Merit Semifinalists at the area schools:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnukIDABt_JKdDdZYXlQbnFUQ0VfMHRpTFp1SUIxS2c&hl=en_US#gid=5

STA has 14.5% over the aggregated years in the survey, Bullis 0%.  For 2011, the Washington Examiner published a list of NMSFs for the area public and privates: STA had 11, Bullis had zero.  http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/2011/09/areas-national-merit-semifinalists/118321.  In 2010, STA had at least 11 NMSFs (they finished with 11 Finalists -- see http://www.stalbansschool.org/page.aspx?pid=1762).  So, in the past two years, STA has had 22 National Merit Semifinalists, compared to two for Bullis.  I would argue that this blows the "STA boys only get into Ivies because they are legacies" argument out of the water -- clearly they are scoring big on standardized tests, which are big factors in college admissions.

Again, this is not to denigrate Bullis or the quality of the teaching or its "fit" for any particular child.  But to suggest that the academic cohort is the same as between Bullis or STA/Sidwell/NCS/GDS etc. just doesn't make sense.[/quote]

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