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[quote=Anonymous][quote=SAM2]Just to follow up, the false argument that riled me up was the claim that " there just aren't that many super-high achievers academically-speaking" is private schools. That's just wrong -- there are lots of them.[/quote]

No, it's not wrong.  Arguably it's a matter of opinion or interpretation (e.g what's  super-high achievement, what's many), but *most* local private schools don't have more than one or two such kids per year  (if that) and even in their best years, I don't think any of the "Big 3" ever get out of the teens (except maybe combining NCS/StA) based on a measurement like NMSF.  That's a handful of kids.  And even when a local private has a "high" percentage of super-high achievers, that percentage is still a small percentage of the class (e.g. 15 vs. 85).

Sure, super-high achievers, by definition, are a small group.  But the discourse here suggests that they're all at privates and privates are full of them.  Not so.  Only a small percentage of the kids in privates are knocking the ball out of the park on standardized tests.  And if you're looking for a concentration of such kids locally, your best hope is TJ or maybe Blair.

This is simple sociology/demography -- the overlap of two tails of different bell curves (extreme wealth and extreme intelligence) is typically going to be miniscule (unless you imagine a society where wealth is based on IQ and is not inheritable).  None of it is about which school (or type of school) is the best.  Super-high achieving kids are outliers -- so, if the percentiles tell you anything, they're more likely to tell you which schools attract (rather than produce) them.   And that's not what makes a school great.

In general, I'm skeptical of the whole "best" school notion -- it's a "for whom?" decision (and the answers can vary dramatically because of that) and it's a realm-of-the-possible decision.  But if you could somehow eliminate those issues, what I'd want to compare is the difference betwween what kids come in with and what they go out with.  Not sure how you measure that.  But I know it wouldn't be a matter of counting how many kids at each school got top standardized test scores.  
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