Reply to PG school options?

Forum Index » MD Public Schools other than MCPS

Reply to "PG school options?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I am relatively new to the boards and I wish there was more activity related to PG. I am having a difficult time navigating the perception from the actual performance of the neighborhood schools close to me. (I was the one who asked about Yorktown and Rockledge)[/quote]

Do you live in Bowie?  I do, and I think the perception/reality thing is key.  I walk my neighborhood and the two surrounding me frequently, am always talking with neighbors, et cetera, and most of the people are nice, intelligent, perfectly normal middle class people.  And there are lots of kids, and they go to, gasp, public school.  So I really find it hard to believe that the surrounding schools are that horrible.

I've done some research on Great Schools and even by visiting school websites.  I haven't seen anything that makes me think the schools are as doom and gloom as they say.

Test scores reflected on those sites are averages.   I think that the test score situation feeds itself.  A school gets good scores, so a lot of ambitious, motivated students/parents move to the area to attend that school.  Those students then get good scores, and the cycle continues.  The school attracts a disproportionate number of students who would probably score high even if they attended a different school.

The reverse is that a school has average scores (let's say a great schools rating of 6).  Well, students/parents who are highly motivated and ambitious (college bound) freak out and get scared off, so they avoid those schools by either moving away or going to private schools.  So the average school tends to lose a lot of the top students in the area.  (I'm not suggesting the other students there are horrible, but if the top students leave, the scores will reflect it.)

I'm not entirely convinced that the highly motivated students would necessarily have had lower scores if they attended the school with the average rating because I haven't seen any evidence that the teachers at those schools are any worse than at schools in other counties.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics