Reply to If your child started at public, how did your child do academically in private middle and/or high?

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "If your child started at public, how did your child do academically in private middle and/or high?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]PP, your hypothesis got me curious. According to the Dept of Education, there are 10x as many public school students as private school students.  So assuming each school type is just as likely to produce Intel finalists, there should be a 10:1 ratio of public:private. And your theory suggests the ratio should skew even more toward public school students -- 15:1 maybe?

But when I check the Intel finalist list, it's actually only about 4:1, which suggests private school students are outperforming public school students pretty significantly.

How does that make sense under your hypothesis?

Also, FWIW, the Intel finalists seem a much more mixed bag than you suggest, with very few schools proximate to the major research facilities.

Your hypo is a nice story, but I am skeptical of it standing up to empirical scrutiny. [/quote]

I hadn't looked at the data in a couple of years

For the most recent list, I count 44 from privates (out of 300) and 64 from science-focused public magnets.  I suppose privates do slightly better than their representation in the overall population, but given the ability of private schools to weed out students who aren't satisfactory and their ability to cream students off of the top, wouldn't we expect them to to better than merely hold their own?
  
Interestingly, the privates on the list tend to be places like Bellarmine and Harker in the Silicon Valley, a place that has a tech focus.  The lawyers' kids at DC privates and the investment bankers' kids at the New York Day Schools are few and far between, although the DC area and Long Island are well-represented by public schools.

All those kids from Great Neck on the list are quite near Cold Spring Harbor.  The kids from Montgomery Blair are close to NIH.  Perhaps, however, this is a function of research labs co-locating with large metropolitan areas that have affluent suburbs, and I would really need to do more careful measurement to support this hypothesis.

[/quote]

I doubt the data is available, but the relevant comparison would be private school kids who take HS science classes to public school kids who take college track science classes.  I think we are all aware of the fact that many HS students barely graduate high school and in fact an alarming percentage across the county do not ... to include these marginal students in your 10:1 ratio analysis is just silly when looking at winners of science contests.

But truly ... this entire thread, as a PP noted, is completely useless unless you were seeking the answer "it depends" ...[/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