Reply to By the numbers: A dispassioned evaluation of Hardy (compared to Deal and Wilson)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Notwithstanding that I fully believe that my kid will do well anywhere, why on earth would I send my kid to the lower performing school, if I had a choice?

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The implication of the above is that there are costs to attending such a school for a high SES student (or a white high SES student) that have nothing to do with the student't test scores.   One is that there are academic negatives not covered by the tests.  More likely is that there are social unpleasantnesses apart from academics. "My kid aced the scores, and eventually went to Dartmouth, where he regaled his classmates with tales of how he was beaten up every day at DCPS"

To the extent that those other costs are relatively minor (not like in the hypothetical quote above) the reason to send the kid to this school is that a family does not want to move, and does not want to spend the money on private school.                         [/quote]

Is this OP? Again I appreciate your thoughtfulness, or whoever you are.

I agree but... the point is that it is very easy for many families to avoid such a school. You can rent your place out and live IB for Deal for a few years, then move back, you can sell and in most cases get something really nice in the burbs (IB Hardy real estate is pricey), and for a smaller number of families, private is affordable, especially if it's just for MS and maybe HS. Those years typically correspond with peak or near-peak earnings for parents. It's the early years when parents are most likely to struggle to pay. Bottom line, there are numerous people who have avoided Hardy without great hardship, and without being Rockefellers either.

As for the costs, public schools with great demographics create networks of former classmates who are later successful in their business and professional ventures. Sure, if you attend InnerCity Middle and High School, you probably will still be successful, but you will not have this long-standing network, deep friendships that go back to the playground before any of you had any money or any clue. To me, these social aspects are important. As an economist surely you've seen research on the value of such networks. Plus the benefit of the parent networks, not even considering the kids!

But even if you don't care about that, perhaps because you believe you and your kid can develop networks elsewhere, there is still a lot to academics beyond the test scores. Revisit your data. You see that "90 percent" DCCAS for a school does not mean that this is the average percentage score on the exam. It means this is the percentage of students who are proficient or advanced. But this (proficient) is a very, very low bar! Chosen because let's face it, DC is coming from a long way down. But for me, academics go way beyond these standardized tests. Even among schools boasting 90 plus, there can be big variations in the level of academic rigor and enrichment. And this in turn will mostly be a function of average levels of performance. It is all very well to focus on the "white" scores for your kids, but DCPS central office and the school admins will have a more divided focus, if your school is not uniformly high achieving.

BTW all of this applies equally to Wilson as it does to Hardy, there I agree with OP completely.

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