Reply to Which K-8 has the best high school placement?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The objective of a K-12 school isn't to create the smartest cohort of 9th graders possible.  They're building a community.  
They can hit their "academic"/SAT/college admissions goals by having 80% or 90% (or whatever) of academically focused, driven kids.  The final 10-20% can be filled with less academically qualified kids who are admitted for other reasons.  The schools expect this and function just fine with it.  Maybe these kids are siblings.  It isn't Thomas Jefferson where every last kid is driven.  So Sidwell has an average SAT of 1450 and Thomas Jefferson's is 1530. Big deal. But for this tradeoff Sidwell is able to pay their teachers ($$) and make the experience more enjoyable for their students (good athletes for competitive teams).  Their academic identify and mission continues unscathed.[/quote]
So true and good for parents who are considering k8s to know ahead of time, if a school like Sidwell is appealing to them. But this really isn’t answering the original question as to which k8s have the best outcomes for all their students. [/quote]

I mean, the original question was answered at the beginning of the thread.  The schools with relatively established pipelines - Sheridan, St. Patricks, Norwood, Lowell, WES, Langley, etc. are all fairly similar and the individual characteristics of the kid/family matter more.  And to the extent there are differences among the schools it reflects the cohort of kids more than anything.  Sheridan is strong at GDS because a lot of kids and families who would be good fits for GDS go to Sheridan.  If you put the same kid at Langley the results aren’t likely to be wildly different.  There are some school relationship effects, but in most cases they are drowned out by other factors.  And individual characteristics of a class at a school can matter if there are like a lot of GDS siblings if your class.  This kind of issue is probably somewhat more likely at the bigger K8s but can happen anywhere.  So there is no one best “feeder” K8 that you can rely on.  It just depends on factors you aren’t going to know until the end.  So if you are a family who doesn’t have strong ex ante preferences of future upper schools, K8 is likely to work for you.  And if at the end you are like I think single-sex is best for my smart and sporty boy who plays sportball whatever, so sporty school X is my first choice, the school is likely going to help you achieve that because that is a doable admission they can sell  sporty school X. But if you are like my kid is smart with good grades and SSAT scores and my first choice is Big 3 school X, Langley isn’t going to necessarily help you hit that first choice. There are a lot of smart kids applying for those spots with good grades and scores. For that kid you are way better off applying early to Big X because admission is probably somewhat easier in the lower schools.  [/quote]

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