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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]SWW has better academics than Wilson.

SWW also has better college admissions than Wilson per capita (Wilson is four times bigger than SWW).

Everybody knows that, and that’s why send our kids to SWW.

Want proof?  Here you go:

USN&W ranks SWW #2 in the DC area, right beyond TJ (which some consider the best high school in the country; TJ has far better college admissions than any other high school in the area, including Top 3 privates).

Wilson ranks #73.

[url]https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/district-of-columbia/rankings/washington-dc-47900[/url]
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Truly the dumbest post I've ever seen.

Walls has a self-selected group of kids, combined with a screening from DCPS.  Wilson has none of those things and is more reflective of a larger swath of kids in DC.  Those rankings are based on academic performance...if you only looked at the academic performance of the subset of Wilson students who looked like Walls kids, I'm guessing their academic achievement would be similar.

It's like if you ranked how good a hospital based on mortality rates...low and behold, the hospitals serving the healthiest populations would rank highest but it would not necessarily reflect the quality of care.[/quote]

Not PP but this is really the most idiotic response to a post I have seen on DCUM.  Are you a Wilson parent?

Previous posters suggested that Wilson and Walls were equally good or Wilson was better, and parents just picked one or the other because of “fit.”  In response, PP pointed out that Walls has better academics, better college placement, and a much higher ranking.  Your response is that Walls attracts a higher caliber of student.  That means you AGREE with PP.

And then you make an analogy to hospitals.  Why don’t we run with that analogy.  Let’s say you have a terrible disease.  Would you choose a hospital with better doctors, better treatment, and a higher ranking than one with worse doctors, worse treatment, and a lower ranking?  I suspect that you might pick the first one.
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You don't understand the PP's point at all...they were pointing out the idiocy of how USNews determines the rankings...if you look at how they do it (which I just did) they use measures like % of kids who graduate and scores on assessment tests...OF COURSE Walls does better on those because they screen out a bunch of kids based on GPA or their test or whatever they do during the admissions process...but that does not mean it's a better-than-average school (maybe yes, maybe no)...it just serves a smarter-than-average population.  Imagine two schools:

School A is a magnet school that screens for "above average" kids and screens out any kid with a learning disability (i.e., all the kids would graduate from almost any high school and would perform better than average on assessment tests).

School B is a general public school that reflects a wide range of kids from all backgrounds, of all abilities, with no screening.  It reflects the population as a whole.

Suppose school A's graduation rate is 100% and 90% of kids score above average on some achievement test.  Is that surprising? Does it tell you anything about the quality of the school?  Not really. We knew those kids were going to graduate and score above average on tests--they were screened before they started at that school and unless the school really messed up, this was going to be the case. Now, suppose school B's graduation rate is 95% and 85% of kids score above average on the test. Wow! That seems pretty great given the high school graduation rate is something like 70 percent and we'd only expect 50% to score above average. The school must be doing something really well. But US News would rank school A higher than school B because there is no adjustment for student population.

And the hospital analogy is a great one--[i]the ranking would only be meaningful if the metrics used to determine the ranking were good[/i].  If, as you suggest, a ranking is based on some sort of measures of "good doctors" and "better treatment", than it might be useful.  If, on the other hand, they used what the PP suggested--mortality rates--high rankings might not reflect anything other than serving low-risk (i.e., relatively healthy) patients.

So, if the US News ranked high schools based on the "quality of the teachers" or "improvements in student achievement" then the rankings might be meaningful.  But they don't. Simply using the levels of things like test scores and graduation rates is meaningless if you don't control for the student population.

Dig a little deeper and think more critically before relying on these rankings...there may be some that are useful, but this one is B.S.

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