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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here.

Quick reply as I'm heading out the door.

To the previous poster: in a word, no. You're misunderstanding the stag hunt. Coordination is needed for Hardy, not for the privates.

But anyway, we're not talking about the 1% here. The highest income neighborhood (with sufficient people) is probably Spring Valley (or WH or Foxhall). The median household income here is about 300k. When talking about the "top 1%," realize the numbers you're actually saying. The top 3% starts at 310k and the top 2% starts at 330k (if I recall correctly).

There's plenty of income and wealth feeding into Hardy. This makes private school attainable for many families, but it remains the case that private school tuition (let alone for multiple kids) is not affordable for even more families.

The previous poster (with the long post) makes several misstatements and, frankly, I doubt whether he/she has actually read this thread. I will not offer a detailed retort.

As someone else pointed out, the wealthiest families are in-bounds for Mann, not Key. Honestly, this isn't really even close and people from these areas would surely know it.

I don't think the recession was that large of a deal in these neighborhoods, so I'm hesitant to ascribe much meaning to it. Incomes remained fairly stable, housing prices didn't decline, and retirement accounts cratered. I imagine -- and this is purely conjecture -- that people sending their kids to private finance this from income, not savings. Anyone with a sufficiently long horizon before retirement (say, greater than 7 years) could be very confident their retirement accounts would recover.

I think a bigger issue is the international institutions. The IMF still pays 75% of private school tuitions (up to a generous cap). But they're the main outlier. World Bankers starting after 1998 (or 1996, I forget) no longer get this education benefit. The last of these people probably have kids near Hardy-age right now. That means that there is about to be a much larger pool of potential public school kids looking at middle school. (The IADB pays up to 12k a year, so I don't view this as enough for the top privates.)

Anyway, I'll try to check in periodically when killing time. [/quote]

Housing prices DID decline, even in Spring Valley.  Many people ascribe the Deal renaissance to the stock market crash.  What say you to that?  They did coincide timing wise, and once it started it became a force of nature.  In fact, word at some of the middling privates who hiked their tuition back in the good old days when everyone would NEVER send their kids to Deal and Wilson is that they are really truly suffering.  All it took was a critical mass there.

I did in fact read your entire thread.  Sorry I was wrong that the wealth is concentrated in Mann not Key, and we are in fact at Mann so that makes sense.  People there still mostly go private - always have, always will.  I think to a large degree you are right that we are recession proof in a way that the Janney Deal folks were not, between the subsidized international tuitions and parents paying tuitions for tax reasons.

But what you are forgetting is the effect that economic uncertainty can have on a herd.  If it pushes them all to Deal, Deal becomes an "in" school.  We were here, we saw it.  People stopped going private after Janney, and they all decided to do it at once.  They talked together at church and at coctail parties and those with older children talked to those with younger children and Melissa Kim was there.  It was quite incredible and it was revolutionary. And then they all decided to go to Wilson, and Wilson made room for them.  The academies no longer existed, but Honor classes do, the same way they are creating them at Hardy.  And now that some of the other schools have been rezoned for Hardy who knows.

But one thing these people are spot on about is although you tried, because your sample size is so small, you had to use proficient and proficient is not a measure any of us respect.  And neither is improvement.  If you look at the Janney kids, look at how many of them are scoring advanced before they set foot into Deal.  THAT is the real issue.  THAT is the real problem.

And then take a look at Mann.  Even if we came to Hardy, we would not necessarily help you with advanced - many are ELL.  And to be honest, some of the Mann kids are not that smart.  But they already have an in due to sibling preference, and because they are international many go to WIS for the IB program because they will not necessarily be here - we always have people moving in and out of Mann, back to their home countries.  And people go to Mann to get into private school.  Mann is just a creature unto itself.  It is very much like a private school.

Hardy needs kids who COME prepared, not just kids who they need to prepare while they are there...... kids who need to move from proficient to advanced.  That is why many kids at Deal don't move I wager - they stay advanced.

It will be very interesting to see what the PARCC does to all of this.

PS I don't think you have the time, but someone said that back in the early 2000 (before our time here) Hardy used to be a neighborhood school.  I find that hard to believe, but it would be interesting to find out........[/quote]

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