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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It's not that anyone is cheering for mediocrity.  It's that when looking at a school, it's obvious that a school with 33% FARMS kids is going to have lower scores than a school with 2% FARMS kids.  That's a no-brainer.  Yes, ON the whole (when you average ALL the scores of the students), students at Langley score higher than students at Fairfax HS.

But, you have to compare similar groups to similar groups so that your not just skewing the averages based on economics.  That's what you want right?  The question was whether the TEACHING at Fairfax was good... Not just whether the students at Fairfax have high household incomes and are native English speakers.

If you control for those variables (loosely using race to identify students with higher household income and native speakers), you see that there are many schools, including Fairfax HS, that have comparably high SAT scores.  That is the "apples to apples" comparison you should be making if you want to know whether the teaching at different schools is better/worse.  [/quote]

I'd suggest that it's even a bit more subtle than this.  The schools don't really undertake to prepare students for the SATs, which in theory are designed to measure aptitude, rather than achievement.  Lots of kids in this area take classes outside of school to prepare for the SATs.  Instead, as a practical matter, SAT scores become a proxy for what does matter to many parents, which is whether their kids will be surrounded by high-achieving peers.

The people who focus on the overall averages tend to believe that their (presumably brilliant) kids will suffer if they attend school with other students who are less motivated or come from more challenged backgrounds.  The people who break down the scores into demographic sub-groups often do so because it reinforces their belief that their kids will find a sufficient cohort of motivated peers at a particular school to succeed.   Because most whites in FCPS come from middle or upper-income families, the performance of white students often becomes the default measure of how a typical kid who has parental support and doesn't have to work three jobs after school will fare.  [/quote]

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