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[quote=Anonymous]Hey Sam,

This is Mike from Lotus Prep - a parent just sent me the link to this thread. I'm a bit surprised by your message here. I asked you before publishing last November if we could include some of your data in a research paper and on a website, and you said yes. You said, "I'm here for the data, not the glory. Indeed, I'd prefer to remain anonymous!" I wrote back:

"Are you sure? I'm going to publish a smaller part of my analysis, a ranking of schools, on a commercial website. Right now I have you credited as a data source in my second and final paragraphs as 'education researcher Sam Tuo.' Do you want me to remove that? Thanks for your work, by the way - it's fantastic and deserves a wider audience."

You told me again you were not interested in any credit, but let me know if you'd like credit on the site now.

As I told you last year, your work is excellent, and you've done a real service for DC families. We updated a substantial portion of your statistics and added our own, mostly after talking to administrators and teachers.

BTW, happy to share the new info we found if you'd like to update your Google spreadsheet.

----

Also, thanks to the people who have pointed out the very few typographical errors in the report; we'll update those shortly. We only published numbers for which we had a real, documentary source. If anyone sees an incorrect number, and can point to a real, documentary source showing it's wrong, please send that over and we'll correct that number. Please don't write anonymously about hearing something else fifth-hand. :)

That said, I think it's ridiculous that this resource even needs to exist at all. Private schools should be forced to reveal this information.

The contrast:

For the public schools, information was available publicly. Administrators from the public schools in a few cases even sent us reports from the College Board that were more up-to-date than what was publicly available.

For the private schools, the research process was more like Bob Woodward's parking garage meetings with Deep Throat. To their credit, Maret and a few other schools publish this information publicly. Most do not. We had to obtain statistics from Sam, from private meetings with parents and teachers and administrators, from obscure out-of-print books, and from reports the private schools had accidentally published in public (this was how we verified the figures for NCS). For some schools, we could find no information.

Private high schools have managed to effect an astonishing change in the psychosocial dynamic. It has become taboo to discuss any objective measure of academic performance. In the extreme version of the anti-numbers argument, parents and children are told to choose a school solely on the basis of how the school makes them "feel." Detest the data; trust the glossy brochure, the fancy website, the slick administrator. (Do we act so irrationally when we buy a car or a house?) If we believe that private schools are mere country clubs, that they do nothing to educate our children, that's appropriate. In that case, they're 4-year, $160,000 babysitting services that do nothing for the mind and happen to send "graduates" to fancy colleges afterward.

I don't believe that. I think there are real performance differences between schools. It's hard to measure those differences, but average SAT score and NMSF proportions are excellent proxy measures for a student body's academic preparedness. Some people stick their fingers in their ears when they hear this, but the correlation between SAT score and first-year college grades is obscenely high, even after adjusting for socioeconomic variables. The only reasonable counterargument is that average SAT may not be entirely a school performance measure. It may instead be that a school is selecting students with off-the-charts fluid intelligence who would get a 1600 even if they were locked in a dark closet for 4 years. Maybe. Either way, I'd rather know the numbers than not know.

In the end, just as no one is choosing a car solely on the basis of horsepower, no one is selecting a school *solely* on the basis of average SAT.

These numbers are useful information to consider alongside the fancy school tour and brochure, alongside the conversations with counselors, alongside the conversations with parents.

As long as the private high schools in the area are publishing glossy brochures, I'll be publishing the honest numbers, wherever they can be found.

-Mike

[quote=Anonymous]FWIW, I think that LotusPrep site pulled my data sets from the DCUM FAQ.  I don't have any connection to LotusPrep and don't know anything about them.  As I've explained in many threads, I think the data is useful but needs to be used with caution and context.  HTH

Sam2[/quote][/quote]

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