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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]The residents of Winnetka and Scarsdale must be pissed that their property taxes pay for high schools that rate so terribly on college readiness.[/quote]

Ugh.  I went to one of those schools.  Greater than 95%+ go to college from those schools.  The US news and world report "college readiness" index looks at the number of AP or IB exams and how many pass them.  Do you think that a student is unready for college if they haven't taken any AP or IB exams?  Unready for MIT or Harvard?  Sure.  Unready for college?  Not so much.  New Trier in particular filters students to keep the standards of the AP classes high so that only kids they think are going to get 4s or 5s on the AP exams take them.

SWW, with its joint program with GW might be ranking less high on the "college readiness" metric in part because kids can take actual college classes instead of as many AP or IB classes, which is kind of ironic.  While it's obvious that the schools on this list are fantastic schools, and generally the higher up, the better the school (no one would argue that Thomas Jefferson, Stuyvesant, etc. are not the best public schools in the country), and how you do on AP and IB exams and how many students take is correlated with rigor, it's not the full story.  What a ridiculous war to be having on a message board.[/quote]

Sorry, but I aim higher. This is my city and our message board.  If you think we should all come from privates our get admitted due to minority status and low SES and then not be able to actually survive, FU.  I went to CUA for a semester before I went to my Ivy, A's vc C and D's.  No offense t0 GE, but SWS ought to be offerine a better education inside.  [/quote]

It is not a war, it is an explanation of what "college readiness" means, which is important because a lot of people here were saying it was only how many kids take APs, not how they do on them.  And I think college readiness, as the PP said, should fairly represent serious colleges.  No offense to CUA, but I had the same experience.  A's there, thought I was college ready and then boom.  Welcome to my Ivy.

And while a lot of Ivies have a summer prep course before you start freshman year for people who didn't come from the best high schools (mostly low SES), for many of us it was not enough.  What really made me sad was to watch the kids who had wanted to be in a science or tech field (engineering majors, mostly, but also Econ and premed) fail the courses that were critical to continuing in their chosen field or do so badly that their odds of getting into a good grad/med school started to sink.  Finally, they did not have the opportunity to withdraw mid semester  like wealthy kids who screwed up to preserve their college grades because they would have had no financial aid the last semester.  Don't know if that has changed.

But DC is not just SWW.  And as someone here as already admitted, DC is a bad joke - even compared to Md and VA if you ignore TJ. Actually, I think it is a disaster for the most part, and the scores on the common core test, like the quality of our high schools, will probably bear that out.

Our tops are SWW, #277, Banneker (which is supposed to be STEM, is selective, and has no relation to a college) #477, college readiness 47%, Duke Ellington #1776 and worse and worse.  It is a really crappy set of schools considering the amount of brain power and education and SES of many of the parents who live in this city, who as far as I can tell sometimes go to Wilson and go Ivy, or are private all the way.  This includes AAs who either can pay for private or who get scholarships.  Or they move.  And this spells out why, in black and white, and it is mostly kids of color who are losing under the present system.

I have yet to see the college admissions from the vocal Banneker supporters on this board, and doubt highly that they (or SWW) would impress, given that Banneker's SAT scores are BELOW the national average.

Suffice it to say, I would be worried for a kid from Banneker or ANY OF OUR DC HIGH SCHOOLS except possibly Wilson who ended up at an Ivy. I'm sure some do, whether they send one every year we may never know, but low SES gets you a lot of points but our schools clearly don't, in general, prepare people for an Ivy or maybe most colleges.  Remember, we all get financial credit because all we have here is UDC if we go to a state school elsewhere...

All I am saying is I am really starting to get why people who want a good education for their kids leave DC if they are not zoned for Wilson.  And I think that is pathetic, and I hope by the time all these parents who are scrambling to get their kids into PS3 etc in "good" charters have better alternatives later on. They clearly care about their kids education.  In fact, what is really clear from this board is how many parents really really care.  That was probably true precharter and while one can hope that the charters change the quality of DC high school options, I don't understand why we don't have decent ones now for those who are going into high school NOW.

I used to laugh about UDC but I am not laughing any more.  The level of dysfunction is not funny anymore.  DC should be embarrassed.  Where are all the kids with the good DCCAS scores (take the raw number of the kids who scored advanced) going to go?  And wherever they go, are they going to be college ready?

Most colleges try to take students from each state from public and private schools. Do they make an exception for DC?  I did not grow up here.[/quote]

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