Reply to Does anyone here actually send their kid to Hayfield/Edison/West Potomac/5 or lower GS high schools?

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Reply to "Does anyone here actually send their kid to Hayfield/Edison/West Potomac/5 or lower GS high schools?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I moved my family to a GS 8 school and absolutely crossed off all the GS 5 and lower schools. The decision wasn't completely rational and is the result of my own experience at bad schools. I came out of these cesspit schools with not even the option of AP/IB or a language other than French/Spanish but I could probably naturally survive a prison sentence if it came to that. My mind just can't accept that the lower rated schools around here are large enough to actually have decent programs where any motivated child can succeed.[/quote]

OP here. I agree with the first part of this post. I went to a GS 4 with no AP's and have no desire to put my kid through that particular sort of ringer socially. On the second part of this post though, the lower rated schools do have a s*load of programs. Hayfield for example has a ton of AP's, offer multivariable calculus, Japanese and Arabic. You really do get a ton of resources just by virtue of being in FCPS.[/quote]

It's great to have the options, but then you need to look at the actual results.  If you compare Hayfield to Lake Braddock, the AP participation rate is about 8% lower, and the pass rate for the smaller percentage of students taking AP classes is 15% lower.  Which school do you really think has the stronger peer group?[/quote]

Not op, but how many kids does your child need to be successful? If they don't have at least 200 super competive, academically motivated and gifted kids, is your kid going to be a total failure? 
Maybe so. Maybe your kid really needs as much pressure as possible, or they won't perform. I somehow doubt it, but maybe your kid is just super jonesing for a real scholastic pressure cooker. 
Maybe they will only take ( gasp) 6 AP classes instead of 8! The horror!
Long story short, you are pointing out differences without much distinction. UVA takes roughly 25% of the top applicants of all nova high schools. So what if there are 30 top applicants from Hayfield and 100 for LBSS? Your kid's odds fair about the same. Of course they might have a less stressful high school experience at a school like Hayfield.
[/quote]

Passing an AP or IB exam after you took the course doesn't mean you are "super competitive." It does suggest that you belonged in the course and that the other kids didn't have to sit through a watered-down version of the material.

The claim that UVA takes a set percentage of each high school's class, by the way, is regularly asserted and never substantiated here.

[/quote]

Dude. You can take the time looking it up. I've done it in Arlington. It's the same percentage. Wakefield gets a small number in, but it's about 25% of applicants. Same percentage as Yorktown. Feel free to do the same for FFX. 
I know you really don't want that to be true, but it's a fact of life. 
Sometimes it doesn't really make a difference where you go to school in FFX. 
And fwiw- I went to one of the top HS's mentioned here. It was great, but I don't believe a kid at Hayfield is getting lesser education, and I'd have no problem sending my kid there.[/quote]

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