Reply to Alexandria city vs. FCPS Alexandria

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Alexandria city vs. FCPS Alexandria"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]That does look scary, but consider...

TC's SAT average for white students -- 1720
FCPS SAT average for white students --1715

TC's school-wide averages will always suffer in comparison to most FCPS schools, because TC's student body is 20% white, 40% black, 31% hispanic and 6% Asian.  More importantly, many of the non-white kids at FCPS schools come from middle class families.  Some of Alexandria's non-white kids are middle class too, but many of them come from the vast apparatus of public housing complexes and other affodable housing projects that Alexandria maintains to ease the guilt of its rich, white, liberal population.  So TC's student population is skewed heavily toward LEP and Free/Reduced Lunch population.  Is it ideal to have so many poor students concentrated in one massive high school?  No.  Does it mean that your particular kid will be unable to achieve his potential at TC Williams? No.

One interesting comparison is to look at the AP Test results from TC compared to FCPS high schools.  TC's kids score 3's, 4's, and 5's on AP Tests at a similar rate as the kids at the middle tier of FCPS schools (Lake Braddock, West Springfield, etc.).  That tells me that the kids who are serious about getting a great education at TC Williams can, in fact, get one.  And, by attending a school that has economic diversity, they'll likely gain some street smarts, too.  Not such a bad thing to have...
  [/quote]

Hey, what happened to the "if your kid's on the AP track, they won't interact with the poor kids" boosterism?

I remember in HS interacting plenty with the general population in gym class and other electives ... if anyone sends their kids to TC thinking your kid's going to be in a bubble, I think they'll be sadly, sadly, sadly mistaken.

There's new and struggling Americans a-plenty at TC. Whether you, as a middle-class or upper-middle-class white parent, need to have their struggles in close proximity to you, is entirely up to you. Because, like it or not, there's a large number of people who just don't care about that fancy book larnin' at TC, and no one's really yet explained the concrete benefits of sending your kid to higher-poverty schools as opposed to lower-poverty schools (note that I am not advocating breaking the bank or living in a woodshed to live in the McLean zone as opposed to the Marshall zone, or moving out to Stafford cause the ferriners are taking over Fairfax.)

With that said -- if you live in a $1.2M 3000-sf TH in Old Town with a Walkscore in the 90s, you, and your kid, will probably be fine at TC. Why? You're living in the nicer part of town and have some top of the line housing. You're likely isolated from most of the grime that makes living in Alexandria unpleasant.

It's folks who buy a $250-350k condo or TH to save money or "I want to live close in and it's all we can afford" that will likely rue their decision. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics