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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Woodson has slid in the rankings, prioritize great school ratings of 8 or higher for elementaries to avoid low ses [/quote]

But GS rankings don't just focus on academic performance. Not sure what to make of Woodson slide, but we can't afford in the Madison, McLean, and Langley pyramids. We could try Oakton but not sure which elm and middleschool... Advice appreciated.[/quote]

PP is a troll. There’s literally nothing wrong with Woodson. It’s a great school.[/quote]

Their rating of 6/10 for 2022 says otherwise. I remember Woodson used to be an 8/10 a few years ago. Something is going downhill there but I suppose that can be said for a lot of FCPS.[/quote]

I recently told my friend that Woodson was well regarded and to ignore the 6 because if you looked they are being dinged for stupid equity reasons.  I don't support great schools and I also sent US news and niche rankings to her and suggested a more wholistic approach.[/quote]

Great Schools is an abysmal ranking system--not worth looking at--it has no benchmarked system of measurement, its equity measure is hare-brained.  USNews is better.  Even better to just look at the data on the Woodson FCPS profile.  Woodson always has strong SATs, pass rates on standardized measures and college admissions.[/quote]

[b]US News is also a bit of a black box though. [/b]They use diversity in their scoring but not totally clear how. For example, despite good test scores, they rank WFES surprisingly low (155) relative to Mantua (95) and CWES (57). Schooldigger is a bit different, with rankings of 40, 85, 97, respectively.

Rankings aside, I'm curious to hear more about WFES and the PTA, activities, enrichment offerings, etc.  [/quote]

Sure.  I meant to imply that even US News is better than GS (not that that's saying much).  I'd rather go to the data of interest than to a score anyway--and FCPS provides quite a bit on their school profiles.[/quote]

But isn't the available data essentially % proficiency at or above grade level (and broken down by race/ethnicity, income, etc)? Or is there a way to find out how proficient kids are, on average, at a given school? Would be nice to know this for AAP and gen ed.  [/quote]

Yeah, it's frustrating, because FCPS had a really robust data reporting on their school profiles, but 2 years ago the Virginia Department of Ed insisted that the state do all the reporting rather than local districts and the state shares a lot less meaningful data.  Now there's just a link to the VA DoE under the testing bar.  You used to be able to look at pass advanced rates, separated out by AAP/Gen ed/ELL/SpEd,  DRA rates including growth between 1st and 2nd grade which told a lot about the quality of reading instruction in a school (when they did DRA before VA DoE required the new inventories) on the FCPS school profiles--it was an amazing resource.

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In lieu of better data, as long as they break up the not-so-informative %-proficient-at-or-above-grade-level data by certain categories (economically challenged, English learners, etc.) one can use that as a window into school quality...with the expectation that better schools should show higher rates of proficiency for all groups in normal times, not just higher rates for those who are likely to have lots of support at home.

Pandemic data are also telling in some ways. I pulled some of this data last year but I can't remember how I got it so I'm not sure if one can still get it now--I think it was directly from VA DoE. It broke the data up by subject and various subgroupings (race, ethnicity, economically challenged, English learner). And I looked particularly at how different groups fared pre and post pandemic (2019 vs 2021). Maybe it's too simplistic, but you could think of the pandemic data as what happens when the school is out of the picture... And if the scores were decent pre-pandemic, and they dropped a lot during, then the school maybe was doing something right before all went south. And there is some indication of that for economically disadvantaged kids at Mantua  and a bit less so for WFES (English proficiency relatively low both pre and post pandemic for this group).

Conversely, if scores stay up during the pandemic, it probably says more about the students than the school. For example, asian students at Mantua and CWES did just fine during the pandemic. At WFES there was a 20-pt drop in math proficiency. White kids did better at WFES than Mantua and CWES.

Of course there's only so much one can learn from this kind of data, and maybe the assumption that pandemic scores reflect the child and home and not the school, but I do find it interesting.
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