Reply to Woodson, Lake Braddock, West Springfield experiences

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here- we are not military. Moving with two older elementary school age kids and plan to stay in the area through highschool. Not really concerned about which elementary school so focused on middle and up.

Not sure if there are any sort of cultural differences between these areas to be aware of besides the military family presence.  Anyone have an estimate of roughly what percent of kids are military families in these schools? Just curious.[/quote]

One cultural difference is that the Woodson pyramid attracts families that want to send their kids to the highly selective TJ HS for Science and Technology within FCPS. When their kids don't get accepted into the TJ program from Frost MS they end up going to Woodson. That's a whole other story, but the summary is that it has a large population of very academically competitive parents. This is why you have heard it is intense there.

One way it can affect your child is through preventing them from standing out for competitive college admissions unless they are able to match the strength of courses the other kids are taking. WSHS and LBSS are solid schools but the average SAT scores are consistently lesser there throughout the years by about 50-100 points versus Woodson. Again, this has practically nothing to do with FCPS schools and teacher quality and frankly entirely due to parental investment in pushing and prepping.[/quote]

Not OP but isn't there [b]an advantage to go with the AP model over IB[/b]? Unless your kid is more arts/humanities focused?

Also, how can you say the difference is solely in parental investment in pushing/prepping? Parents choose schools for a reason, and so do teachers. This just sounds like Woodson-hating (which honestly, as someone who cares about academic rigor, makes me think Woodson might be the best of these options). [/quote]

I think this is more personal preference--we explicitly chose IB over AP because I think it's a stronger program--particularly in lab sciences and writing/research. Others believe AP is stronger or want a more a la carte approach.   [b]The one downside is that IB tends to generate less college credit because they are 2 year courses per exam and the exams are considered a bit tougher.  But  many kids (including mine) take equivalent AP exams for their IB courses.[/b][/quote]

Sorry for the naive question, but do you mean that even with your kids taking AP equivalent exams they received less college credit? Just wanting to better understand the trade offs aside from personal pref and subjective assessments of rigor/difficulty. My very limited understanding is that, historically, IB was created to draw quality students to schools that were not doing that well. [/quote]

No, my kid took all their IB exams and then for IB courses where it mapped on to more than 1 AP exam, they also took the additional AP exam as an extra (e.g., macro and micro economics).  So they ended up with plenty of credits.  Robinson also offers some AP courses which they took.

Historically IB is an international education program to have consistent standards across countries --often in private international schools.  In the US, there has been some push to use IB to boost academics in low income schools, but mainly it's just a rigorous college prep program -- Robinson was never a low-performing school for instance and it is IB.[/quote]

But Robinson is not close to Woodson in terms of rankings? Isn't Woodson recognized as part of the top 5 in the county (Langley, McLean, Oakton, Madison being the others)? [/quote]

I thought the top 5 was Langley, McLean, Madison, Oakton and Chantilly[/quote]

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