Reply to FCPS High School prestige ranking

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DS attends one of the 4th tier, low prestige schools. The school sent lots of kids to UVA, VT, W&M this year, as they do every year, plus a number get into Ivies, MIT, CMU, UCLA, Berkeley, Michigan, Duke, Hopkins, etc.

So your “prestige” rankings are meaningless. Or maybe they even work against you, if you believe colleges have “quotas” from each high school.

Nobody cares what high school you went to. And a few years after you graduate from college, nobody will care what college you went to.[/quote]

Capable students from below average HS’s CAN do well. The college acceptances at ACHS for example are often really strong.

The problems are as follows: 1, this is not as much an issue in FCPS as our schools are larger. But some smaller, low income HS will not be able to offer many, if any, AP classes (or IB or whatever). This leaves students at a huge disadvantage when it comes to college readiness. They simply aren’t ready for a demanding college class having had only general education math/English up to what you might be tested on in a standardized state test. 2, people worry about what their kids might be exposed to in terms of fights and behavior at a lower SES school. 3, adults at low SES schools perpetuate a more restrictive, punitive environment on the kids. There is little to no trust from adults to students. There are more punishments and the school environment feels very negative. 4, a kid who is borderline - intelligent and capable but vulnerable to a “bad crowd,” and there are lots of teens like this - will be lifted up by a higher income, higher education, rule following peer group, but potentially brought down by low achievers and peers/parents who don’t emphasize attendance and achievement. Not as much an issue if your kid is more self-motivated, but not all kids are, some need more help to be kept on the straight and narrow as impressionable teens.

Obviously a really smart kid can stand out a lot at a lower SES HS. But students who are just average or even “above average” good students will fall through the cracks in a big way because the admin’s emphasis will be on the larger population of at risk kids. [/quote]

A review of the numbers transferring out of some of some of the lower performing schools would indicate that a much fuller schedule of classes could be offered if FCPS eliminated IB.  
A simple step that could lead to a solution.  It could also solve problems of low enrollment in some schools.[/quote]

If there is demand for the IB diploma, maybe FCPS should consider how other districts around the country do it. For example, MCPS and APS offer IB diploma magnet programs where transfers or other accepted students are expected to work towards the diploma. The high schools with the magnet programs also offer the typical AP program of study for the in-bounds students.

So, if FCPS graduates roughly 500 diploma candidates a year on average, then maybe two high schools could offer an IB magnet with the IB diploma as the expected goal. (If the students decide midway not to pursue the diploma, they would have to transfer back to their neighborhood hs.) The two high schools with the IB magnets would also offer a complete AP programs. [/quote]

The VDOE data for 2023-24 indicates there were 487 IB diploma candidates and 330 IB diplomas, so a 67.8% success rate across the current 8 IB schools.  [/quote]

Robinson is carrying most of the load for successful IB diplomas, with a bit of help from 2 other high schools.

Most of the FCPS IB schools are graduating fewer than 20 IB diplomas each year.

An alarming number are graduating fewer than 1 dozen IB diplomas.

Your 67.8% success rate is such a farce, especially when you consider that number includes schools like Lewis getting close to a 100% candidate to diploma succes rates, when in reality the school average below 10 IB candidates per year in a class of roughly 400 graduates, and that almost 100% rate bringing up your average might just be 6 diplomas out of 7 candidates.  IB is a complete failure and waste of money at most FCPS high schools, except for 2-3 of them.[/quote]

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