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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Saratoga has very similar families to those you find at schools like Hunt Valley and Orange Hunt.

The house there are nice and affordable, but they take longer to sell than the other West Springfield homes due to Lee HS.

Daventry house have the same issues.  Wonderful elementary with West Springfield elementary, but feeds into Lee.

WSHS has a diverse student body, very safe, is solidly middle class, some of the most affordable commutable homes in fairfax county, and has virtually identical achievement to the wealthiest schools in the district.

That is why folks are clamouring to be zoned for WSHS over Lee.

For the affordability of the homes you simply cannot beat the value of the schools.[/quote]

I'd say WS is similar to the other schools that are solidly "middle class" as defined around here  - Robinson, Chantilly and Lake Braddock.  The difference in SAT scores between WS and Langley is about the same as the difference between WS and Lee. [/quote]

WSHS, LB, etc SAT and SOL scores are right there with very little difference between all of the other schools in that top three though ten or eleven.  It isbonly the two schools at the very top which have significantly higher scores.  The next eight or so schools are basically identicalnin terms of achievement.

Lee HS is not at all a high performing school and scores far lower than those other schools, including WSHS.[/quote]

Since you're the one who keeps focusing on test scores and labeling entire schools - rather than individual students - as "high performing" or "low performing" here, I'll push back.

The top schools in Fairfax in terms of test scores have been (after TJ), Langley, McLean, Woodson, Madison and Oakton for years.  Below that, you have a large number of "solid, middle-class schools" - West Springfield, Robinson, Chantilly, Lake Braddock, Westfield, South Lakes, Fairfax, Herndon, Centreville and South County.  At the bottom in terms of test scores, although not always in the same order, are Edison, Stuart, Hayfield, Annandale, Falls Church, Lee and Mount Vernon.

The two schools that don't fit so neatly into those three buckets are Marshall and West Potomac.  I'd argue that Marshall will join the first group in another year or two.  West Potomac seems to bounce between the second and third groups.  If there's any Fairfax school that can be said to have "Langley scores for an affordable price," it's Woodson, not West Springfield.    [/quote]

I would bet that if you can buy in Marshall now it will be the best investment in terms schools because it is going to continue to get better and the pricing will reflect that. [/quote]

I'd wonder about that.  We bought a then-new house in the Marshall district in the mid-1990s, rather than buy an older house nearby in the Madison district.  At the time, we reasoned that any FCPS high school would be good, so why not go for the house we preferred?  As it turned out, we were fortunate.  The area boomed with new, high-end construction and the school also improved (Jay Pearson is a good guy and runs a tight ship).  When we sold the house a few years ago, we definitely made a good bit more than we would have made had we bought and sold the older house in the Madison district, which was already a known quantity.

But, from what I can tell, the market has now caught up.   From looking at current listings in the Marshall district, I can see some homes on the market where sellers who bought in the 2009-10 time frame will take a hit, assuming a standard sales commission.   It's very difficult to time these things.  I'd buy because I like the house/schools/commute, not because you can pigeon-hole what's going to be the "best investment."
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