Reply to Fleeing APS schools for FFX County

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]FFX is a sprawling, overly large almost impossible to comprehend entity, spanning from the sad backwaters of the Springfield area to the gleaming McMansions of western FFX.  You must choose your pyramid extremely carefully.  But in general, the FFX high schools run circles around Arlington high schools.[/quote]

Based on what?   Certainly not based on the Holy Grail of NOVA high schools:  admission to UVA and William & Mary.  Virtually all the top students in NOVA apply to one or the other, and often both, and the admit rates last year were 42 and 47 percent for FCPS and 37 and 53 percent for APS.  No discernible difference.  But I wonder what FCPS would look like if TJ students were excluded?  I bet FCPS would fall below APS.

Outside of Langley, which has an extraordinarily privileged population, no school in Fairfax even arguably "runs circles" around APS.[/quote]

TJ students [i]are[/i] FCPS students, for the most part.  Why exclude them?[/quote]

DP, but the problem is that the presence of TJ makes it hard to truly compare the school systems because you're not comparing truly similarly-situated populations. Families with kids who may qualify for TJ and who want that kind of environment (which isn't all families) will be more likely to move to FCPS to improve their odds of getting in over, say, Arlington. The result of this is not just a concentration of high-achieving students at TJ, but also a greater concentration of high-achieving students at some other FCPS high schools who didn't get into TJ, which makes the student score/profile of these schools better.

FCPS boosters assume that this high-achieving profile at the high school level means FCPS schools are superior, but really it's a classic correlation/causation situation because those high-achieving students would probably be high-achieving in any school system rather than it being the result of some FCPS magic. If FCPS didn't have TJ, FCPS wouldn't have the same draw for those families and they'd probably settle throughout the region in a more balanced fashion, narrowing, if not closing completely, the gaps between the schools (which aren't huge to begin with).[/quote]

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