Reply to Great Schools -- no longer useful

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I found  it very useful.  Our hs is a 6, but that's just a reflection of the mixture of kids at this school.  Kids like mine pass their tests at a higher rate than other kids at the school.  That data helps me assess whether I want to send my kids there.  If kids from non-disadvantaged backgrounds are doing well, then I'm ok with it even if the overall score is not as high.  The schools with high overall scores usually don't have many disadvantaged kids in their data pool...so of course the overall score is going to be higher than schools that have a mix of kids.  If our "6" hs didn't have the disadvantaged kids, it'd be an 8 too.  [/quote]

The only people who care about the score are the those that are worried about education for their children, but not [i]too[/i] worried, so they just want to look for one data point on the internet and then sit around being smug. [/quote]

No, we just don't want to pay an inflated price for housing just so our kids are in a lily white school (or school where 10 percent asians counts as the "diversity").  We don't like to follow the crowds for a crappy house and an unnecessarily high mortgage.  [/quote]

I wouldn't want to be around either of you. First poster makes clear she doesn't care about the disadvantaged kids at her school, just her own kids.  Second poster taunts her by suggesting she can't afford a house in a better district.  First poster responds with tired cliches about "lily white" schools and "crappy" houses.  You're both sad, wherever you live.  [/quote]

You are mis-understanding the first post (I'm the author).  It's not that I don't care about the disadvantaged kids -- I'm just not going to dismiss a school b/c it has a certain percentage of brown/black/ESOL/FARMS kids --- who in fact, across the country, do score lower on standardized tests.  My kids' HS (when they are old enough to go there) is about 30% white.  Of COURSE I care how the other 70% of kids do and of course I would love for the 70% to be super high scoring kids.  But, I'm dealing with facts here.  It's a fact that schools in FCPS and ACPS with higher proportions of minority/poor/ESOL kids have lower overall scores.  You can dismiss that school out of hand and call it a "bad school" -- attributing the low overall passing rate to poor teaching, OR you can look a little deeper and see if non-minority/non-poor/non-ESOL kids are doing pretty good at that school.  Of course it would be wonderful if the disadvantaged groups were brought into the equally high-performing category as kids with college-educated parents and means ... but that is not yet a reality.  If my kids can get a good education in a school that is majority minority, then I don't need to chase the conventional "wisdom" on DCUM that any parent who loves their children must buy into McLean, Langely, Woodson, or Oakton.  It gets really old hearing how those are the only acceptable schools and most of the rest are "bad schools" to be avoided.  Heaven forbid your child go to school where there are kids taking technical/vocational education courses!

The old version of Great Schools allowed parents to see that a "6" school-wide rating did not mean that every sub-group at the school was passing at an "average" rate.  It allowed parents to see that various groups had different success rates on the tests.  Maybe that doesn't matter to some people b/c they value the overall influence of peers and they want those peers to be overwhelmingly high-achieving.  That's fine.  But it was a valuable metric to others and now it is no longer available.  [/quote]

Thank you for supplementing your comments.  It might have been a more productive thread had you not flown off the handle in response to a troll-like comment and treated it like an excuse to rail against "lily white" schools and "crappy" homes in more expensive areas.  People who live in areas with higher-ranked schools aren't simply chasing GreatSchool ratings.  There are a host of reasons why people live in those areas - they typically are close to jobs; increasingly are close to public transportation; have lower crime rates; and may fare better in the event of an economic downturn if the post-2008 experience is a guide.

I have spent far more time than you'll ever know defending the so-called "bad schools" against gratuitous "must avoid at all costs" posts, but it also gets tiring when others launch equally insulting attacks on higher ranked schools.  I do find it curious that you focus on four schools in FCPS as examples of schools that you think get too much love here when some of the biggest critics of schools like TC Williams in Alexandria are Arlington residents in the Yorktown and W-L districts who call themselves "ACPS refugees" and recommend their schools with as much enthusiasm as any FCPS parents.

Happy New Year.

[/quote]

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