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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]If quality of education is your only priority, your kids are bright and hard working and you can swing 35K per child per year for high school, you do very well in DC, the city with a number of the country's top-performing private schools. The rest of us live under a dark cloud of mediocrity, charter lottery stress, dead end middle school feeds, increasing crowding in the Deal feeders and at Wilson and Deal. I always get bummed out when I check Metro area lists of National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists in the early spring. Wilson produces one, two or three, and so does Walls, and that's it from public schools, year in and year out. Meanwhile, many a suburban high school produces 10, 15, 20, even dozens at TJ and the Blair Montgomery magnets. 
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Are you really so terrified of raising a mediocre child? Do you really check Metro area lists of National Merit Scholarship Semnifinalists every year? If your child is National Merit material, isn't it better do be one of two or three than twenty? Is your metric of success really this narrow and small?

And if you're right? Why the hell is the DMV such a mess? Is that by design? Because I'm not sure it took a national merit scholarship semifinalist to give us the beltway, or the Metro's lack of financing, or our country's collapsing infrastructure. Or Donald Trump. [/quote]

Not terrified of much, other than perhaps the current crime spike on Cap Hill (neighbor robbed at knife point two weeks ago in front of his house).  But I'm not impressed with many DC public schools.

I find the National Merit Scholarship Semifinalists lists useful as an acid test of relative high school quality in the Metro area, helping me discern trends.  School leaders, parents and admins can always tout a high school's quality, but if said school can't produced a single NMSS year after year, you might want to ask yourself how good the school really is.  E.g. Banneker doesn't produce NMSS students, and Washington Latin hasn't yet.  Many well known private schools fall down on a NMSS per capita measure, too, producing little more than the national average of 1% of test takers.  Meanwhile, Washington Lee in Arlington adds a couple semifinalists every year without getting much larger. When I first started checking, a decade ago, Washington Lee would produce two or three semifinalists a year. Now they produce a dozen. Meanwhile, Wilson and Walls continue to generate 1, 2 or 3 semifinalists each, never more.  
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That is surprising and probably speaks in part to the lack of a gifted program in DC.[/quote]

What? No. NMSS are a fixed percentage of a geographic population. It definitionally signifies nothing.[/quote]

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