PSA: Special needs kids are not violent, crazy, disruptive and the cause of all behavior problems. Stop constantly conflating the two. Behavior problems are serious...and not limited to those with disabilities. Just stop already.

Anonymous wrote:My school is highly ranked and in a
Very affluent area and more and more parents are putting their kids in private. Our school is rampant w/ discipline issues and a fairly high special education population.

This has been our experience in the “best” / highest-ranked area of FCPS.

FCPS’s extreme policies on DEI / inclusion meant a kid who brought a gun to my child’s middle school was suspended for: ONE DAY.

It appears FCPS’s main concern at the time was “the rule could suffer an education deficit / learning loss.”

That same, extreme DEI interpretation in FCPS also resulted in the policy whereby special needs children who had violent outbursts (throwing a chair across the room in one instance and overturning a desk on another day) resulted in:

- the rest of the class had to evacuate the classroom and go to a safe-space for the duration of one kid’s rampage. Learning was completely interrupted for those times, and often interrupted in other ways on a weekly basis, just to satisfy FCPS’ virtue-signaling DEI extremes. These are only a few personal anecdotes; there are myriad others.

If you can at all afford it, put your children in private schools over even the “best” FCPS schools in 2025. The lunatics on the SB and at Gatehouse are rapidly destroying what was once a great school system.

Great School composite score is misleading. The only way the ranking is useful would be ignore the composite and go only by test score rating.

Just go to filter, select "Test Score" to 9+ or 8+, and you would have a list of schools that is sort of reliably good.

Same with niche.com Ignore the overall score. In https://www.niche.com/k12/compare/ add a bunch of schools, and look at the actual reading/math pass rate. If that rates are high, schools are good.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great Schools is stupid. I feel that we need a sticky that says this. Can we lock the thread now?

Great Schools is beyond stupid.

Hope it goes bankrupt and disappears.

Can you explain why you think that?

DP. Because her kids’ school is ranked low.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great Schools is stupid. I feel that we need a sticky that says this. Can we lock the thread now?

Great Schools is beyond stupid.

Hope it goes bankrupt and disappears.

Can you explain why you think that?

Anonymous wrote:Great Schools is stupid. I feel that we need a sticky that says this. Can we lock the thread now?

Great Schools is beyond stupid.

Hope it goes bankrupt and disappears.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great school rating are valuable. But look at test scores inside the information

They are valuable in only a crude sense for low-information types.

This snarky post makes little sense. This is nothing methodologically wrong with using Great Schools as a starting point, and thereafter to dig deeper as to what is behind their numbers. Moreover, reflecting my experience as a very poor kid who went on to the top schools in the nation, a crucial litmus test is whether a school can take kids without means who are serious students and provide them with a rigorous education. It was the absolute key to my social mobility, and I credit my teachers, including my elementary school instructors, for really pushing me ahead. My peers were a factor, but i chose my friends carefully too. These attributes aren’t easy to discern, but looking at Great Schools as a starting doesn’t make for a low information person. Read everything critically and get your kids to own their education as much as they can themselves without parental hovering.

You can give yourself a cookie but GS scores are still low-information data points.

You give yourself a cookie I’m assuming that GS is the only data point. You can’t possibly be this dim witted. Or maybe you are.

That run-on sentence suggests that you are, indeed, dim-witted.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Great school rating are valuable. But look at test scores inside the information

They are valuable in only a crude sense for low-information types.

This snarky post makes little sense. This is nothing methodologically wrong with using Great Schools as a starting point, and thereafter to dig deeper as to what is behind their numbers. Moreover, reflecting my experience as a very poor kid who went on to the top schools in the nation, a crucial litmus test is whether a school can take kids without means who are serious students and provide them with a rigorous education. It was the absolute key to my social mobility, and I credit my teachers, including my elementary school instructors, for really pushing me ahead. My peers were a factor, but i chose my friends carefully too. These attributes aren’t easy to discern, but looking at Great Schools as a starting doesn’t make for a low information person. Read everything critically and get your kids to own their education as much as they can themselves without parental hovering.

You can give yourself a cookie but GS scores are still low-information data points.

You give yourself a cookie I’m assuming that GS is the only data point. You can’t possibly be this dim witted. Or maybe you are.

My school is highly ranked and in a
Very affluent area and more and more parents are putting their kids in private. Our school is rampant w/ discipline issues and a fairly high special education population.