Fayetteville schools question... (Springdale, Rogers, Benton: environment, work, university)

[gimme it]

I noticed that there are some highly rated elementary and middle/junior highs, but the highschool isn't rated as well on greatschools.org. Any idea why? Interested in your thoughts on this. Thx.

[Aporkalypse]

Originally Posted by gimme it

I noticed that there are some highly rated elementary and middle/junior highs, but the highschool isn't rated as well on greatschools.org. Any idea why? Interested in your thoughts on this. Thx.

No idea but I wouldn't buy into it. I live in LR and consider myself unbiased but Fayetteville is generally considered one of the state's top schools. At one point it made the Newsweek top 100 rankings, the only school in the state not in LR (Central and Mills) that did so.

[Stormcrow73]

I agree with Aporkalypse, Fayetteville HS is a great school. I'm not real keen on greatschools.net. I've seen instances of some not great schools get high ratings on there. They base their ratings purely on raw test score data which we all know can be manipulated by various means. I'd prefer my child have plenty of advanced placement opportunities at a school that doesn't always perform tremendously on standardized tests.

[NOEM1226]

I have never heard anything negative from any students or parents I know. Not sure whats up with the rating.

[rackensack]

It's been nearly 30 years since I was a student there (1979-1981), but I still have family and friends in the area and have seen and heard nothing to indicate that what was an outstanding school academically then is anything but one now. The mere fact that many FHS students are the offspring of UofA faculty ensures a certain level of academic ability in the student body, and an emphasis on the value of education by parents that is sometimes lacking in other schools in the state. The proximity to UofA also provides for unique and valuable opportunities for outstanding students to go beyond what any high school can provide. While I was there, I had several classmates who were taking calculus classes at UofA, and in my own case I had one English teacher who regularly arranged afterschool study groups with UofA faculty members to independently tackle a particular work of literature -- that's how I found myself reading and studying James Joyce's Ulysses with six or eight other kids my age and a UofA English professor when I was 16 years old.

Those kinds of experiences are valuable in themselves, but they also go a long way toward teaching kids who're fairly smart and who succeed in school without trying too hard that there are plenty of smart people out there in the world, and being smart by itself isn't going to take you very far -- that's a lesson way too many otherwise bright kids in Arkansas don't learn until they're in college and floundering for the first time in their lives. At FHS, smart is nothing special.

GreatSchools.net can be a valuable resource for aggregating factual information that can be time-consuming to pull together on your own. But you have to keep in mind that their ratings are purely test-score based, which means they're highly dependent on the tests used. For Arkansas schools, they seem to use three tests only: the Benchmark test for literacy skills, and the End-of-Course exams for algebra and geometry. That leaves out a whole host of things. As a point of comparison, the GreatSchools.net rating for my local high school in metro Atlanta factors in 14 different tests, including end-of-course tests in 8 subjects, Georgia High School Graduation tests in four subject areas plus writing, and ACT results. And even that is an incomplete and distorted picture because it leaves out many factors that don't show up in test scores -- indeed, a school that scores too highly on every test may be suspect for me as putting too much emphasis on teaching to the tests and not enough on actual education.

[springdale stephanie]

I just moved here (to springdale), but half of the reason is because the schools in this area (namely Springdale High and Rogers) are two of the best schools in the state. Go to springdale.com and follow the links. You'll be amazed.

[The A-Team]

Fayetteville high has had the highest testscores in the state many times. Considered by many to be one of if not the best public highschool in the state. Though the people "running the show" suck and have recently been paying off some great teachers to leave....its a shame, these people should be attending the schools instead of running them lol, because they don't know what they're doing!

[sherrenee]

I graduated from Fayetteville in 99, and in my opinion it was and is a great school. Fayetteville offers a lot of non traditional learning experiences that many of the other schools in the state do not. Fayetteville High also offers a lot of Advance Placement classes and with it being so close to the U of A you have the opportunity's to take college classes while still in high school. I think Fayetteville prepares their high school students for college quite well, the teachers and staff start trying to give the students more rope, because it is hard going from a very strict high school environment to the very laid back college enviroment (mean they don't care if you show or not or if you do the assignment or not)

[Aporkalypse]

Steph, interesting. I'd always heard Fayetteville>Bentonville>Rogers>Springdale for schools and that to a degree the latter two had struggled with absorbing non-English speaking students. Certainly Fayetteville wins on test scores and Bentonville wins on facilities.

[DC at the Ridge]

With the new high school opening in Rogers this fall, the facilities in Rogers will probably be better than Bentonville. Rogers and Springdale have struggled with the increase of non-English speaking students, and the test scores reflect that. Both Rogers and Bentonville have easy access to the community college, but Fayetteville's access to the University is a tremendous advantage. While Rogers and Springdale, and the other school districts in the area to a lesser degree, have been dealing with issues due to large influxes of immigrants, I think Fayetteville's school district is still more diverse because the range of cultures represented is so much broader. The Catholic Church was planning on building a high school in Lowell. I know they bought the land a few years ago. Does anyone know where they are on that?