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This is the definition of a straw man. While I agree with your last point that a better school is a better school (and that parent involvement can't completely make up the difference), you totally misconstrued the idea of parent involvement with schooling and education.
Good points.
Schooling and education IMO falls squarely on the parents. Did a parent teach their child to respect authority, to be curious about the world and how things work, to have values, etc. OR did the parent not give a crap and let thir kids disrespect authority, wear saggy pants, shrug off chores, etc. Learning, for the most part, falls squarely on the parents and how their children were raised from day one. Schools can only teach if a child is receptive to learning......that receptive nature starts with the parents.
Who cares? Seriously? A child is only going to do as good as his parental involvement will afford, regardless of the school. Ivy Leaguers have come outta South Side and Berea High Schools and drop out felons have come outta Riverside. These lists are so absurd.
A child is only going to do as good as his parental involvement will afford, regardless of the school??? Then explain to me why so much 'parental involvement' in our large public school district involves parents scrambling to have their children attend out-of-zone schools? Why, for example, did fifty-some-odd parents camp out for AN ENTIRE WEEKEND in order to be at the front of the line when Wade Hampton High handed out special permission attendance forms at 7am on a Monday morning?
Why do parents pay a small fortune to send their children to private schools?
By your definition, said parents need only be involved at whatever public school their child is zoned for -- "regardless" -- and the outcome will be the same.
I am not saying parental involvement isn't important -- indeed, it's vital. But sorry, the school itself matters, too. Your perspective will be quite different once you actually have children in public school. You won't be saying "who cares?" because I promise, you will care.
A child is only going to do as good as his parental involvement will afford, regardless of the school??? Then explain to me why so much 'parental involvement' in our large public school district involves parents scrambling to have their children attend out-of-zone schools? Why, for example, did fifty-some-odd parents camp out for AN ENTIRE WEEKEND in order to be at the front of the line when Wade Hampton High handed out special permission attendance forms at 7am on a Monday morning?
Why do parents pay a small fortune to send their children to private schools?
By your definition, said parents need only be involved at whatever public school their child is zoned for -- "regardless" -- and the outcome will be the same.
I am not saying parental involvement isn't important -- indeed, it's vital. But sorry, the school itself matters, too. Your perspective will be quite different once you actually have children in public school. You won't be saying "who cares?" because I promise, you will care.
Learning, for the most part, falls squarely on the parents and how their children were raised from day one. Schools can only teach if a child is receptive to learning......that receptive nature starts with the parents.
Bingo. It's not about the parents teaching calculus, physics, and chemistry (though if we have kids I will gladly teach them those haha), it's about parents being INVOLVED with their student, who is being taught calculus, physics, chemistry. It's about a household who promotes learning and education, who respects their teachers, who understands WHY learning is important, and who encourages their kids to learn.
Parent involvement isn't being the teacher, it is creating a healthy home environment that promotes the learning.
DJGreer: One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes those schools are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The parents who care, and already foster a positive learning environment at home, are the parents who do these things to get their kids into the elite schools in the first place. These kids, more often than that, are then already ahead of the curve/above average in education AND have parents that care and involved being competitively fed into these schools. OF COURSE these schools are going to end up with better test scores and more successful graduates then!
Now, I WILL acknowledge that some schools are better than others. I went to a private college prep HS (academic scholarship and my mom was the school nurse) and it was excellent. Crazy high average SAT scores and all but 1 kid went to college. However, I also recognize that student scores and successes were skewed by the fact that the majority of the kids who attended my school were already intelligent because their parents were involved and had them on track at an early age. Yes the school and the teachers were a little better than public school, but they were also being fed above-average students to work with via parents who cared at an early age.
Which leads me to my final statement: the biggest advantage to going to a "smart" school is actually the social interaction and the competition among other smart students. It tends to breed more success.
Bingo. It's not about the parents teaching calculus, physics, and chemistry (though if we have kids I will gladly teach them those haha), it's about parents being INVOLVED with their student, who is being taught calculus, physics, chemistry. It's about a household who promotes learning and education, who respects their teachers, who understands WHY learning is important, and who encourages their kids to learn.
Parent involvement isn't being the teacher, it is creating a healthy home environment that promotes the learning.
DJGreer: One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes those schools are a self-fulfilling prophecy. The parents who care, and already foster a positive learning environment at home, are the parents who do these things to get their kids into the elite schools in the first place. These kids, more often than that, are then already ahead of the curve/above average in education AND have parents that care and involved being competitively fed into these schools. OF COURSE these schools are going to end up with better test scores and more successful graduates then!
Now, I WILL acknowledge that some schools are better than others. I went to a private college prep HS (academic scholarship and my mom was the school nurse) and it was excellent. Crazy high average SAT scores and all but 1 kid went to college. However, I also recognize that student scores and successes were skewed by the fact that the majority of the kids who attended my school were already intelligent because their parents were involved and had them on track at an early age. Yes the school and the teachers were a little better than public school, but they were also being fed above-average students to work with via parents who cared at an early age.
Which leads me to my final statement: the biggest advantage to going to a "smart" school is actually the social interaction and the competition among other smart students. It tends to breed more success.
Buying my house in the Riverside zone should help resale too!
Parent involvement isn't being the teacher, it is creating a healthy home environment that promotes the learning.
^ What a great statement!!
From day one when a child is born, parents have the choice to foster and promote learning and intrigue with the malleable brain of a baby, or they can choose to be indifferent to their child's future.
Maybe, we should have schools for parents on how to parent?
At least read what their methodology is before you cry about it.
It's a metric to see how prepared they will be for college, what else they supposed to measure? Bible study hours?
Nobody is crying about anything. We have a right to question the validity of the ranking when the authors have not made their methods clear. It's called analytical thinking, not crying.
I would like a better explanation of how they take a graduation rate (%) and add that to an SAT score like 1400 and get anything that can be compared to another school.
I wish these rankings for schools did a better job explaining how they get their rankings.
I agree the parents have both a genetic role and a nurture role in the life of the student. You could argue that this is a constant regardless of the school. However, one student might do much better in learning at a better school than at a lesser school.
The school's quality is important. I have been to differing qualities of schools and I could tell a huge difference. Even within the same school, some classes teach the subject better than other classes teach the same exact subject.
I like the SC state report cards much better than these magazine or web-zine rankings. The latter always seem to leave out important schools due to the poor method of ranking.
What we need is the equivalent of the BCS ranking of the academic school rankings. LOL half-joking...
Our oldest is entering kindergarten this fall and we're putting her in public school as the elementary aschoolthat she is zoned for is quite good, but as she gets older, we will weigh all of our options.
And then, in response to a query why parents seek out the quite good schools for their children, you say: Because they're lemmings?
Parental involvement matters. And the school itself matters, too. No point pretending this is an either-or.
DJGreer: One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes those schools are a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Slightly off topic: I (in poor taste) joked to my wife, if I have to send my kid to Cambridge for college I'd prefer him going to Harvard so he can room with the next Zuckerberg, instead of UMass and the next Dzhokhar.
I don't see what's wrong with picking a house based off the school rankings, as arbitrary as some think this particular one is. It's decent validation for those that paid the premium or chose a smaller house in a better zone since many families need the two incomes to fund multiple kids into grad school these days.
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