Raising kids in Squirrel Hill?

[Love2Golf09]

Originally Posted by gameguy56

1. Allderdice can be very good. I personally know many allderdice graduates who ended up at Ivy leagues and the like. It just requires parental involvement, as any school would.

For comparison

Allderdice is ranked 1204 out of all the nation's public high schools.
Neither North Hills, Peters Twp, Gateway or Seneca Valley are actually ranked at all. Mt. Lebo is 1058, the only other school you mentioned that is ranked.



3. I think that someone choosing to live in an Urban area is probably aware that it won't be perfect. I think the problems are overstated, however. I've never had issues when going to squirrel hill.

Well, I didn't mean that nobody could succeed at Allderdice. It is a fine school and the best school in the city. However, one ranking doesn't mean everything. I've seen others that ranked Mt. Lebo no.1 in the state. Greatschools.net gives Allderdice only a 5 out of 10 rating. For all I know the survey you listed probably puts 90% of their emphasis on diversity, rather than actual educational achievement. That would probably explain why Allderdice was so high, while Peters Twp, North Hills and Seneca Valley were off the list.

[RW333]

Outside of questions of safety concerns, and, maybe, school districts, I'm always puzzled by the many searches on the forum for "good for families" neighborhoods -- as though families were somehow a rarity, or perhaps a persecuted minority, with crosses burned on the lawns of "family houses" in Squirrel Hill.

[Tiger Beer]

Originally Posted by RW333

Outside of questions of safety concerns, and, maybe, school districts, I'm always puzzled by the many searches on the forum for "good for families" neighborhoods -- as though families were somehow a rarity, or perhaps a persecuted minority, with crosses burned on the lawns of "family houses" in Squirrel Hill.

In my experience, Pittsburgh is one of the FEW cities in the U.S. that families can live IN a city.

Generally speaking, people are either scared to death of their cities and all recommend suburbs (i.e. Detroit, etc.)....OR the city is so expensive no one could possibly get a 2 or 3 bedroom place to raise a family (i.e. New York, San Francisco, etc.).

[likepgh]

Originally Posted by Love2Golf09

For all I know the survey you listed probably puts 90% of their emphasis on diversity, rather than actual educational achievement.

"For all I know"? It's not hard to find out! Click on the link and the criteria is right there: "the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2007 divided by the number of graduating seniors."

[BrianTH]

I think it is important to understand that Great Schools uses standardized test scores for its ratings. Because of some correlations between various demographic factors and test scores, that means their overall ratings aren't really that useful for comparing schools with significantly different demographic composition.

In fact, if you look up Allderdice at Great Schools and dig into their ratings, Great Schools breaks out black and white ratings separately, and it gets a 9 for white and a 2 for black. Similarly, it breaks out "the economically disadvantaged" separately, and they also get a 2. Again, those results are predictable given general test score correlations.

What you would really want for comparative purposes is a controlled/"value-added" measure that took the expected test score given the demographics of the students and compared it to their actual test scores (better schools in the "value added" sense would outperform their expected test scores, and worse schools would underperform). Unfortunately Great Schools doesn't do that, and their limited breakouts are too crude for that purpose.

This, by the way, is a general problem with school ratings, not just Great Schools's ratings. The bottomline is that the difference in measurable outcomes between schools is often a lot lower than people think once you have controlled for demographics--not that there are no differences, but just that the differences can easily be exaggerated, and in a few cases reversed, by using uncontrolled measures.