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Location: Chapel Hill, NC, formerly NoVA and Phila
9,764 posts, read 15,711,289 times
Reputation: 10855
Quote:
Originally Posted by CHTransplant
The list should be titled:
"High Schools with the Best Student Populations."
That may be (and probably is) true. But going to school with the "worst" populations can have a profound effect on the classes offered, the experience of teachers, the extracurriculars at a school, the amount of time spent on discipline/safety, etc. I'm not saying that a student cannot do well at a school that is ranked in the middle or that some cannot do great things coming from low-ranking schools, but the population at a school does affect most students in several ways.
The best high schools are those where the parents expect the students to work hard. Very simple. And lots of parents in the Triangle have that expectation.
Notice that my comment is work hard, not get good grades. When grades are the sole emphasis, cheaters will mess up the dynamic.
The devil is in the details with these polls. Due to their nature, they have to find separation somewhere in ratings, but the difference between the 10th place school and the 100th place school can be miniscule (or not pertinent to one's situation), but because a place is assigned, one looks far worse than another. A better way of organizing would be in groupings of superior, above average, average, below average, etc.
For example, compare 2 schools I am interested in - Panther Creek (#11 on list and the one we are districted for) and Northwood (#87 on list and one we are contemplating moving to). Their scores differ by more than half a grade in only 3 categories - Food, Health and Safety and Resources and Facilities - yet they are 76 spots apart on the list.
For Resources and Facilities, the major differences are in lockers, cafeteria and classrooms as well as a higher level of accommodation of disabled students. Well you'd expect the newer and larger school (Panther Creek) to have more modern facilities (albeit with its fair share of mobile classrooms). If I do not have a disabled student, then the fact that one school accommodates disabilities better than another is of less importance to me.
The differences in Food seem to surround the ability for Panther Creek students to go offsite for lunch and not be forced to use the cafeteria services (the comments on the cafeteria for each showed universal disdain for cafeteria food). If I don't have a student with a special diet, then I don't really care how highly the cafeteria is rated.
For Health and Safety, there were universal comments at both schools about the nurse only being there once a week (if my child is sick I am going to pick them up anyway, so not a huge deal for me). The main differentiators were around prominence of faculty/student IDs - in a smaller school of 1000 students, there is more chance that everyone knows each other than in a school of 3000 students - so Panther Creek is scored higher on paper, but in reality, its a big vs. small bias.
From an academic standpoint, I don't need 2-3 offerings of the same AP class, as long as there is 1, my child can be served. The graduation rate difference of 10% does not matter much to me as it will be because of socioeconomic differences in the neighborhoods that feed the schools. The GPA differences are miniscule
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