Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I'm going to work at RTP and consider to buy a house at Cary area. I checked out Cary's high school performance. All of the high school are very good for the state test. But some how, I could not find any Cary's high school in the national high school ranking list at all. Does any body know how are Cary high schools performance at national level? Which high school at Cary is the best?
There are many factors at play here that I won't even get into, but the bottom line is that most, if not all high schools in Wake County are good, but only a couple are great.
I'm in no way recommending you chose your school based on SAT scores, but here's a link to the county's website talking about 2006 SAT performance (not sure why there isn't one for 2007). It lists the top 6 schools (in terms of SAT performance) as Enloe, Green Hope, Apex, Broughton, Leesville and Cary.
WCPSS:Students continue to excel on 2006 SAT (http://www.wcpss.net/news/2006_sat/index.html - broken link)
Green hope or the new Panther Creek (most of the kids are from Green Hope) No idea about the ranking, actually that really doesn't matter to me as long as test scores are good.
Apex HS is, IMHO the best one in Wake County. Green Hope has high rankings but is sort of seen as a "preppy" school. A lot of BMW's in the parking lot there and the school actually has one of the most expensive parking lots in the country ($240 for one parking spot for the year I believe). I don't know how much merrit you can put to this, but the school's very common nickname is "Green Dope". We were very pleased with our oldest son going to Apex High school. Eventhough we decided we wanted to leave NC and come back to NY the summer before my son would be a junior, we stayed until he could graduate from Apex last year. Apex used to be, and to a lesser degree still is in a way, one of the only "neighborhood" high schools left in Wake. In that MOST of the students who go there actually live in Apex.
I think part of the issue is that there are no magnet high schools in Cary. Most of the "top perfoming" high schools in Wake County that you see on these national lists are magnets. But really, all of the Cary high schools are very good. You can't go wrong with any of them.
couple that with the busing and you have the recipe for great private schools and "good" at best public schools. If Cary were in the North or somewhere else where you have neighborhood schools, they would no doubt be in the excellent category. But to be frank, the Wake County schools are not what they are made out to be by the cheer leaders. And I like Cary.
couple that with the busing and you have the recipe for great private schools and "good" at best public schools. If Cary were in the North or somewhere else where you have neighborhood schools, they would no doubt be in the excellent category. But to be frank, the Wake County schools are not what they are made out to be by the cheer leaders. And I like Cary.
Bearing in mind that I have no first-hand knowledge of the high-schools here, I am not sure I would put all of my faith in the testing methodology that was used. For one - it seems to bounce a LOT of schools based on some rather arbitrary rules (like - I only look at AP schools, and not IB schools), and didn't bother to get every state represented in their rankings (10 states are missing). From the stuff I managed to gather on it, sounds like a fairly skewed system, which by no stretch of the imagination seems to pull in a complete picture.
And again - I'm not saying any one school around here is particularly good or bad. Just taking the rating system to task.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
It is because they are not great
