Why aren't NW Va schools comparatively good? (Winchester, Fairfax: real estate, school districts)

[Ichabob]

Usually, there are areas that have good school districts, but when I review NW Virginia (Winchester-Woodstock-Front Royal area & down the Shenandoah valley until Broadway High ~74%) everything is below-average with a few stretches to average (Sherando High makes it to ~70%.)


Attached is SchoolDigger.com's take. What's going on with these school systems compared to other areas? I realize "everywhere can't be above average." Is it a regional culture where average is good enough compared to taxes/expenditures needed to improve outcomes? (It's not like real estate is reasonably priced in Clarke, Warren, or Frederick Counties.)

[nm9stheham]

IMHO: Be very careful about such rankings. Here is what that site says: "Schooldigger calculates school rankings based on SOL Mathematics, SOL English Reading, SOL Science, SOL History test scores released by the Virginia Department of Education." So it is just using test scores which is not just a reflection of the schools, but a whole host of factors that go into the students' scores. Arguably, most of those factors have nothing to do with the schools.

IMHO#2, the 'outcome' we ought to care about is far more than school test scores, and a lot of a person's success in life has nothing to do with those test scores. A culture or family values that encourages good work, social, and personal ethics, as an example, will carry people farther in life than the test scores of the schools they attended. So one cannot even make any useful connection between regional culture and school test scores and success in life.

I'd pay FAR more attention to the values in a regional culture than trying to make a totally questionable correlation to school test scores. It may be desirable for everything to be at our fingertips on the internet. But that can't be done well with evaluating regional culture; one has to travel and get 'boots on the ground' to get any sense of that.

And as for the schools themselves, paying too much attention to test scores is often a case of letting the numbers drive one down a wrong path; the scores were never intended to be used as a comparative basis for school quality on a fine scale, exactly because the results are inextricably intertwined with so many other non-school factors. They're only use is as an indicator of where there might be problems.

[ersatz]

Most parents care deeply about school quality. Sites like Schooldigger and GreatSchools try to give parents some evaluation tools but these are highly subjective. There is no perfect online tool for judging schools, but my own Fairfax County tries:

FCPS - School Profiles - Fairfax HS - Demographics puts a number of statistics out there that allow a parent to delve a lot more deeply into a particular school than just trying to evaluate it by published test scores. It would be really helpful if more school districts did this, but, I guess, most are afraid to expose their statistics to the general public.

[Suey123]

There are a lot of pockets of poverty in the Shenandoah Valley. And taxes are very low. Low housing prices and low taxes mean no money for schools.