Best Public School Rankings
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Posted by Miss Pavla (Follow Me)- Miss Pavla hails from the DMV. She is a graduate of Purdue University (Fort Wayne, IN) and will talk sports, health and wealth with anyone - To see more posts by this author click here |
A coworker of mind forwarded me U.S. News and World report which ranks the top 1,500 public high schools in America. It definitely made me raise an eyebrow to some of the particulars of these rankings, and makes me wonder about or education system, when JUST our area (i.e. NOVA) has approximately 45 of the top 1500 high schools in the nation.
For one, being a native of Northern Virginia and a proud recipient of a Fairfax County Public School education (big ups to the Class of 00′ from #106 Lake Braddock!) I’m not too surprised to hear that almost the entire county is on this list. Schools that didn’t even EXIST when I was in high school (i.e. Westfield HS) have also made the list. From what I’ve been told, the metro area is one of the most educated regions in the world and some of that can be attributed to the premium we put on a high school education. I’m sure in Fairfax County we pull much of that weight, considering the WORST public school system is right over the 14th Street bridge.
I’m somewhat skeptical about the ideology for ranking the schools: the number of Advanced Placement, Intl. Baccalaureate and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors.
I don’t think there is a one-to-one correlation between the amount of students taking an AP/IB/C test and effective education. If you also read closely they have an E&E rating, which is a percentage of how many graduating students actually passed one or more of these tests. I think it would have been more effective to add that to the ranking criteria, as this proves how effective the teaching is. What good is a group of students that have access to certain education if they aren’t passing the exams? School #1403 had an E&E of 40%, while #8 had an E&E of 32%. So they are getting all their students to take the tests but a lot of them aren’t graduating…doesn’t make much sense to me!
But then I also raised my eyebrows at this fact: VA is far from the largest state in the country, in terms of population, population density, or acreage. So its a bit disturbing to me to hear that so many of the top public schools are here, which inversely means that so many other places DON’T have top ranked schools. These are all generalizations that I’m making but some of the schools that are listed below as top public schools in the nation (from our area), I wouldn’t think of sending my child to. And yet they are ranked above thousands of other schools.
Anyway, to see which schools in NOVA are ranked, click the link at the top.
u do the dishes . . .
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I know another bridge you can cross to find a terrible school district…the woodrow wilson!!
I’m a Lake Braddock grad, and i know for a fact that my senior class (’96 WHAT UP!!!) did not help the fact that LB is #106 in the cuntry.
Some kids I went to college with went to a catholic high school where their teachers told that that Dinosaurs fossils were put on earth by the Devil to trick people into thinking the world is older than it really is.
Meanwhile I was taking calculus and AP History. NOVA is a breeding ground for capitalistic leaders. If you don’t compete, you get weeded out and end up at NOVA community college, which is still one of the best CC in the country.
GO figure.