<p>The WSJ last year published a story ranking the top 65 high schools in the country - public and private - in terms of the percentage of the graduating class going to "elite" colleges. The top public high school was Thomas Jefferson at 32. (While Hunter, which was number 9, is tuition free, I don't think it's a public school - I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong about that.)</p>
<p>Sigh...up way to late....</p>
<p>Hunter is publicly funded, but not by the Board of Ed, which is a good thing in terms of some independence, but a bad thing because Stuy and Bronx Science, etc. receive at least $1000 to $2000 more per student in public funding (City Council and some odd arrangement through CUNY (City University of NY/community college allocations). Hunter College itself is practically unrelated to the HS; kids go to Columbia for 2nd/3rd year calc. and higher math.</p>
<p>Curious about that study by WSJ; about 40-50% or more to elites? (of that 30% Ivies or so)? That ranking is even better than Worth magazine! {Of course, it's smaller size helps with percentage comparisons, and probably with overall educational environment, which is serious but without being the pressure cooker that appears to be Stuy and TJ.} Also: no windows in most rooms and CO poisoning - true</p>
<p>Why is every high school "the best"? Because of boosterism. Polls show that most parents think our nation's schools are failing to adequately educate children. Those same parents overwhelming think their own local public school is doing an excellent job at educating students; it's all the other schools which are failing.</p>
<p>Here's the link to the WSJ ranking of schools:</p>
<p>Here's the accompanying WSJ article:
<a href="http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1018890612719.html%5B/url%5D">http://webreprints.djreprints.com/1018890612719.html</a></p>
<p>I think we have CC representation from most of these schools. The schools are ranked by the success of the school in sending the kids to the top 10 colleges (7 Ivies + Pomona, UChi, Duke). Perhaps we can draw the conclusion that the privates still do a better job of getting kids into top schools. Even though the median SAT some top publics may be higher, those top publics still don't have as much success with admissions. Or, could these kids be making different choices. I would love to see a ranking of schools based on kids getting into their top choice school....no matter what school that is. </p>
<p>Note: the admission numbers are based on "enrollment", not acceptance. Public schools may be disadvantaged in this study because their studenst may elect to follow the merit money to enroll in a LAC or state school. Keep this in mind.</p>
<p>Hunter is definitely public. In fact, it was the first public high school for girls in NYC.</p>
<p>Brief history: Historically, upper middle class young women became teachers. With the flood of Irish and German immigrants after the Civil War, the population in public elementary schools surged. Too few upper middle class young American women were willing to teach in the schools with the rough young immigrants and there was a teacher shortage. </p>
<p>Thomas Hunter--a remarkable man who was an Irish immigrant himself--was on NYC's school board . He suggested offering girls a free education to become a teacher in exchange for teaching in NYC for a certain number of years after graduation. Thus was born the NYC Female Normal School. (Normal being the word for teaching.) At the time, free education for girls ended with eighth grade. The chance for a free education beyond that drew the best and the brightest, but families were reluctant to give up their daughters' wages and support them. Hunter's compromise was to offer the girls housing and food in dormitories. While this didn't mean their parents got wages from them, they were relieved of the responsibility of feeding and housing them.(I think he also required them to wear uniforms.) Hunter himself felt getting the girls away from their families was essential, partly because he felt that by living with one another, the girls would lose the prejudices different ethnic groups felt towards one another (which would be important for a classroom teacher) and partly because he thought if the girls stayed in their own neighborhoods they'd find it harder to turn away from the petty crime in their neighborhoods and too easy to get pregnant before they finished school. </p>
<p>Admission was extremely competitive. Think about it--get in and you became a teacher, a respected profession. If you didn't, you left school after 8th grade and went to work in a factory in a day when 12-14 hour shifts were usual and wages were very low. </p>
<p>Normal school was high school plus two years of what we'd consider college. The Normal School split into Hunter Teacher College (which later became Hunter College, part of CUNY) and Hunter College High School after it became necessary to have four years of college to teach. (That's very simplified, but the general idea.) The problem was that when this happened, the high school had too many teachers. So, to keep all of them, the high school added two years before high school, rather than after. The school stayed a six year institution. Students begin Hunter College H.S. in seventh grade. (The dormitory system had ended many years before.) It was when the split occured and there was no longer a "normal school" that the school was renamed for its founder, Thomas Hunter. </p>
<p>In the old days, Stuyvesant was all male and the Hunter girls were Stuy's official cheerleaders, homecoming queens, etc. Then in the '70s, Stuy got sued because it was all male. When it went co-ed, the boys demanded Hunter do the same. I believe the first co-ed class graduated in '77. (BTW, Bronx Science was co-ed when both Stuy and Hunter were single sex and in the 60s many kids chose Science because it was co-ed.) </p>
<p>To this day, Hunter College H.S. is run by the school of education at Hunter College, not by the Board of Ed. There is an affiliated public elementary school as well.</p>
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I think all high schools are above average, but only a third or so of them are the best in the country
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<p>makes no sense to me. What is average then? and 1/3rd are the best???</p>
<p>Jonri - Hunter is near the top of the elite admissions list...at number 9 out of 65. It's the only public school in the top 30.</p>
<p>Hunter's numbers become even more impressive now that I read that Columbia's data was not available as to which HSs are feeding it. Thus, Hunter's numbers might be even higher if students go on to attend Columbia, which seems likely.</p>
<p>Shash_Rao:</p>
<p>"I think all high schools are above average, but only a third or so of them are the best in the country."</p>
<p>It was a joke - I think there's a sarcastic line about a mythical county in Garrison Keillor's book, where he says 'all high schools here are above average'.</p>
<p>I have not read this entire thread but read it early on and now the most recent posts. Earlier on, there was discussion as to the criteria of "best" high school and basing it on SAT scores. I certainly cannot imagine evaluating how good a school educates kids based on SAT score results, but that is just me. I would want to know way more about the actual education and teaching/learning. </p>
<p>Now, I am reading of the list of best high schools and how it is based on getting kids into the top colleges. By the way, there is no doubt that these ARE great high schools. However, I have two comments on that criteria. One is that not ALL high schools have as their "mission" to get kids into the top colleges. Certainly that is NOT the case at all at our public high school. On that same vein, I have seen local parents send their kids away to boarding school and lots of the motivation seems to be to "get the child into a top/better college". I never understood that. I would pick a boarding/private school more if I thought my child might be happier there or if the education was just a better situation, but not so that X led to Y. I really think it is the kid who gets into college, not so much the school he/she came from. </p>
<p>My second thought is that you could use the phrase, "which came first, the chicken or the egg?" when you look at these "best" high schools. The population of kids going to these privates or even the publics and the population of those communities, it is kinda a no brainer that THOSE kids are going to be the ones who fare well with selective college admissions. Their schools are full of a certain kind of student in the first place (not knocking the education they get there but they are also dealing with the kinds of kids who are going to be very good students in the first place....they simply are all in one place). Here, we have such a mix of students. We have a handful of students who could rival any student at those elite high schools and have the "goods" to get into elite colleges. But we also have students in our high school who will never be going to college. We have a broad mix. </p>
<p>So, it is not so much where you went but who you are. And there are more "who you are's" at an elite prep or "best" public high school. The populations are far different than in schools such as ours. </p>
<p>My D, a freshman at Brown, has a roomie who went to an elite day school. Out of that child's graduating class of 80 at that school, 6 kids last year got in ED to Brown. That is some percentage. Contrast that to our high school, where out of the entire class of 154 kids in ED or RD, my child was the only one to go to ANY Ivy. My D at Brown's next door classmate in the dorm went to St. Paul's. She has met more kids coming out of private schools there than not. So, yes, the statistics are accurate but I still don't think it is the private school that is getting them in, it is a certain kind of student and there are more of them at these "best" high schools. My other D's best friend goes to one of those private day schools on the list and she told my D that 17 kids got into Yale this year. And yes, there is an advantage that the selective colleges have ongoing rapports with these "best" high schools (just read the Gatekeepers for THAT inside look). By the same token, with everyone at the elite high schools applying to the same elite colleges, the competition, so to speak, amongst themselves, makes it hard for an otherwise terrific student to perhaps make it out of the pack and into the elite college. Conversely, while at our rinky dink rural public high school, kids are not so much competing against one another for a spot at an elite college. But these top students at our high school are ever much as "good" as the many from the elite high schools. Also, being from an unknown public high school has pros and cons in terms of admissions at an elite college. The con is they have never heard of the high school and have not taken students in the past. The pro is that the child's profile might be a bit "different" than just another Exeter or Andover kid as they don't want to FILL the freshman class with kids from any one particular place. </p>
<p>Susan</p>
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</p>
<p>makes no sense to me. What is average then? and 1/3rd are the best?
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</p>
<p>Yes, it was a joke. But in jest is truth. More than a decade ago, John Cannell, a medical doctor in the United States, was puzzled to discover that most public school districts claimed to be "above average" on standardized tests, which shouldn't be mathematically possible. His investigations into that phenomenon, now called the Lake</a> Wobegon effect, showed that many school districts cheated in how they administered the tests (by excluding low-scoring students from the tested group, for example), producing test results that misleadingly showed that the school district was "above average."</p>
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So, it is not so much where you went but who you are. And there are more "who you are's" at an elite prep or "best" public high school. The populations are far different than in schools such as ours
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Totally agree that these schools success is not because they necessarily have certain techniques that make them better than the "non-best", but the raw material they have to work with. And, as you said, it is a chicken-and-egg; wherever it started, it becomes a cycle that the best students want the best programs/teachers which attract the best students who want the.....</p>
<p>Another type of "best" school are those rare successes you read of who took a disadvantaged population and had great success in exciting them about learning, advancing them on to higher education etc.</p>
<p>Ellenf, I've read that too. It makes sense, wouldn't you be a bad parent if you didn't ensure your kids were getting a good education?</p>
<p>If the criterion for "best" is added value, and if we expand our consideration to include elementary schools, perhaps we would mention the Westside Preparatory School in Chicago founded by Marva Collins. I think it is ludicrously easy to take the high socioeconomic status young people in my neighborhood and reach the meager standards of my local high school. (Most children in my neighborhood report to my homeschooled son that they are bored and never challenged in school.) But it takes real teaching ability and a sound curriculum to take children from a poor neighborhood in Chicago (I've been there) and get them reading Tolstoy and Shakespeare while they are still in elementary school.</p>
<p>Sorry about the confusion on Hunter - I knew it wasn't run by the NYC public school system, but I didn't realize it was publicly funded nonetheless.</p>
<p>My son's guidance counselor does an "experiment" every year with the junior parents at their first college night. He asks everyone in the auditorium to write down on a slip of paper whether their child is in the top half of the class or the bottom half of the class, and then has them put their slip of paper into a box anonymously. Most years 90%-95% are in the top half. :)</p>
<p>It does make the point pretty effectively - that people can be unrealistic about their expectations. Though I think most parents still believe that their child should be in the top half of the school when it comes to college placement.</p>
<p>I just talked to one of the teachers at Cy Falls HS in TX and she said they would probably make the list again this year (US News and Wrold Report) because of # of National Merit scholars, SAT and ACT scores and large # of ivy acceptances. Apparently they are ranked each year, so depending on the year, any of those schools could be the top.</p>
<p>Wow, I didn't know that USNWR had a ranking of high schools. Newsweek also did one, but I think they later admitted that the criteria used wasn't going to provide a realistic view of privates. .</p>
<p>For all intensive purposes, magnet schools are like private schools. New Jersey doesnt have any magnets that i know of (is AAST a magnet?) and the state is consistently ranked at the top of the nation, i think #1 in this past year. My high school, West Windsor-Plainsboro HS North was ranked the #1 public in NJ by NJ Monthly magazine with a 1224 avg SAT. Fully public, meaning the student body are 100% residents of the local district.</p>
<p>Quite frankly as long as a student goes to at least any wealthy public, they will have the opportunity to achieve their potential in terms of what college they go to. I am proud of my public high school education.</p>
<p>from a while back
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I'd say my public high in St. Louis, Clayton, was one of the best public schools in the country...at least the state, we spent something like 13000/student, small teacher ration, and all that jazz...</p>
<p>p.s. did someone say they went to MICDS?
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</p>
<p>That would be me.</p>
<p>St. Louis does have some very good public schools: Clayton, Ladue, Parkway, Rockwood, UCity. We also have our fair share of districs with "questionable" academics: STLCIty Shcools, Hazelwood, Riverview Gardens, Francis Howell, and Ferguson/Florissant.</p>
<p>This thread illustrates how many people around the country think that their own local schools are at a top level. One could easily fill the entering class of a highly selective college just with the A-average students at the schools mentioned so far in this thread, and there are many other high schools that haven't been mentioned so far in this thread.</p>
<p>Slightly OT: are US private schools ranked, either with the "high-performing" publics or alone? I don't recall ever seeing such a list. (OK, apologies for the threadjack, send me PMs if you know of any such list.)</p>