“Any SAT score starting with 7” was a comment by an MIT person on CC and refers to the main SAT sections.
It was written before the New SAT. The comment was, roughly, ‘so we know you can do the work…but it takes more than that to get an admit.’ In other words, not “good enough.”
Count on it being higher now, not 7xx. Frankly, 720 feels low, considering the competition to elites.
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We don’t know enough to believe a headmaster at a toney prep “charged” a parent, etc. All we know is it’s alleged. And, “This direct evidence of retaliatory animus is not disputed by Sidwell.” Nor am I sure a claim is enough “evidence.”
Nor do we know “all” the teachers shared this purported animus, as also claimed. All?
If someone’s got Sidwell comments that they acknowledge the charge or comments, let me know.
What would motivate Sidwell to “retaliate”? This is a school with a reputation to uphold, not an insulted middle schooler on the playground. Moreover, its reputation includes getting students into Ivies, statistics which “retaliation” would worsen. Am I missing something?
The teacher LORs differ from the counselor report forms. And the counselor should be able to be diplomatic but accurate. True for the LORs too, but the counselors and adcomms probably know each other.
“We don’t know enough to believe a headmaster at a toney prep “charged” a parent, etc. All we know is it’s alleged. And, “This direct evidence of retaliatory animus is not disputed by Sidwell.” Nor am I sure a claim is enough “evidence.””
Exactly. I can see not responding because who wants to get into a pissing match about this? “No, I didn’t”. “Yes, you did!” Sounds like a squabble among kindergartners. Unless the plaintiff puts forth several witnesses, it’s a he said, he said.
It’s a fallacy to think all kids attending such schools are rich. Many middle class and lower income students as well. Regardless, smaller classes and more personalized attention are helpful in many ways, yes, because faculty and staff truly know their students. Despite how some like to claim otherwise, class size does make a difference.
@roethlisburger Hope you are voting to put dollars into your local schools.
The ‘facts’ being quoted were in the complaint or in the response to the motion for summary judgment. When a party moves for summary judgment, it cannot dispute the facts (or at least most of the facts) and the judge takes the facts as stated by the parties, in favor of the responding party. Sometimes the facts just don’t matter so the moving party (in this case Sidwell) doesn’t correct every single thing. Were the SAT scores submitted late? Doesn’t matter since it wasn’t Sidwell’s obligation to submit them. Did the head of school say he wanted the family “gone gone gone”? Doesn’t matter since the question of law didn’t deal with that. So Sidwell admits that the Head said that but so what? That didn’t keep the girl out of Harvard.
In summary judgment, the facts are not in dispute. If you want to dispute facts you have to do that at trial If it had gone to trial, I’m sure Sidwell would have had some ‘facts’ of its own. For summary judgment the moving party says “there are no facts in dispute, here’s the question of law, Judge you decide.”
Counselors may not know their students at a large public HS, but at Sidwell its most likely they are quite familiar with their students. And IIRC, the plaintiff in this case attended for 14 years.
This is just so silly. It does not simply pass the reasonable test.
One America’s best day schools.
What is alleged goes contrary to their self interests. Plain and simple.
People do not generally vote against self interest unless personal gain or larger societal issues are at stake.
Long lived Institutions never do.
A Quaker School to boot. you’d have to know how they operate to understand . just how antithetical this is culturally.
A school with a real liberal ethos and DC location.
A student of color. The same school and same time as America’s first Black president and was classmate of said President’s daughters.
A school very interested in PR and elite school admissions.
A lifer at said school. K through 12. They like to promote these successes. They love this revenue.
Student of high academic credentials and athleticism.
The daughter of African immigrants and became a ER doc.
They wanted this kid to strike out why ? They knew the parents were a pita and wanted that heartache?
The educators at this school with such a track record of success and skill purposely undermined this student- contrary to all they stand for and against their self interests.
No where did I say every student was poor. Most people at Sidwell are rich or at least upper middle class or have the benefit of family money(rich grandparents) and it’s a fallacy to claim otherwise.
Individuals often have different motivations and timelines than larger organizations, which can lead to conflicting behaviors. This type of conflicting motivations and timelines can lead to disastrous consequences, such as many key contributing factors in the subprime mortgage crisis.
It also sounds like the events prior to the settlement with legal threats and parents frequently complaining got under the skin of some Sidwell employees, with comments like below. Having owned multiple small Internet companies with forums, I’ve had my share of legal threats, and they can be quite emotional for all parties involved.
I would not find it surprising if some persons at Sidwell held a grudge after the settlement result, which involved having to pay $50k to the Adetus and recalculate some of Dayo’s grades. I’d expect there was a lot of internal discussion among Sidwell employees during the settlement, including speaking negatively about Dayo and her family. Not everyone individual at Sidwell is necessarily going to brush that off and go back to business as usual with doing their best to support Dayo and the Adetus, even if doing so would likely be best for Sidwell in the long term.
Many details are missing. We don’t know exactly what was said and whether those comments were accurate. Maybe some of the GC or LOR comments were not as great as they could be, even if they were technically accurate. There are many possibilities, which makes it difficult to draw conclusions.
I could buy the pro-headmaster arguments better if it were not for the fact that the man who was headmaster there while the girl was in school resigned in the same year that she graduated. Perhaps he moved to a better position. Perhaps he was of retirement age. Perhaps he was just tired of the place. Still.
He’s now head of a new school in the UAE. Oh, man, I know several eudcators who did this and the $ was beyond fine.
QM, some of us just don’t see the smoke, much less any fire.
One possibility, while we’re speculating, is that SF liked the girl (just not the parents,) saw the pressures and chose to support her, not suggest she leave.
We have no idea where that bigfat line is drawn, between the school’s intents and actions and the lawsuit claims the school was dead set against her, everyone, “all” teachers, etc.
If he “charged” a family. The board would have ousted him that week. He wouldn’t have resigned over the summer.
If he lost his temper with the constant complaining and threats, maybe he angrily confronted them.
What I think is they showed up at an event or at the school and approached a teacher or gc. Headmaster cur them off at the pass. Probably got a bit heated.
Worse case is he charged them unprovoked because of his hatred for successful Nigerian parents and their gifted child.
Sidwell has the ability to select from an elite pool of applicants for headmasters. rhe very minimum this would be a national search, board oversight and thorough vetting. No way this was his first “rodeo” with problematic parents. And his xenophobia and racism would not have been passed muster.
Lol, I take some of that back. He spent some years in Dubai and LinkedIn now says he owns a garden place to “Market Gardening Organically-Grown Vegetables” and it seems to include some related ecology activies.
Something rather “my generation” about that.
@privatebanker “Charged” seems up for interpretation. Came out from behind his desk, quickly?
There were multiple related legal events: The first July 2013 settlement involved Sidwell agreeing to pay $50k and recalculate some of Dayo’s math grades, as quoted below. This settlement occurred in the summer before Dayo’s senior year, when Dayo was still a student and had not yet applied to colleges. A quote is below:
The Adetus were not satisfied that Sidwell was following the settlement agreement and not retaliating. They filed a Breach of Settlement petition in November 2013, while Dayo was applying to colleges. They also filed a Second OHR Complaint in May 2014. A quote is below:
In November, 2016, the Adetus filed another claim requesting that Sidwell pay the Adetus a sum of not less than $1 million due to “legally cognizable injuries” resulting from retaliation against Dayo, which violated the previous settlement. The lawsuit concluded in July 2017, agreeing with Sidwell’s request for summary judgement. The Plantiff was ordered to pay $37,834.58 in legal fees. A quote is below
The new 2019 lawsuit is an appeal to one of previous decisions.
I want to mention that athletic recruits and their parents are also vetted by the college coaches. College coaches may talk to the high school coaches, club coaches, older student-athletes and their parents and anyone else connected to the sport. Parents often participate in the recruiting process, visit campus, attend campus and team events. All this happens well before the admissions gets involved, LORs are read, etc. The opportunities to be dropped like a hot potato if any negative information comes up are abundant. No team needs parents from hell.
In the same time the GCs in the schools like Sidwell may also participate in the recruiting process and contact college coaches to advocate for their charges. I saw that first hand.
On the other hand we really do not know if she really was a legitimate athletic recruit.
One thing that puzzles me about this discussion and others that I have engaged in on CC: Other posters seem much quicker to accept a school’s authority, and to say that if teachers are unfair, the student should just get over it–life is unfair, everyone encounters unfair teachers . . . At the same time, in discussions having to do with the workplace, I seem to come in much more strongly on the side of “stick it out,” “your boss is not actually that unreasonable,” and “maybe your co-worker has personal issues.” This is probably just due to differences in life experiences.
In this case, I could see the possibility that the statements made by the family are more or less correct. I sympathize with the student–generally I would take the side of the least powerful person in a situation. (I think there is only one other poster who agrees.) It looks to me as though at a minimum, there is fault on both sides in this case. And only one side involves adults exclusively.