I also live in FL. If we lived in the Miami area, there is a magnet school for TECH fields. In our county, there is a magnet school for the arts. There are 3 private schools and many religious schools.
My son stayed at the public school with APs and Honors classes. Of sons small group of friends, only 3 went to UF; one now in med school, another in law school. The rest of his friends did pretty well in college admissions: j Hopkins, Columbia, MIT, Caltech, WashU, and Princeton.
I grew up in Philly area. Even though I attended a local HS, many of my friends sent their kids to private Quaker schools, which had a great reputation. I know my best friend did that for the philosophy of the school, not for college admissions.
@roethlisburger – I wasn’t suggesting that the study compared selective privates with public schools. I was using my own experience (very selective privates vs. moderately selective public) to illustrate what I believe to be a common dynamic – kids who are likely to succeed can succeed in a variety of settings, and the parents of kids who are likely to succeed will usually not place them in a setting where they won’t be able to succeed. I bet anything that’s true among parents of public school kids in Chicago. It’s certainly true of the ones I know!
I’m pretty sure our local HS (average SAT scores around 500 per section old scoring) would be considered no great shakes, but like JHS’s high school there was a sufficiently large group of high achievers it didn’t matter. Those kids did fine. In fact a friend of mine sent one of her kids to Horace Mann while the other stayed at the high school because he wanted to participate in their arts program. Both her kids ended up at U of Chicago. She did feel that her HM kid got much better writing instruction and faster turn around correction on papers and essays. But both did fine in college and are gainfully employed now.
Here in Broward the magnets are just ok. If you are zoned for a bad high school the magnets can be an upgrade depending on the program but the best regular public schools are better than the magnets. The lone exception is McFatter which is fantastic if your kids are into techie stuff. If I was in Palm Beach County my middle child would have been at Bak/Dreyfoos.
Unfortunately, the arts magnets in Broward are at Parkway Middle/Dillard HS, both very rough schools. We looked at those schools for our middle but we weren’t convinced the overall education offered at Parkway/Dillard was going to serve our musical child well.
My kids attend a “tough” urban public school where 70% of the kids are on reduced-lunch. Not only have they gotten a superb education (and great college choices) but I"m happy that they attended a school where they could be part of the larger world…not just in their bubble. And at the same time, having our kids there (and the kids of many people we know) has risen all boats…I’m a big believer in building communities one small step at a time.
My kids also attend a high school where the majority of the kids are non-white and the majority are on free/reduced lunch. It has been a very good experience.
After one week there follwoing 2 years at a mostly Asian/white upper middle class middle school my oldest came home and said how much she loved that noone cared what brand her clothes were, or how much time she spent in the morning on hair and makeup. I had no clue up to then how much she had disliked the social aspect of the more upscale school.
I dislike articles like this that provide a brief and incomplete summary of a study, without offering a good (and free) way to review the actual details found within the study. A preliminary version of the study appears to be at https://aefpweb.org/sites/default/files/webform/aefp40/HSChoice%20AEFP%2017feb2015.pdf . Some of the numbers are a bit different, and it doesn’t list some of the categories where the article suggests possible significant differences between the HSs, such as enrollment in a “highly selective” college. The incomplete info that it does provide mentions the selective HSs had a 40-45% greater HS graduation rate and ~60 percentile difference in ACT score from the bottom tier HS without controls, so even though the “selective” HSs were far less selective than Stuyvesant, they do have large differences from the bottom tier HS. The study found the following differences associated with a “selective” HS compared to a bottom tier HS after all controls. The controls included both pre-HS academic stats and demographic/SES factors.
Stats
+0.51 === 11th Grade ACT
+0.02 === Percent Attendance
0.00 === Enrollment in 4 Year College
I expect that the benefits of a more selective HS largely depend on the individual student. Some students function best with a larger portion of high achieving peers. Some students function best as the big fish in a small pond, with less academic competition from peers. There are also large academic differences between individual students. For example, if a particular student is a likely candidate for failing to graduate HS, then he may be served best by HSs that offer specialty programs to assist with that goal, regardless of selectivity or tier.
Northside College Prep was recently named the best high school in Illinois. The following is their 2013 matriculation list. 16 kids to Chicago and 15 to Northwestern with a smattering of Ivy acceptances is pretty good for a pretty small school.
The Dale-Krueger studies do say that grads of elite colleges were elite students who would have been equally successful at less selective schools. That might even be true, but their studies don’t prove that. There’s a lot of technical details I could argue with in the study, but I’ll just focus on school inclusion and rankings. The first study only included 4 public colleges and the second included 3. I don’t think you can extrapolate anything about public colleges from a sample size of 3. The other issue is that their scoring method for colleges may not reflect most people’s rankings of colleges. For example, Stanford is closer to being “average” than to being in the same league as Yale in the study.
Stanford has had some rapid changes in its undergraduate program over the past 3-4 decades. Based on the undergraduate years Dale and Krueger were studying, it would be a mistake to assume that Stanford and Yale were obviously in the same category.
“Northside College Prep was recently named the best high school in Illinois. The following is their 2013 matriculation list. 16 kids to Chicago and 15 to Northwestern with a smattering of Ivy acceptances is pretty good for a pretty small school”
Honestly I don’t think that says much about the school. It’s so difficult to get into NCP that from the demographics alone you’d expect excellent ACT scores and excellent study habits (white students from more affluent parts of the city need to test in the top 1 percent and have perfect grades to have a decent shot at admission)
Also I don’t know about Chicago but Northwestern definitely favors local kids. At my public HS kids who would have NO shot at Northwesren if from a different state routinely get in. NW knows that locals are lie,y to be the most devoted alums and that definitely plays into things.
We are trying to choose the high school for my DS and we have looked at the local public high school, private school nearby and boarding schools. The course offerings and cohorts are so different between the three options that I cannot see how the final choice could be academically irrelevant.
It is a discussion for another thread but it seems that it must be unusual for kids who take the typical public high school offerings to often “catch-up” to kids who take very accelerated math/science at some of the top boarding schools. I realize it is anecdotal but in our community a kid we know recently dropped out of UPenn as he was unable to keep up and I understand felt like he was too far behind as compared to other freshmen. The kid was one of the better kids to come through the local high school in several years. Another kid from the same high school matriculated to a prestigious state sponsored boarding school but finished in the bottom 10% of her graduating class. She got a great education but was certainly impacted from the local school system which is considered above average.
I entered college not even realizing that my public HS had not prepared me well for college. The prep school and private school kids in my classes blew me away- they had written research papers with citations, used primary sources in history classes, were much more advanced in their foreign languages, etc. And- to me the biggest differentiator- they didn’t see teachers and administrators as “the enemy”- they stayed after class to ask a question, they showed up during office hours to show a professor an outline or draft of a paper, they elicited feedback regularly.
Guess what- after Freshman year we were all on equal footing. The kids like me from public HS’s (whether great, average, or lousy) were incredibly self-directed and motivated. We were used to hard work. We were used to figuring things out for ourselves, and had experience using the library to fill in the gaps- regardless of what they were.
We all did fine. For every academically advanced boarding school kid I met, there were at least three or four who came to college to play lacrosse or to party. For every brilliant private school kid I met, there were at least three or four who functioned well in the highly structured world of a private HS with small classes, but who couldn’t handle a large lecture where the professor didn’t take attendance and nobody cared if you didn’t show up at all (but if you don’t show up- you don’t learn. Public HS kids know this.)
So Yearstogo- I think it all evens up by the end. If you have a highly directed, hard working kid- he or she can thrive in a crack in the sidewalk. If you have a kid who needs a lot of structure and hand-holding- and your local public HS doesn’t do that- then kicking the tires on a private option might make sense.
I graduated Magna Cum Laude- starting slightly behind in college doesn’t mean you end up graduating at the bottom of the barrel.
If that is true, it is likely an outcome of other admission decisions and not by design. Like most private elite schools, they want to be seen as a “national” school pulling applicants from 50 states. However, Northwestern prefers ED students, taking nearly 50 percent of their class from that pool. At our Chicago area high school, NU’s reputation is that they are much easier to get into ED than RD. I would wager that the percent of Chicago area applicants in the ED round are greater than in the RD round as most high stat kids use their ED choice on the Ivy’s or Stanford, and NU hopes to pick more OOS kids in the RD round.
Every “elite” college with which I am familiar, except maybe MIT, gives local applicants some kind of special consideration. Some of that relates to other things – “facbrats,” who have one of the strongest admissions hooks of all, are by definition almost 100% local, the percentage of applicants who are legacies may be higher among local applicants, large donors may also have a tendency to be local, and athletic recruiting may be easier with local players. But that’s not all of it. Community relations and town-gown issues are major concerns for modern universities, and there is real value in being seen as a place where deserving, talented local kids get their shot, and future local leaders are developed.
I am pretty certain that the University of Chicago has a specific outreach/recruitment program and earmarked financial aid budget for Chicago Public Schools kids. And I believe that long-term planners at UChicago deeply envy the extent to which Northwestern is embedded in the civic and political life of the city and state, far more than UChicago has been. They want to have local presence, too (and it didn’t just happen by magic at Northwestern).
This is very interesting to me. I am wondering if it’s becoming even more of a “thing” now with the current cohort raising children. My cohort of parents was interested in moving to towns/neighborhoods with the “best” public schools. I have cousins in their late 30s, with two kids in elementary school, who are doing the opposite. Both parents are professionals.They chose to live in a down-and-out small city where they are among probably the top 0.2% of income-earners. Nobody–literally nobody-- in their school system is in a similar professional category as them. Their first-grader is one of only two students in her class who is not from a single-parent family. More than 75% are on free/reduced-price lunch. When I asked them why they are not choosing to live among professional and economic peers, they said that they have more “control” and “influence” where they are. In a typical suburban district, they’d just be one of the crowd, nothing special. In the down-and-out small city, they are very special. The district is so happy that they are there that they fall all over themselves to please them. Their kids are also the cream of the crop, with many advantages that their peers do not have. Thus, the whole family holds a lot of social power in the community. This makes them happy.
Doesn’t seem like that’s why SouthernHope and vickiSoCal did it, but this is my cousins’ reasoning.
My 2 sons attended a private N-8 school. In 8th grade, they each applied to both private schools and the nationally-known magnet schools. We gave them full choice over where they wanted to go, though we did give our opinions. They both chose the magnet school for HS. For one, the magnet school worked out better than a private school would have. For the other, the result is not as clear but I think either would have worked similarly.
You might be a less prepared public high school graduate but you must be a different kind of student who’s capable of catching up. The reasons why the kind of students you represent come to being are not well researched either because researchers don’t ask the right questions or because they don’t go for the hard-to-collect data. I suspect innate traits and family influence play a major role.