[mumblemumble]

My favorite thing I've ever heard said by the principal of our kids' elementary school: "Our test scores are down, which is great, maybe that will keep some of the school shoppers away this year."

Our city has a school choice program that includes a portal where you can look up these kinds of quantitative measures, and I think I agree with him. Tiger parents slosh from school to school as they chase after rankings, and, much like ill-contained liquid cargo in ships, all that motion tends to destabilize and capsize schools.

Sadly, I don't think smaller higher education institutions can afford to take such a relaxed attitude about it. They don't get to have an enrollment backstop in the form of a semi-captive audience of parents who live nearby and aren't hyperactive enough to commit to spending upwards of an hour every weekday trucking their kids back and forth across town.

[aantix]

It's such a strange way to evaluate schools.

My high school was inner city. But they had AP programs, computer science classes, advanced mathematics.

It's all about your child and the individual path they'll take within the school.

And if they have or two smart friends that they enjoy hanging out with, they're golden.

[gruez]

>And if they have or two smart friends that they enjoy hanging out with, they're golden.

The probability of that happening is greater if average test scores are higher. The "tiger parents" aren't just looking for schools that offer the best programs, they're also looking for schools that have less problematic students that disrupt the learning environment and would be bad influences on their kids.

[aantix]

You make friends with those that you're in class with.

The entire school isn't the friend pool, but your proximity of classmates.

If the class room sizes are roughly the same, probability of meeting two smart friends will be roughly the same.

[gruez]

>If the class room sizes are roughly the same, probability of meeting two smart friends will be roughly the same.

Why must both schools have the same proportion of potential "smart friends"? Even if the school with better test grades somehow had the same proportion as all the other schools, all the tiger parents flocking to that school is going to change the proportion.

[LeanderK]

not sure exactly what we're talking about but why must tiger parents have smart kids? I thought its just really pushy parents?

As a kid, to light the spark of a topic, i would say its more important that the other kids are genuinely passionate about something. Otherwise its just more homework.

Also you forget that the mean usually doesn't tell you a lot if you, like the poster mentioned, are mainly influenced by the immediate surroundings. If your kid is academically interested and already has good, smart friends, the gain of switching a better on average school might be negative.

[WalterBright]

My high school offered a nice selection of impressive advanced classes. The course catalog was amazing.

I took those classes, and they were all milquetoast.

It was all just a potemkin village.

In contrast, the Caltech course catalog had classes blandly labeled "introductory" when they were well known for being brutal.

[mumblemumble]

Similar experience here. I went to four high schools. The best ones, academically, were the bog-standard schools that people love to use as an easy punching bag.

The ones where classes were a breeze and barely challenging at all were the private college prep school and the not-quite-as-rich-but-still-pretty-wealthy high school in the suburban white flight community. My read on the situation was that teachers had figured out that every single parent believed their kid deserved a constant stream of gold stars, and had the leisure time and resources to make their lives miserable until it started happening. Also the white flight school cared a lot about its football team so you better make for damn sure that the classes aren't so challenging that the quarterback has trouble balancing their time spent on homework, practice, and partying.