Board member J. Warren Geurin (Sterling) said the School Board believes high schools operate best with a maximum of 1,800 students. Schools with more than 2,000 students are not desired for educational reasons, he said.
I hate to bring this up again, but have you never heard of
Stuyvesant High School? Enrollment: 3300. How's about Bronx High School of Science? Enrollment: 2800. Brooklyn Tech? Enrollment: over 4900.
These are schools parents glory to have their children go to.
Stuyvesant:
According to a September 2002 high school ranking by Worth magazine, 3.67% of Stuyvesant students went on to attend Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities, ranking it as the 9th top public high school in the United States and 120th among all schools, public or private. In December 2007, The Wall Street Journal studied the freshman classes at eight selective colleges (Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams College, Pomona College, Swarthmore College, U. Chicago, and Johns Hopkins), and reported that Stuyvesant sent 67, or 9.9% of its 674 seniors, to them...
...Stuyvesant has contributed to the education of several Nobel laureates, winners of the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize, and a host of other accomplished alumni. In recent years, it has had the second highest number of National Merit Scholarship semi-finalists, behind Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia...
...Stuyvesant, along with other similar schools, has regularly been excluded from Newsweek's annual list of the Top 100 Public High Schools. The May 8th, 2008 issue states the reason as being, "because so many of their students score well above average on the SAT and ACT." US News & World Report, however, included Stuyvesant on its list of "Best High Schools" published in December 2009, ranking 31st.
{Note: Wikipedia doesn't have the current college acceptance rate overall for graduates, but in my year (1987), only two of the 791 graduates did NOT go straight on to college. Of the surviving members of my class, to my knowledge only one has not graduated from a university at this date.}
Bronx HS of Science:
Bronx Science has developed a worldwide reputation as one of the best high schools in the United States, public or private, ranking fourth in U.S. News and World Report's 2008 list of America's "Gold-Medal" high schools. It attracts an intellectually gifted blend of culturally, ethnically,[7][8] and economically diverse students from New York City.
Every year almost all Bronx Science graduates go on to four-year colleges; many attend Ivy League and other prestigious schools. Bronx Science has counted 132 finalists in the Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent Search, the largest number of any high school. Seven graduates have won Nobel Prizes — more than any other secondary education institution in the world — and six have won Pulitzer Prizes.
Brooklyn Tech:
Brooklyn Tech is a founding member of the National Consortium for Specialized Secondary Schools of Mathematics, Science and Technology. Brooklyn Tech is noted for its famous alumni (including two Nobel Laureates), its academics, and the large number of graduates attending prestigious universities. Routinely, more than 98% of its graduates are accepted to four-year colleges with the 2007 graduating class being offered more than $1,250,000 in scholarships and grants. It appears as #63 in the 2009 ranking of the annual U.S. News & World Report "Best High Schools" list.
I'm not saying that large schools always work, or that they are appropriate in every situation, but large schools can be educationally rigorous and can, in fact, beat the pants off Loudoun County's schools academically.
So, my dear School Board, you're going to have to come up with something other than "educational reasons" for why you won't even study the FEASIBILITY of expanding the size of the existing schools. Because I just gave you a total of over ten thousand reasons why that won't fly.
All my best wishes,
Liz Miller
The Doorbell Queen
I don't know much about the topic, but I bet a lot depends on what kids are used to~ Those schools you cite are in a big, metropolitan area were students are used to the anonymity & hustle/bustle of big city life. I graduated from a large suburban HS (600 in my class) and although I did well academically, I felt rather lost in the school. Just my 2cents. As a parent, I'd prefer smaller schools for my children. They can go "big" in college. :)
ReplyDelete~erica g
Langley High School in McLean is the 2nd best school in the state. Enrollment = 2100.
ReplyDeleteThe point is, the school board should not just say, "no, we won't look at whether it will work for us." and say it's for Educational Reasons. That is utter horse pucky.
Liz, to further clarify, I am the one dopey dropout!! LOL But, I am attending school now! :)
ReplyDeleteOkay, then, TWO!
ReplyDeleteI was thinking of someone else. And, hey, I just got my Bachelor's two years ago.
Ok, there is someone else. I didn't sleep well the last few nights, thinking I was the only one......
ReplyDeleteMy daughter-in-law's sister graduated from Stuyvesant last year and went on to NYU this year, so while I never had personal experience with such a school, I've heard her talk a lot about it. I think the big difference is that it is VERY difficult to get into Stuyvesant. It was not her neighborhood school--not by any means. She had to commute from Queens, and spent a good hour to hour-and-a-half commuting each way. A school like Stuyvesant doesn't have to deal with the broad spectrum that the typical public high school has to accommodate. Yes, a large high school can work, but I'm not sure this is a fair comparison.
ReplyDeleteI used Stuyvesant because that's where I went, but I'll bring Langley back into the discussion (where teh Spouse went). Currently the second highest ranked school in the state. It is a zoned school, and doesn't use tests for admission. Enrollment is 2100 students.
ReplyDeleteLarge schools can and do work.
I'm not saying we must have them, but it is absolutely maddening for the school board to unanimously vote against even looking at whether it's FEASIBLE to expand some existing schools. And to say that it's for educational reasons when Loudoun's schools are being surpassed educationally by schools that are larger is flat out wrong.
I think that (as always) it all comes down to money.
ReplyDeleteHigher enrollment begets more teachers; more teachers means more expenditures; more expenditures = higher taxes. The dilemma, I believe, is class size. Keeping classes at 20 or 25 (or whatever they are right now) is the problem. For every, say, 25 extra students enrolled, you need to hire one more teacher (and most likely an aide).
(Geezer alert) Back in the day, the class sizes at my schools were always in the 30 to 40 students-per-class range, and I don't believe my education suffered because of it. Until parents are willing to accept larger class sizes (and I don't believe many of them are), we're going to have to live with high school enrollments in the 2K range.
Just my opinion.