Advantages to attending super-difficult high school?

cobrat
Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:29:14 +0000

No, but the more rigorous schools tend to be those in areas with greater resources. Magnets may be somewhat an exception. In our state schools are funded primarily by local property taxes and wealthy areas have better schools. Poorer areas have less good schools, fewer APs offered, pay-to-play sports and music, etc.



In NYC’s case from the stats I last checked, the city’s DOE actually spent the least per-capita on students who attended the academically rigorous public magnets compared with students at other high schools…and the majority were eligible for free/reduced priced school meals.

Even college friends* who assumed they were bastions of SES privilege ended up having to concede their arguments were off-base when I showed them those stats and mentioned the SES composition of most of my HS classmates and what I knew about the other NYC public magnets.

Heck, back then…we had some siblings of HS classmates from well-off families who ended up going to private schools because they didn’t score high enough on the exam to get into our HS or our public magnet rivals. Thus, being well-off is no guarantee one will make it in to the NYC public magnet.


Ironically, most of those classmates attended high priced academically rigorous private/boarding schools or public schools in wealthy suburban districts.