And speaking of TJ . . . yeah, exholt, TJ is FCPS’s incredibly cutthroat magnet school (although I’m sure it’s substantially less diverse than where you went), which IMO throws another wrench in this whole story. Yes, Oakton is rich, and the parents expect their kids to go to good colleges, and therefore it’s competitive/high stress in a certain sense. The thing is, though, that most of the kids there are barely hovering around average in terms of intellectual ability, and it definitely showed in terms of grade inflation, the difficulty of even AP or honors classes, etc.

Actually, I wonder what the average SAT numbers for different demographics at Oakton and South Lakes would be if kids who went to TJ but lived in the districts for these schools were factored back in? Or just how many kids from each school’s respective districts ended up at TJ, and of what ethnicities? It certainly wouldn’t tell you much about the quality of either high school, but I think it would be interesting.

Anyway, yeah, education policy is thorny, and SO tied to local circumstances.

I went to Falls Church, so yeah, calling South Lakes a poor, too-diverse-for-the-white-pta-moms school sounded quite strange.

Hey, any chance you went to Luther Jackson MS? that’s where all my Oakton friends come from :D

Disturbing considering the countless accounts I’ve heard from mostly socio-economically privileged college classmates, including those who graduated from some of the nation’s renowned private boarding schools who managed to go through 4 years of high school averaging straight As without having to open their texts more than a handful of times or otherwise putting in any meaningful effort.

Not surprisingly, most of those classmates had a rude awakening their first year when they found the Profs were not only assigning them far more work than they were used to, but also had far greater expectations in the quality and rigor of said work. Some were shocked and even angry when they found many working-class scholarship students who attended “inferior public schools” seamlessly adjusted to college academic life which was reflected in their academic performance and the amount of respect they received from non-snobby classmates who did not make classist generalizations about public school graduates receiving inferior educations compared to their private school educated selves.

It’s always been the rich school where the students are encouraged to go to good colleges and do well..

I attended a public magnet urban high school that was very much like that….with the exception that it was mostly non-White and it had a mostly working/lower-middle class student population during my time there. If anything, the school culture was “Ivy-level college or bust” with the accompanying cutthroat grade/SAT competition where having less than a 90%/100, a schedule full of APs and even some college courses, and 650/800 on all sections meant you were considered irredeemably stupid in the eyes of fellow classmates and even many teachers.

Deal. Sir Charles, please stop the socialist posturing about the plight of the working class, which you pretend to understand so well. Gotta love his bio:

Sir Charles of DC is a lawyer in private practice with over twenty years of experience representing unions, union employee benefit plans, and individual workers. His undergraduate degree is in political science. ..he retains a touch of the frustrated DJ and looks forward to inflicting his tastes on others from time to time, no doubt with the inevitable “I remember when I saw the Clash in this small club back in 1979” commentary, the aging hipster’s equivalent of You kids get off of my lawn.

Hm…he doesn’t have any self-interest in defending the plight of the working class at all.

On the other hand, there are a couple of things that make me uneasy with a “Oh, these disgusting rich people just don’t want their kids going to school with minorities” argument. Knowing what I know about the environments at both schools, I would have chosen Oakton other SLHS any day, and that’s in spite of my hatred for my former spoiled brat classmates. South Lakes’s facilities were not nearly as good, their security team had a reputation for draconian enforcement tactics, and there were more fights and sexual assaults (based on anecdotal accounts, at least). And while I think that the SAT argument is a total red herring, it’s equally misleading to argue from the other side that the educational opportunities are the same given the IB offerings at South Lakes. It’s pretty widely held that AP is the more challenging program.

Obviously the respective demographics of the schools play a huge role in forming these differences, right down to one school offering IB and the other offering AP classes. And, of course, it’s an extraordinary privilege to be in a position to quibble about the differences between one wealthy suburban high school and another, slightly less wealthy suburban high school. If I were reading this story about any other school district, my politics would lead me to believe that the whole thing was, in fact, a thinly veiled aversion to integration . . . but I’m not so sure in this case, even though there was no shortage of racially insensitive, ignorant, or downright prejudiced kids at Oakton. I just really can’t say that I wouldn’t have been extremely upset if I were put in the same situation (although I probably would never resort to litigation).

Lydia, you’re right about the comparison between South Lakes and other FCPS high schools. To me that’s actually another interesting things about this story — Oakton is by no means the snootiest of FCPS high schools (at the very least, Langley, Great Falls and Woodson beat us there), nor is South Lakes the poorest or least white.