New Trier's reputation

[chet everett]

Perhaps it is like the notoriously damp / drafty parts of great Universties like Oxford where antiquated physical surroundings lead to a more charming and eccentric experience ...

{in reality I think the voters rejected the referendum becuase of the times, poor communication from the district, and lack of evidence that members of the BOE were / are serious about being careful stewards of public funds. Those are all issues that can be addressed and likely will be theough subsequent school board elections...}

[Larry Siegel]

Originally Posted by BRU67

Well, "disasterous" in New Trierspeak is highly different than "disasterous" in other school districts....

At New Trier (and Northside and Payton etc.) you learn to spell it "disastrous."

[DiscerningOne]

Looking at the most recent U.S. News ranking of high schools, New Trier is ranked 14th in Illinois and 406th in the USA.

I'm a NTW alumna from 1970. Back then, most of us thought New Trier was ranked as one of the top high schools in America (if not the BEST).

My question is "What happened?".
How did it slide down so far?
There is still plenty of money from the community funding it.

Were we laboring under a misapprehension back in the 1960s? Perhaps we weren't as outstanding as we thought....

[MarianRavenwood]

New Trier's reputation was always a result of a bit of self-hype and a bit of selective metrics. NCLB took away some of the perception that NT had created for itself.

But in the end, plenty of great people went to average high schools. Plenty of great people went to average colleges, or not at all. Some people make far too much out of rankings.

As NT shows, money helps but its not everything.

[847mom]

Its all about the methodology of the rankings. I take them with a grain of salt. Firstly, most of the highest ranking schools on these lists are selective enrollment. Other ones are based on how many people take AP classes. At NT students are required to be Juniors or Seniors to take AP's. Stevenson HS allows Freshman to take them, so obviously they have a higher number of students in the AP classes. Other studies take into consideration achievement of minorities and household income. Obviously, that wouldn't benefit certain school districts. I find the lists pretty useless.

[wjj]

Originally Posted by 847mom

Its all about the methodology of the rankings. I take them with a grain of salt. Firstly, most of the highest ranking schools on these lists are selective enrollment. Other ones are based on how many people take AP classes. At NT students are required to be Juniors or Seniors to take AP's. Stevenson HS allows Freshman to take them, so obviously they have a higher number of students in the AP classes. Other studies take into consideration achievement of minorities and household income. Obviously, that wouldn't benefit certain school districts. I find the lists pretty useless.

Spot on. All these rankings have big biases that have nothing to do with achievement. For example, Stevenson, one of top non-selective HS in the country is only a 7 out of 10 on Great Schools. Why? Because Great Schools has a heavy thumb on the scale about "poor student" (of which there are few at SHS) progress vs not-poor student progress. So things like very high test scores, high number of students passing AP, several dozen national merit scholars every year, high graduation rate, high number of students going on to a four year college are not as important as a small percentage of "poor students" not closing the achievement gap fast enough. I'm sure NT has the same issue. But anyone who knows SHS and NT and many other schools see these rankings as the joke they have become. And....these rankings change their methodology all the time and one needs to look at the details of the methodology to see what is going on. That's what happened to SHS on Great Schools. SHS was a 10 out of 10 for decades and then this year dropped to 7 out of 10 because Great Schools decided that it is more important to focus on a small number of low achievers rather than the thousands of high achievers.

[Hiruko]

Yawn. Very few people care about these so-called rankings beyond the people who get a boost to their ego from the PUBLIC school their child goes to. I went to New Trier and other local public and private schools. I would only reluctantly send my hypothetical child to the local public schools for various reasons.

[Grlzrl]

Originally Posted by Hiruko

Yawn. Very few people care about these so-called rankings beyond the people who get a boost to their ego from the PUBLIC school their child goes to. I went to New Trier and other local public and private schools. I would only reluctantly send my hypothetical child to the local public schools for various reasons.

Spot on.


Most of the people I know that don't want to go to NT say it's because the school is too big and their student will not be able to participate in things because of too much competition.