Schools – 4s ranch vs Carmel Valley

[serendipity4]

Hello, we reside in Scripps Ranch with EB Scripps as our assigned school, where my son will start KG this fall. We did the school tour too.

My son is advanced learner. He does 3 digit carryover addition, borrowing 3 digit subtraction, basic multiplication, 2nd grade level reading and plays violin and piano. He also is an advanced swimmer. I am not gloating, but basically trying to see if we should switch school districts? We tried to choice into Dingeman (which we heard is better for STEM (which my son is into)), but did not get through. Looking at long term, are 4s ranch schools comparable to Carmel Valley schools(elem, middle and high). I know from friends Ashley falls is not as good as other carmel valley elem schools. I believe 4s ranch elem schools are great. Any comparison between middle and high schools in 4s vs Carmel Valley. We would like to buy a long term house so he continues in that school district, with his friends until high school. How is Oak Valley vs Carmel valley middle and Del norte high vs CCA or Torrey Pines high? I do not think we will be going the private school route, FYI. Any other factors to consider when looking at choosing CV vs 4s ranch? For the amt we are budgeting for a house, we get more sqft in 4s ranch vs CV, as expected, so we are favouring 4s ranch, especially the old 4s area which makes it walkable to stone ranch, boys and girls club, parks and hiking trails, and I believe to the middle and high schools as well. We dont want to be driving all the time as both of us work. We are getting a bigger and more pvt backyard too in 4s vs CV. Please advice.

[Coronita]

way too early to determine if any of your kid’s “advanced learning” is going to carry over into the years that matter. In fact, many of the kids that were smart/advanced learners in elementary ended up falling behind once middle school and high school kicked in. simply because they thought they were so smart and eventually got lazy..
while as the kids that struggled early and cared about doing well developed the work ethics to overcome whatever learning difficulties disabilities they had.

if your kid really is advanced AND self motivisred in STEMs you are wasting your time considering public schools in 4S or Carmel Valley… And if he really isn’t into STEMs no matter how gifted you think he is, it also wont matter which district you pick because both are good.

Many of the peers of my kid that were previously “gate” or “advanced learners” fell off the cliff starting 7th grade because they forgot the part about being self motivated and couldn’t do something as simple as “doing homework”.

Carmel valley schools aren’t really any better or worse than 4S. The difference is the parents involvement. I haven’t been impressed with any of public schools.

There was virtually no difference between my kids elementary school in CarmelV and Chapperal in Rancho Bernardo which a lot of tiger parents in RB seem to flock to….The margin of error was directly related to the parental involvement, who collectively felt the same way…

[an]

flu hit the nail on the head. Also, one thing to also keep in mind is that, college board are now implementing SAT adversity score. So, your perfect SAT score won’t count as much if you live in Carmel Valley as it would have, if you live in South East San Diego. So, flocking to the to the highest rated school might adversely affect their chances to get into college. If your kid is that advance, stick w/ your current school and spend the time with after school enrichment, more sports, more volunteering, etc. Since school will come easy to your kid.

[spdrun]

SAT ad(i)versity score will exist — it will remain to be seen how/where it’s actually used. Private schools already tend to make preference for candidates who did moderately well but are from poorer districts.

[an]

[quote=spdrun]SAT ad(i)versity score will exist — it will remain to be seen how/where it’s actually used. Private schools already tend to make preference for candidates who did moderately well but are from poorer districts.[/quote]
Yep, so live in a poor district and get perfect SAT score and get straight A. It’ll be worth more.

[spdrun]

Wouldn’t schools be wise to that, since they collect information on parental income/job/background?

[Coronita]

The adversity score does not affect the SAT score but it does affect your chances of getting accepted.

It’s part of a long list of practices that see institutionalized War on American Success.

Fortunately, for people who think this is a good idea, they don’t have kids that have to go through this crackshit system. They either don’t have kids or their kids weren’t subject to this bullshit.

Architect of this adversity score is the Head of College Board, who was also was the architect of Common Core

[zk]

[quote=flu]The adversity score does not affect the SAT score but it does affect your chances of getting accepted.

[/quote]

What information/source are you using to come to that conclusion?

[Coronita]

[quote=zk][quote=flu]The adversity score does not affect the SAT score but it does affect your chances of getting accepted.

[/quote]

What information/source are you using to come to that conclusion?[/quote]

Evidence. None… yet. Especially since the score is confidential and private and how it is used will be behind closed doors, which was intentional…Perfect for institutional discrimination, just like affirmative action and quota limits.

seems like our colleges care more about making things “fair” than expecting the best. and yet, employers always say they can’t find enough well qualified technical people, and that’s why they need to hire H1Bs.

Your kids might not have gotten into those UC schools if they had the same crendentials today. neither would I. of course we can’t turn back time and prove that is true. and since your kids don’t need to worry about it, it’s not your problem. so this is a good thing obviously…. lucky you.

[zk]

The adversity score does not affect your SAT score. It is provided in addition to the SAT score and tells the schools considering the student a little about the student’s socioeconomic background. If you are a disadvantaged student, any schools you’re applying to should already know about it (you should tell them).

If you aren’t disadvantaged, and you move to a poor area to get a better adversity score, you have to consider whether that’s worth it. That seems extremely unlikely to me, even if the school doesn’t notice that you’re not poor (which it likely would).

As far as 4S vs. CV, I highly doubt there’s enough difference to matter in any way. But I’m no expert, and I really don’t know. If I were in your shoes, one thing I would do is to see what colleges kids from those places are going to. My daughter just graduated from Canyon Crest Academy, and quite a few of her peers are going to Ivy league schools, MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, etc.

It does seem notably hard to get into the better UCs from CCA. I don’t know whether going to a crappy school district in National City would improve one’s chances or not. Plenty of kids from CCA got numbers in the range of 35 ACT, 1550 SAT, 4.3 gpa, with good essays and plenty of extracurriculars and did not get into some (in some cases any) of the the mid-tier UCs (Santa Barbara, Davis, San Diego, Irvine). I have a hard time picturing kids from National City with similar resumes not getting into all the UCs, including L.A. and Berkeley. I don’t know what the UC situation is in 4S.

An advantage to better school districts, in addition to better resources, better teachers (theoretically) and more parental involvement/encouragement/motivation/pushing (with its pros and cons) is the pressure to keep up with your peers. Not peer pressure (pressure purposefully applied by peers) so much as just the desire to keep up with them (not sure if it’s different or not…) If a student cares about such things (and most of them do), it seems to me they’d be more likely to push themselves at a school where a preponderance of students seems to be aiming for the likes of Harvard and Stanford and Cal Tech and a lot of them hit those targets while many others “settle” for UC Santa Barbara or Vassar (or similar excellent schools).

[zk]

[quote=flu]
Evidence. None… yet. Especially since the score is confidential and private and how it is used will be behind closed doors, which was intentional…Perfect for institutional discrimination, just like affirmative action and quota limits.
[/quote]

Having always opposed affirmative action and similar programs/ideas, I agree with your basic position. I think that discrimination against more-well-off students is already occurring. This may add to it; it may not. It certainly won’t help those with resources. UCs in particular already give a massive advantage to first-generation students.

[quote=flu]

seems like our colleges care more about making things “fair” than expecting the best. and yet, employers always say they can’t find enough well qualified technical people, and that’s why they need to hire H1Bs. [/quote]
I think you overestimate the effects (on the size of the pool of well-qualified technical Americans) of colleges’ efforts to make things “fair.” But that doesn’t change the basic truth that it is, in fact, unfair to students with resources.

[quote=flu]
Your kids might not have gotten into those UC schools if they had the same crendentials today. neither would I. of course we can’t turn back time and prove that is true. and since your kids don’t need to worry about it, it’s not your problem. so this is a good thing obviously…. lucky you.

[/quote]
My kid graduates high school this week and did, in fact, get into UCSB and UC Davis (she’s going to USC). Would she have gotten into Berkeley and L.A. without the priority given by UC to first-generation students? I’m pretty sure she would have. So, maybe not so lucky in that sense. But, the way I see it, she’s lucky to have resources and to be smart and to live in California and to have what it takes to have gotten into some excellent schools. So, despite that probable discrimination, I don’t think she or I are in a position, overall, to complain about luck.

Would she have gotten into L.A. and Berkeley if we had the same resources but moved to a poorer neighborhood to take advantage of a higher adversity score (if they were in play now)? I doubt it. I doubt it more for the additional, peer-generated motivation she had in Carmel Valley than the lack of impact of the adversity score.

At this point, obviously, it’s impossible to tell what impact the adversity score will have. But it obviously won’t help and probably will hurt the already-discriminated-against, better-off applicants. Which I agree is unfair and, to some small degree, results in fewer well-qualified job applicants.

[Coronita]

Zk,

I might have come across as a heartless dick that doesn’t care about the less fortunate. But I am not…

It’s not that I am totally against giving some breaks to those that are less fortunate, or that I think a certain level of subjectivity should be allowed as long as it follows the following guiding principles

1. Any sort of subjectivity criteria/score should be publicly well known, where it can be subject to public scrutiny

2. There should be a clear separation between entities responsible for objectivity versus subjectivity

The College Board built its reputation on establishing a standard based scoring system, where one could objectively determine how well or not so well an individual is based purely on academic performance. It was designed so that someone who gets an 4.0 at school #1 could be evaluated versus someone who gets a 4.0 at school #2, and reduces the changes of one school scoring harder versus the other. In other nations, particularly asian nations, that’s the purpose of national entrance exams at the middle school, high school, etc… so that there is a one common source of truth in determining one peer versus the other. The College Board test was to establish this sort of standardization and objectivity. Folks can argue about how true or not true college board tests accurately represents kid’s knowledge and learning in school (I would argue a lot of it is bullshit, especially the vocabulary section), but the gist of some sort of objective standardization, as it was designed to represent, was a good thing… And if anything, improvements should be made to make sure the test contents were more an accurate representation of kid’s knowledge and learning…objectively….

Now that College Board introduces this adversity score… It sends a completely different message… It basically says, that standardized testing isn’t really that meaningful… Even though we are responsible for coming up with an objective academic score for candidates, it’s not that important, and here’s another score that is a “feel good, adversity score that could possibly explain why that kid didn’t do as well”… This begs the question: why bother even having a standardized test to begin with…

The current CEO of the College Board keeps saying that economic adversity is a real problem and it should be accounted for and dealt with… HOWEVER, if the College Board is really so concerned about economic adversity to disadvantaged kids, why does it continue to charge $65 ($95 if you register late) for each ACT/SAT test one wants to take, $25 the first test result transcript, and $15 each additional transcript thereafter you want to send to a college???

More importantly, why is it that College Board, in 2006 took in $582.9 million of revenue but spent only $527.8 million, or the College Board paid out over $1.3 million in 2009 to the CEO and 19 executives more $300k/year, despite being a “non-profit organization”? I guess the non-profit organization means the organization can’t make a profit… but wow, the executives sure are killing it, more so than a lot of for-profit organizations… The CEO of College Board makes more than the head of the American Red Cross and Harvard

Source: wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_Board

I mean, doesn’t this scream hypocrisy or what???

There are plenty of vehicles where colleges already consider subjectivity in college admissions. If anything, any sort of subjective scoring/consideration is already behind close doors, and there already lacks any sort of transparency to those subjective measures. All the lawsuits, all the fights, even the ones raised and taken to the Supreme Court by the Asian community has always been about improving the transparency of such subjective scoring… If there was truly nothing to hide, and nothing shady going on, there would not be a need to do any of this hidden/behind closed door scoring. The fact that there is a lack of transparency, is because those doing it knows it would raise eyebrows…because it would be considered systematic discrimination.

All our ‘fixes’ to try to address any sort of inequality is always quick fixes AFTER the impact of adversity has happened. If anything, if money/resources should be spent, it should be spent to shore up those blight communities with adverse environments at the grade level… not lowering the bar after adversity has happened.

Yeah, I get it. My family has money. If my kid wants to retake the SAT 20 times, and takes 10 prep classes, I can afford that and my kid can get a pretty good score… Some kid from the inner city with crack addict parents that have no money probably can’t take the test 20 times, and probably cant afford to go take an SAT prep class a few times too, and would probably score lower…. Because the damn test costs a lot each time and resources to prepare for the test costs a lot too. But instead of addressing THAT issue, let’s not do anything, and just come up with a bandaid and invent this “adversity score” that ranks parents based on how much they can bend over to our fees and costs to prepare for things, so that those who pay more, have a lower score…even though eventually our salaries depend on those very parents that pay more….And if theoretically more and more colleges actually abandoned the College Board standardized tests, and parents/kids no longer had to bend over and pay any of those ridiculous test fees and prep-course fees, while it would allow more families/parents/kids keep more of their hard earned money as they pursue higher education, it certainly would make us, the CEO and executives at the College Board, unemployed! So, of course, the current CEO (Common Core architect) thinks the way to address this is to add a fudge factor, to represent the economic disadvantage of students that itself (the College Board) contributes to, with its exorbitant fees……just another quick fix, so that the big $$$$ can continue coming into the College Board so that the CEO can college his $1million paycheck while not really solving the problem, besides pushing the burden and cost onto some other non-suspecting group of people…

And while we are at it .. why stop at SAT? Why not include the adversity score into LSAT, MCAT, GRE, GMAT, etc…

Also, since we want to start considering economic adversity, what about other forms of adversity, like health/mental adversity. Should a kid who otherwise is mentally fit/physically fit in a ghetto neighborhood be considered using one subjective score…versus a kid with autism that is from 4S Ranch/Carmel Valley? How much harder is it for someone with Autism to learn versus someone who is worried about getting shot in a bad neighborhood???
What about dyslexic kids who take more effort and time to read, that scored well in a AP/Honor’s English, versus someone kid that isn’t dyslexic in the same class. Where’s their adversity score?

Personally, this is one of the cases in which the federal government should salary cap non-profits and heavily regulate the College Board in what it can and can’t do.

[zk]

[quote=flu]I might have come across as a heartless dick that doesn’t care about the less fortunate. But I am not…
[/quote]

To me, you didn’t come across as a heartless dick at all. A little angry, perhaps, and not without justification. As for the rest of your post, you’re pretty much preaching to the choir.

Especially this:

[quote=flu]
All our ‘fixes’ to try to address any sort of inequality is always quick fixes AFTER the impact of adversity has happened. If anything, if money/resources should be spent, it should be spent to shore up those blight communities with adverse environments at the grade level… not lowering the bar after adversity has happened.

[/quote]

That would be a lot more expensive, time-consuming, and politically difficult than just lobbing an “adversity score” into the mix. Hence the lack of action. But I agree 100% that that’s what’s necessary if we want to our country to be everything it can be.

[Author]

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