OT: Jackson Private Schools
- Thread starter ZombieKissinger
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Are you referring to traffic? It's typical rush hour and lunch crowd congestion. It stays steady during the day though. Supposedly there will be another lane added from the Castlewoods area to Hwy 471, which is sorely needed. I'm not crazy about some of the businesses going up in Flowood between Hartfield and Castlewoods but it is what it is.
What that area really needs is another car wash.
That's a little too cynical, even for me. Certainly there are tons of non-profits that are non-profit in name only, and just use income growth to pay insiders more in compensation, but with the possible exception of St. Andrews which I just don't know much about how they operate, I don't think any of the most successful MS private schools generate enough money for insiders to really take. To the extent they can generate that money, it goes into the facilities arms race. They aren't focused on profit, they are focused on the perception of their school, and sports and academics are generally how they think they drive perception. They may measure their success by and how much they can charge.
Now for the vast majority of private schools in Mississippi, they are a business in the sense that they are just focused on keeping the lights on and by necessity they are all about the money. And for them, sports or academics (or just a safe environment) are the marketing, but it's less about how much profit they make versus how much begging they have to do from their donors just to cover operating expenses as opposed to capital campaigns.
Not knocking JA at all but I would bet 95% of that 55% would have made the same on their ACT no matter where they went due the home/environment they were raised in.
As someone who has driven from Flowood/Rez to DT Jxn for the past quarter century plus (20 miles one way, IIRC), Lakeland is much better now than 15 years ago (or whenever the additional lane was added). It is in no way a "nightmare" unless you're comparing it to Grenada. Much easier to get from Flowood/Rez to DT than from Lake Caroline to DT.
Everyone associated with schools are all about enrollment— private and public no matter the educational level.
And apropos of your post, I’d love to see if there are any numbers as far as total enrollment at the private schools.
Yup. Being in an environment with students overwhelmingly from good homes probably does move the needle a little on the ACT since it is testing what you have learned much more than a test like the SAT, which mainly tests how good you are at taking the SAT plus vocabulary.
But basically all of our measurements of what schools are "good" are measurements of selection effects. It would be a political non-starter, but I suspect it would help a lot of public schools out with perception if they published test scores tied to demographic data. Probably a lot of public schools could have stayed decent if parents had been able to see the test scores broken out by two parent households, family SES, race, etc. Lots of public schools probably have test scores and academic performance that would mirror JA/Prep/St. Andrews if they just looked at the students that came from two parent households with incomes high enough to pay for a JA, Prep, or St. Andrews.
I bet they wouldn't. JA is a strong academic school. They could have done as well at another good private school or several of the good public schools in the area. But definitely not at an average academic school.
I agree it's not average but a large part (maybe the majority) of the reason it's above average is the quality of students that go there. If I was still raising kids and lived in this area I would probably send them to JA . LOL a few years back a young administrator at JA asked my wife if she would consider coming out of retirement and help with some special project they had going on and my wife replied "Darlin I appreciate the offer and I know yall have got a lot of money at that school.....but you don't have THAT much."
There's some truth in this, but to think the 8 hours a day a student spends in school, whether it's quality instruction or just crap, to think that's just irrelevant is being willfully blind.
I'm sure some of it is upbringing, but just to add my 2 cents: some of my kids went through JA, and the school does a pretty good job of creating a culture of success in the classroom. I went to public school, and there were definite cliques... you were either an athlete OR a nerd who tried to get good grades. There weren't many who tried to do both. My teammates would laugh at me for answering the teacher in class. I thought it was funny, and made fun of them for being dipshits... But anyway, point is - at JA, and I would assume all the private schools, you are encouraged and challenged by other kids to make good grades no matter what your outside interests are. It's expected, and I think the 'rising tide lifts all ships' theory is definitely at play there.
If you're in that environment, you don't want to be the one dumbass who doesn't get good grades, or score high on the ACT, no matter if you're a bookworm, a cheerleader, or the center on the basketball team. It's quite different from the environment in my public school, which is a good thing. I think over time it does make a difference in average ACT scores on the whole.
I disagree with this. Home environment is certainly one part of the equation but most definitely not the only part. School matters.
Excellent and accurate observation. This is a definite phenomenon and very few public schools can escape from it, since the public schools generally have a cross section of a whole community, good and bad. It's generally only the public schools in upper-middle class suburbia that can avoid this.
JA and Prep are great about creating this culture. I'm sure others are as well, but I don't know enough about them (St. Andrews, etc.). I've heard good things about MRA too, but don't know. Hartfield is definitely slanted toward athletics. It's like the old saying, you can't really serve two masters. In my opinion, I'd choose academics all day long, if the kid is a good enough athlete, the colleges will find him. But so many are obsessed with 'winning' and a friend group.
You're right I didn't do a very good job of getting my thoughts across. I guess what I was trying to say is that 95% of the 55% came from homes that provided a good home environment AND if their child wasn't at JA they would have sought another school that would have given them an similar chance to excel academically. I.E. the family cared and had the resources to make it happen.
You need one every so often to put some distance between the chicken tender restaurants and drive through coffee places.
Hillcrest is Sewanee, the
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I am a little surprised it is still open. There are several lessons other schools can learn from the downturn. However, unfortunately the population shift away from that area also greatly impacted their family base.
I didn't mean to imply that quality of instruction doesn't matter. There are schools that are good at instruction and schools that are bad at instruction, and everything in between and it does make a difference. I just meant that in general, we don't judge schools at whether they are good or bad at instruction, we judge them based on what kind of students they have. And also that provided instruction is at least somewhat adequate, the impact from the quality of students will dwarf any impact from the quality of instruction.
If by "all the private schools" you mean Prep, JA, and St. Andrew, maybe that's right. But a lot of (most?) private schools in the state are small enough and non-selective enough that what kind of positive or negative peer pressure students can get varies pretty significantly based on the age group. Sometimes there's a good group of kids and the cool kids and the smart kids are the same group, and generally everybody wants to do well, and sometimes the "cool" kids are just really into drinking and partying (and sometimes drugs) and you end up with a dynamic where even the kids that want to do well don't want attention drawn to how they are doing. I'm guessing in general it's much better than public schools on average because of selection effects, but you'd think having virtually all of the parents bought in on paying for school would result in a better environment than it often does.
Agreed— especially the part I’ve bolded and changed color.
The smaller academies are so small that it doesn’t take many students to influence the attitudes of their classmates.
Last school year they had a total of 250 students in K3 - 12th. Clinton Christian and Central Hinds are pulling kids that Hillcrest once got. I, like vhdawg, graduated from there in the early 90's and it's a shell of what it once was.
One of my family members by marriage was hired into their administration not too long ago. He's no longer there but when I heard they hired him and for what role, I knew they are desperate.
A few of the families I knew lived near the Hinds and Copiah county line. Their older kids went to Hillcrest but their younger kids ended up at Copiah Academy.
It's pretty worthless to get a bachelor's degree in just one Physic. You should really try to get a degree with multiple Physics.
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