An Apology to Our Readers

We (once again) find ourselves apologizing to the many individuals we have offended in addressing the US News articles rating of our school. It was not meant as an attack on the school but rather on how the writers of the article judged schools. We too believe that the school has made some outstanding achievements and their inclusion in this report provided a chance to promote the school in a very positive and impressive manner. Few could argue with the stellar reputation of US News. Many opposers to this blog keep making comments regarding removing our children from the school and have repeatedly attacked us for not coming forward. It is unfortunate that it seems as though many parents have adopted the schools climate and attitude of 'like it or lump it' approach to those who dare speak out against it. What is even more amazing is that these same parents have zero empathy or understanding as to why we choose to remain anonymous. Even more interesting is that the majority of these same parents (as one poster pointed out) also choose to remain anonymous when trying to attack or discredit our efforts.
This saddens us as our only hope is to improve upon the school by insisting upon integrity and ethical behavior on the part of the Board and Administration, improve the quality of teaching within the school by increasing moral and reduce the teacher turnover, and create a community in which all parents can expect to be heard by the Board and Admininstration with respect, consideration, and an unbiased mind (and without fear of retaliation or being considered a troublemaker), even if it means their request can not be accomodated. We also realize that although a major reason for not revealing our identity is truly fear, we have also come to realize how invaluable our anonyminity is in resolving issues and acting as an advocate or ombudsman for the parents of the school who are equally as fearful. We have come to the realization that the DESE and government officials and ogranizations have very little interest in adequately overseeing our schools (not just ours but district schools as well) and attempting to resolve issues can be a complicated and time consuming task that many parents are not able or willing to take on. For many schools  the negative implications are minimal, especially with a School Committee and Superintendent that have a checks and balance system that they must answer to. Unfortunately our school has no such system making the parental concerns and issues that much more difficult. While we can't take on every battle, we can try to address the issues that we see having the most drastic and long term implications on our children.
In closing, while we do apologize to the parents who felt we were using the article to attack the school, we do not apologize for the creation of this blog nor our decision to remain anonymous.

US News Article Insight

We recently went to check out this article after reading a comment posted on another site questioning the methodology and usefulness of the rating. The post was correct in that the rating was not based on merit or true academics but rather simply the number or percentage of the students who sat for either the AP or IB tests. The article nor rating do not take into consideration the student results (i.e. how many passed, how many failed, what the average score was) but just how many of MVRCS students took the tests compared to other schools and districts. Additionally, after looking through the summary of the article (located at US NEWS Summary of MVRCS ) we realized that it is an application process and states that it is non-merit based. Additionally, if you look at the numbers below, MVRCS is predominately white (68%) and only rates a 74.2 on the 'College Readiness Index'. Further, under the 'Exam Passing Rate' the school scored only 61.2% which is not impressive considering how few students have been in the upper classes. Overall, while the heading does look impressive on the MVRCS website, after closer examination it doesn't seem as much of a achievement or accomplishment. We think our school can and should be doing better than this and the need to resort to applying (was a payment involved?) for inclusion into this type of study.