oh, don't get me wrong, I'm sure there is MUCH worse. I just wanted to comment that the rankings are often rigged or maybe not as representative of what they imply as one might think. Also that I found the fact that they would ram down the students throats how great the school was constantly despite it being far from a demanding educational institution was weird...it was as if they cared more about their perceived value than their actual value. You could graduate with a B average if you just showed up most of the time, handed in a few half assed assignments, and barely ever studied. There was nothing "hard" about high school.
I always got very good grades in high school (almost all A's) and I never had to try very hard. Yet despite having a high GPA and a desire to attend a high-tier college, my assigned guidance counselor was trying to convince me to apply to Radford and West Virginia University. No offence to anybody who went to those schools, but that was so far below what I was capable of and was in no way what I wanted. It felt almost as if the school had some kickback program with those schools or something...otherwise why would they push me to go to them when I EASILY had the grades to go to top quality colleges and ended up getting into Johns Hopkins and doing just fine there? My theory is pretty much the perfect representation of suburban NOVA: image over substance. I mentioned how the "best school" was measured by enrollment in AP classes with zero regard to whether anybody actually passed the test. This felt like the same thing. They just wanted more kids to go to college so they hired drones to shove them into the easiest schools to get into...they didn't care that I was capable of more or that I wanted more. It was like my grades were meaningless. I feel like they just wanted to boost their college enrollment numbers by getting people into the easiest schools they could. They had nothing to gain from pushing students to strive for harder goals. I had to go to the administrators and demand that they change my guidance counselor because that lady was wasting my time and trying to hold me back. Thankfully the replacement I got was better and actually listened to what I said (maybe because she knew I "fired" the last one, must mean I am actually serious, but she honestly seemed more intelligent so I'll give her the benefit of the doubt and say she actually cared). Makes me wonder how many kids had potential to do more but were guided down the easiest path possible by the school and they just didn't know to question what they were being told was "best for them".
When half the kids at the "best" school in the "richest" county either don't go to college or can't do better than NOVA...something is wrong. Granted, it is the parent's fault as well. It is one thing if you are poor and your parents are working all the time and life is tougher, but I could never understand these parents with super high paying jobs living in giant houses with all the opportunity in the world and yet they didn't even care that their loser kid was failing high school. How is that even a thing? It wasn't because their kid was stupid (at least not all the time), but just that the kid was lazy as fuck and never did any work at all. What did these parents think was going to happen to their kid? Were they going to get magically rich after failing high school classes or barely graduating and then failing out of NOVA?
tl;dr FCPS talks a big game but they aren't as great as they like to pretend. It is all about image not substance.