But....Parents who know how to effectively “after school”, “pre-school” and find tutoring figure out ways to defend their kids from the machinations of government school functionaries.
Very true.
My experiences with FCPS, as well as that of other family members, is that it really isn’t all that great of a school system. They just have a lot of money. So they focus on catering to the highest and lowest ends of the educational spectrum, while putting all sorts of wizz-bang technology (SmartBoards everwhere!) into classrooms. The kids in the middle just get pushed along in ways that make sure they do well on the SOLs and other standardized tests, and are guided into the various levels of state universities from early ages. My oldest, who is both very bright and also less-than-motivated, was (I’m convinced) aligned by FCPS in elementary school towards GMU or JMU. Which aren’t, of course, bad schools. The problem I had was in the predestination aspects I thought I was seeing.