Private school curriculum - elementary school
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Anonymous
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My DS will be starting K in one of the TTs in the fall. The school has a reputation of being “rigorous”.
We know some of the families who have kids in the mid-upper elementary grade in the school. They all say the same thing - the school does not push the kids who are able to get ahead. According to them, the school seems more concerned with providing support to those who may fall behind as opposed to pushing the kids to get ahead. The common complaint seems to be that kids are bored at school as they claim to know the material already. It was surprising to hear this complaint from more than one family from school that has a reputation being rigorous. Maybe rigor doesn’t come until high school? When we looked into K for DS, we also looked into other TT, 2T, 3T schools. They all seem to have great curriculum for K-2. Is the curriculum for all the private schools similar more or less in elementary school in terms of rigor? Also, why wouldn’t a school want to teach kids to get ahead - for example, if there are group of 2nd graders who can do 4th grade math, why not teach that group 4th grade math? Why not accelerate kids who can handle a grade or two above ? |
Anonymous
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Yes, it does seem that private Ks in the top tier focus on less rigor and more social emotional learning. I have noticed the parents are focused on acceleration send their kids to Speyer, Basis, citywide G&T, Hunter if they can get it, and Success Academy.
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Anonymous
| Yes, private elementary schools don't really track kids to advance higher level kids. Rigor starts in middle school and then accelerates in high school. |
Anonymous
And I agree with the PP that Hunter & Citywide G&T are more academic compared most (maybe all?) private middle schools. |
Anonymous
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I think that's why many of the kids who enter private from public in 6th or 8th grade tend to be more advanced and do better than the kids who have attended from K. Obviously, not 100% the case. But at places like Trinity, the kids who enter in 9th tend to be extreme performers. The kids who got in at K may not have necessarily received an acceptance if they applied at 9th.
Same story with Hunter. The 7th grade entrants tend to perform better than the K lifers. |
Anonymous
Completely agree - kids accepted in later grades for academics (as opposed to those who get in for connections) have a much more meaningful academic basis for acceptance - the metrics for accepting a kid for K are not very meaningful. As noted, I think this is particularly relevant at Hunter which thinks it has a great testing mechanism for K but it is completely useless. At my child's school which adds a lot of kids for ninth, the new kids tend to be smarter. There are a few from places like Basis who are a year or two ahead in math (i.e. most kids are tracked to take Calculus in 12th, but they are tracked to take it in 11th or even 10th). Privates add a lot of public school kids in 9th who are from upper middle class professional families - perhaps making $500k a year with 2-3 kids so private K-12 for all kids is tough, but public k-8 then private 9-12 is manageable, and they are tired of dealing with NYC public school drama and don't want to deal with SHSAT schools, even if their kids got into Stuy, Bronx Science, HSMSE, etc. |
Anonymous
Is this why so many private elementary school kids have tutors? Frustrating to drop 70k a year on private school tuition and still supplementing with tutors or Russian School of Math to get ahead. 70k for elementary school is pretty obscene if the majority of the time spent is on social emotional learning.... |
Anonymous
Tutors are mainly for the child to be ahead and gain an advantage over others. |
Anonymous
| Do any of the traditional private schools differentiate to allow students to go ahead in math, for example? |
Anonymous
Yes, I am curious about this, too. I just saw Speyer’s exmissions (which allows math acceleration) and they are fantastic (3 to Brearley, 4 to Trinity, and so on). Do these kids enter Brearley and Trinity more advanced than the current students at the school? |
Anonymous
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FWIW if you really want middle school math acceleration you should look at moving to Scarsdale for a few years, since they have an unbelievably intense math program and there's literally a policy on "skipping grades in math" on their website: https://sms.scarsdaleschools.org/78750_3
With private schools it tends to be more of a question of a) scheduling - does the schedule have enough flexibility to let a kid take math with a different grade - and b) persuading the relevant teachers and department head; most places that can do it are willing to do it for the right kid, but you do have to convince them your kid is that kid, because a whole lot of private school parents think their kids are a different level of genius than they actually are. When changing schools with acceleration, the details of this are something you could potentially work out with the new school before accepting an offer, but there can be some issues with how the curriculum lines up - I was accelerated in 5th grade and changed schools in 10th, and my new school started BC calculus halfway through the year rather than at the start of the year, as a consequence of which I had to cool my heels taking Statistics for half a year before I could continue in math. |
Anonymous
| This is why our school consultant told us to do public for elementary. There are several kids in my kids class working 1-2 grade levels ahead in math in small groups with the teacher. I don't know why our public school is so good at differentiating but the privates aren't. We've heard they teach to the middle. |
Anonymous
Good to know. Are you in a citywide GT, district GT or zoned school? Does anyone know if a lot of PS6 kids end up applying to private school for middle school, and if so, how are exmissions/ |
Anonymous
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Anonymous
Zoned school. I should also clarify that for elementary, it was important to us to be close to our school and not have a 30+ minute commute. So we were not comparing against all private elementary schools - it was a handful of specific privates versus a handful of publics in our district, so your mileage may vary. I have not heard great things about the state of GT unless it happens to be your local school. Except for nest+m. |