Best private schools in NYC?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:AFAIK, everyone who took ISEE in DC’s (public school) grade got 7s, 8s, 9s. I don’t think that’s the differentiator here.

It's not a differentiator but it is a floor - lots of kids with 1500+ SATs don't get into Harvard, but you're generally not going to get into Harvard without them.

So I don't think "any TT options would be closed to your family" is inaccurate, it's just that you shouldn't go off thinking that your kid is a surefire admit with all 8's and 9's - if their ISEEs are above whatever level the school considers an acceptable baseline then they'll look at the file in more detail for other, more interesting indicators of whether they'd be a good fit.

Not disagreeing with anything here. I was replying to a post that talked about being lucky or not lucky enough to have kids who do well on these tests -- all I am saying is that that baseline is not difficult to achieve by any reasonably intelligent kid at a decent school with some preparation. The other components may be more of a reach.

We found the ISEE super difficult so those kids are lucky and pretty smart and definitely in the minority. By design a 7–9 is roughly the top 25% to top 5% nationally, so it’s statistically impossible for ‘most kids’ to reach that range no matter how much prep they do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We found the ISEE super difficult so those kids are lucky and pretty smart and definitely in the minority. By design a 7–9 is roughly the top 25% to top 5% nationally, so it’s statistically impossible for ‘most kids’ to reach that range no matter how much prep they do.

I'm sorry to hear that - it sucks that we attach so much importance to standardized testing when it's such an inconsistent metric for some kids.

That being said, though, while I would disagree with PP that the baseline is "not difficult to achieve for any reasonably intelligent kid" - some kids just don't test well - I do think that enough kids hit that baseline that it's very hard to get into a TT school if you don't.

Part of the problem with looking at it in terms of percentiles is that the ISEE is very much *not* an aptitude test; obviously the verbal and math achievement sections are explicitly achievement tests, but even quantitative reasoning rests a fair amount on how much math you've learned (basic pre-algebra and mean/median/mode for 5th graders, e.g.) and of course reading comprehension also benefits a lot from vocabulary and domain knowledge. So it's really measuring "how prepared are you to enter our school" rather than "how smart are you," which is why kids who are well-prepared - and have some natural aptitude for standardized tests - tend to do better than the percent distribution might suggest. An entire class is unlikely to be in the top 25% nationally in raw intelligence, but at a good school, there's a pretty strong chance they'll all be in the top 25% in terms of how much they've learned.

[Anonymous]

Sorry, swapped verbal and reading comprehension there - RC and MA are what we would normally call achievement tests, similar to a MAP or whatever, but while VR in theory goes in the 'aptitude' bucket, in practice it's mostly about how much vocabulary you've learned.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We found the ISEE super difficult so those kids are lucky and pretty smart and definitely in the minority. By design a 7–9 is roughly the top 25% to top 5% nationally, so it’s statistically impossible for ‘most kids’ to reach that range no matter how much prep they do.

The context for this was kids applying to TT schools in upper grades. And the overall probability of getting a seat in that context is far lower than 25%, so it's the other factors (or luck) that are decisive. Plus, we are talking about a self-selected cohort from NYC, not overall national averages. Again, anecdotally, everyone we know in my child's peer group did well, some with minimal to no prep -- you can use that as one data point if you prefer.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We found the ISEE super difficult so those kids are lucky and pretty smart and definitely in the minority. By design a 7–9 is roughly the top 25% to top 5% nationally, so it’s statistically impossible for ‘most kids’ to reach that range no matter how much prep they do.

The context for this was kids applying to TT schools in upper grades. And the overall probability of getting a seat in that context is far lower than 25%, so it's the other factors (or luck) that are decisive. Plus, we are talking about a self-selected cohort from NYC, not overall national averages. Again, anecdotally, everyone we know in my child's peer group did well, some with minimal to no prep -- you can use that as one data point if you prefer.

Seems unlikely.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, swapped verbal and reading comprehension there - RC and MA are what we would normally call achievement tests, similar to a MAP or whatever, but while VR in theory goes in the 'aptitude' bucket, in practice it's mostly about how much vocabulary you've learned.

Map testing is sooooo easy compared to the ISEE.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Map testing is sooooo easy compared to the ISEE.

Yes but my point is that both are tied to how much you've learned rather than how smart you are.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anyone thinking about the suburbs?

As someone who did this and recently moved back to the city: don't, at least not for elementary.

A good suburban elementary school is in no way an upgrade academics-wise over a good city one, particularly with the class size law making city schools competitive on that count - if you don't believe me, go to https://data.nysed.gov and compare the report cards for a Westchester suburb you like with those from a top zoned elementary like say PS267. And in terms of culture and diversity and generally having a rich full life there's just no comparison. The coolest, most interesting kids we met in the suburbs were the ones who had stayed in the city until late elementary or middle school.

Some random school problems we had to deal with in the suburbs:
- Outdated curricula and a stubborn insistence on sticking with them; they were hell-bent on Calkins right up until the state made them stop and they weren't even doing a very good job applying Calkins (kids were being strictly limited in what books they were allowed to read based on a 1-minute reading-out-loud assessment)
- Extremely hit-or-miss teachers, a problem exacerbated by real estate - no young teacher could afford to live near us so they were all commuting an hour every morning - and seniority; a bunch of crappy teachers were un-fireable due to both their length of service and the fact that they had too many fans in the older generation of town residents from when they were better teachers; they also kept shedding good teachers who got frustrated with them, particularly in hard-to-replace specialties like foreign languages and strings
- Refusal to invest in building maintenance, so we kept losing school days due to flooding or lighting strikes; we lost both the use of the library for half a year and many of the books in that library in a bad thunderstorm
- Town board of finance constantly making random last-minute cuts to the school budget, so programs would start up one year and vanish another because they were moving things around to try to fix them, and they'd be randomly stingy - math team switches from grades 3-5 to 4-5 because they didn't want to pay the extra few hundred bucks for some slightly different league for the 3rd graders, teachers don't have extra copies of worksheets because they only have precisely this many and aren't supposed to copy them, Box-Factory-esque field trips, etc.
- Faculty members publicly beefing with the superintendent; we had a middle school history teacher who was for whatever reason fanatically opposed to the idea of instructional coaching, swayed enough of the board of finance to his point of view that they tried to get the board of education to cut it, and when they refused, included the cost of coaching in one of those aforementioned last-minute cuts. (he also ended up getting his wife onto the board of education, who doesn't seem to have done much except make various futile attempts to cut the coaching budget and then quit in frustration after 2 years)
- Various school functions outsourced to nepotistic SAHMs; for example, there was no official elementary/middle school theater program but there was a separate nonprofit that used school facilities to put on shows and showed consistent favoritism in casting towards the children of board members.
- Obsession with tutoring even for kids who didn't need it (as discussed here elsewhere recently), which meant lots of pressure on the kids who didn't use tutors because everybody was always bragging on being 2 points higher than everyone else on MAP tests.
- Many of the worst aspects of private school culture, like ultra-rich popular kids all hanging out in the same ski/beach towns together - my daughter discovered she had been shunned by that group when she arrived at sleepaway camp and found out that the two 'popular' friends who had persuaded her to go to that camp had changed their cabin requests to exclude her.
- Lots of little racist incidents - Swastikas in bathrooms, 'build the wall' chants at sporting events against more diverse towns back in Trump 1, people making absolutely unhinged posts (publicly, under their own names) whenever the idea of building more diverse housing stock to attract a wider variety of residents came up...

Granted a lot of these are also problems in the city - including random budget cuts a few years ago (thanks Eric Adams) and of course lots of uptown PTA nonsense - but not this many, and not all at once, and in the city they're to some extent easier to escape because you're not trapped in a small town with a bunch of crazy people.

Some of these seem applicable to just the district you were in, while others are more general about the suburbs - your extremely lengthy post would have been a lot more meaningful if you differentiated between the two. Would you mind saying what town this is? Or at a minimum, what county?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Anyone thinking about the suburbs?

As someone who did this and recently moved back to the city: don't, at least not for elementary.

A good suburban elementary school is in no way an upgrade academics-wise over a good city one, particularly with the class size law making city schools competitive on that count - if you don't believe me, go to https://data.nysed.gov and compare the report cards for a Westchester suburb you like with those from a top zoned elementary like say PS267. And in terms of culture and diversity and generally having a rich full life there's just no comparison. The coolest, most interesting kids we met in the suburbs were the ones who had stayed in the city until late elementary or middle school.

Some random school problems we had to deal with in the suburbs:
- Outdated curricula and a stubborn insistence on sticking with them; they were hell-bent on Calkins right up until the state made them stop and they weren't even doing a very good job applying Calkins (kids were being strictly limited in what books they were allowed to read based on a 1-minute reading-out-loud assessment)
- Extremely hit-or-miss teachers, a problem exacerbated by real estate - no young teacher could afford to live near us so they were all commuting an hour every morning - and seniority; a bunch of crappy teachers were un-fireable due to both their length of service and the fact that they had too many fans in the older generation of town residents from when they were better teachers; they also kept shedding good teachers who got frustrated with them, particularly in hard-to-replace specialties like foreign languages and strings
- Refusal to invest in building maintenance, so we kept losing school days due to flooding or lighting strikes; we lost both the use of the library for half a year and many of the books in that library in a bad thunderstorm
- Town board of finance constantly making random last-minute cuts to the school budget, so programs would start up one year and vanish another because they were moving things around to try to fix them, and they'd be randomly stingy - math team switches from grades 3-5 to 4-5 because they didn't want to pay the extra few hundred bucks for some slightly different league for the 3rd graders, teachers don't have extra copies of worksheets because they only have precisely this many and aren't supposed to copy them, Box-Factory-esque field trips, etc.
- Faculty members publicly beefing with the superintendent; we had a middle school history teacher who was for whatever reason fanatically opposed to the idea of instructional coaching, swayed enough of the board of finance to his point of view that they tried to get the board of education to cut it, and when they refused, included the cost of coaching in one of those aforementioned last-minute cuts. (he also ended up getting his wife onto the board of education, who doesn't seem to have done much except make various futile attempts to cut the coaching budget and then quit in frustration after 2 years)
- Various school functions outsourced to nepotistic SAHMs; for example, there was no official elementary/middle school theater program but there was a separate nonprofit that used school facilities to put on shows and showed consistent favoritism in casting towards the children of board members.
- Obsession with tutoring even for kids who didn't need it (as discussed here elsewhere recently), which meant lots of pressure on the kids who didn't use tutors because everybody was always bragging on being 2 points higher than everyone else on MAP tests.
- Many of the worst aspects of private school culture, like ultra-rich popular kids all hanging out in the same ski/beach towns together - my daughter discovered she had been shunned by that group when she arrived at sleepaway camp and found out that the two 'popular' friends who had persuaded her to go to that camp had changed their cabin requests to exclude her.
- Lots of little racist incidents - Swastikas in bathrooms, 'build the wall' chants at sporting events against more diverse towns back in Trump 1, people making absolutely unhinged posts (publicly, under their own names) whenever the idea of building more diverse housing stock to attract a wider variety of residents came up...

Granted a lot of these are also problems in the city - including random budget cuts a few years ago (thanks Eric Adams) and of course lots of uptown PTA nonsense - but not this many, and not all at once, and in the city they're to some extent easier to escape because you're not trapped in a small town with a bunch of crazy people.

Some of these seem applicable to just the district you were in, while others are more general about the suburbs - your extremely lengthy post would have been a lot more meaningful if you differentiated between the two. Would you mind saying what town this is? Or at a minimum, what county?

To be fair, this is pretty much the norm at any well funded, highly rated suburban public. One can quibble with the details. People aren’t stupid for paying for HM when they live in northern NJ or Westchester. That 70k is to avoid the problems the poster mentioned and for many who are HNW it is worth it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Between Saint Ann's and Avenues for Kindergarten, which would you choose and why?

Neither. Do you have another option? Two very different places. All things being equal, if you are in Brooklyn, St. Ann's. If in Manhattan, Avenues. Both are kind of cultish in very different ways.

"Neither" - what an unhelpful response.

Perhaps they had other options. I would do a decent public over those. Plenty of time to move to a good zone.

Saint Ann's is one of the best schools in NYC. Also interested in how you know anything about two different schools in different neighborhoods are when you clearly didn't send your kids there.

I know people at both schools. Knowing about both of these schools is far from a stretch - anyone who is remotely knowledgeable about NYC private schools knows well about both of them.

St. Ann's is wackadoodle progressive (and I say this as a liberal Democrat). Like virtue signaling wokeness progressive. Plus have you read at all about the scandal there? No thanks. They do have pretty great exmissions - I will admit that. But I would not want to mix with that insufferable crowd. Go to Packer if you want to be in Brooklyn.

Avenues is less bad but not my cup of tea. They try way too hard.

Here we go with "woke" again. Anyone who uses that word in the MAGA pejorative way immediately loses all credibility.

As a moderate Democrat, it is the virtue signalling woke folks like at St. Ann's who drive me nuts as they provide fodder to Fox News to empower the idiot MAGA people. And then you start calling people like me who are actually a lot closer politically to you than the vast majority of America by awful names, including MAGA and Republican. Go spend some time beyond a 20 mile radius of NYC and see how the real world lives. Then start to pick your spots. I'm not saying give in to Trump and his buffoons. But be smarter about the causes you are fighting for.

But I digress.

no one cares about your politics. And don’t bring up politics, say some silly nonsense, then tell other people to move on. Ya weirdo. You opened the door.

On a broader point: if you have a kid fortunate enough to get into st. ann’s (i didn’t go there, kiddos don’t go there, only know a couple of people (who are v successful) who did), then go ahead and make a judgment. I get the sense that this gabroni has zero affiliation with the school aside from reading stories on the internet about it. Also, wtf does going outside of nyc have to do with going to school in nyc? So silly…

you have an anger issue worthy of a Jan 6 rioter

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Some of these seem applicable to just the district you were in, while others are more general about the suburbs - your extremely lengthy post would have been a lot more meaningful if you differentiated between the two. Would you mind saying what town this is? Or at a minimum, what county?

Sorry, it was kind of a rant.

I can't say definitively which parts of this were district-specific versus general - I do know that we were one of the stingier wealthy towns in the area, and that we had a particularly badly-designed town charter, so the issues with budget cuts might have been less bad elsewhere, but I don't get the impression that there's any suburban district where they aren't constantly trying to convince childless people that it's worth paying higher taxes to keep the schools good because the schools are underwriting your home value.

Honestly I wasn't trying to compare suburbs negatively to private school as much as I was trying to compare them negatively to a city public school. I think a lot of people look at suburban schools as their second choice if things don't pan out with private, and I think many of them would be better off staying in the city and moving to a good elementary school zone, particularly with the class size law about to start applying to high-performing schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Map testing is sooooo easy compared to the ISEE.

Yes but my point is that both are tied to how much you've learned rather than how smart you are.

I’d like to hear what standardized test admitted students start taking once they are in? The test each school uses to ensure their students are learning. I know Avenues uses the ISA. What does Spence, Trinity, Dalton, Chapin, etc use?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Map testing is sooooo easy compared to the ISEE.

Yes but my point is that both are tied to how much you've learned rather than how smart you are.

I’d like to hear what standardized test admitted students start taking once they are in? The test each school uses to ensure their students are learning. I know Avenues uses the ISA. What does Spence, Trinity, Dalton, Chapin, etc use?

None.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Map testing is sooooo easy compared to the ISEE.

Yes but my point is that both are tied to how much you've learned rather than how smart you are.

I’d like to hear what standardized test admitted students start taking once they are in? The test each school uses to ensure their students are learning. I know Avenues uses the ISA. What does Spence, Trinity, Dalton, Chapin, etc use?

None.

My kid is at one of these and I am not aware of any until the psat.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’d like to hear what standardized test admitted students start taking once they are in? The test each school uses to ensure their students are learning. I know Avenues uses the ISA. What does Spence, Trinity, Dalton, Chapin, etc use?

A lot of the TT schools don’t follow Common Core rigidly - they introduce stuff much earlier or later - so it would be tough to line up with a standard achievement test; a test by grade level would have missing / new material, and an adaptive test would not know which questions were difficult and which were easy.