Why are private school applications still at an all time high?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because public school class sizes are huge, there's a range of abilities that is impossible for even the most seasoned teacher to accommodate, and well behaved kids who are on or above grade level are ignored. The established private schools aren't stupid and have done a good job advertising to UMC families of solid students who are increasingly fed up. Throw in a modest merit scholarship for the ones with top grades and test scores and it's not a hard sell.

I think privates also heavily appeal to those who are well-behaved students at or above grade level but below the top grades and top test score bracket.

Looking at my particular location in FCPS it seems like there's two options for classrooms in our public--there's the public school classrooms like you describe where teachers are mostly managing the kids who are trouble, and then there's the full-time AAP classroom (with the hope of getting into TJ) which is intensely competitive and a pressure cooker and STEM focused and rejects a lot of these well-behaved kids who are at or above grade level.

It's not quite as bad as in NYC, but I definitely see a lot of these nice kids at or above grade level who aren't the super-intense math superstars and their families researching private options.

[Anonymous]

Things that bother me about public school are the overworked teachers, worries about political influences distracting from the classroom, class sizes, half-asses differentiation, not enough funding for all of the regulatory requirements, etc. so we moved our kid to private because we can afford it. I suspect a lot of people who choose private are similar to us. My husband and I graduated from FCPS and were big proponents of public school, until we weren’t.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just read an article that staff at Alice Deal in DC chose to eliminate reading full novels from the 8th grade curriculum.

last year's 8th grade at Maret did not read a full book or write a full essay until the end of year.

Wow! At our ‘mediocre (to those on this forum)’ TX private school they read 6 novels in class and 2 out class. Perhaps we aren’t as provincial in TX as the snobs in DC think.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just read an article that staff at Alice Deal in DC chose to eliminate reading full novels from the 8th grade curriculum.

last year's 8th grade at Maret did not read a full book or write a full essay until the end of year.

This is fake info.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just read an article that staff at Alice Deal in DC chose to eliminate reading full novels from the 8th grade curriculum.

last year's 8th grade at Maret did not read a full book or write a full essay until the end of year.

That’s what I am talking about when I refer to overpriced private schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just read an article that staff at Alice Deal in DC chose to eliminate reading full novels from the 8th grade curriculum.

last year's 8th grade at Maret did not read a full book or write a full essay until the end of year.

That’s what I am talking about when I refer to overpriced private schools.

You are easily duped. Your education has failed you.

[Anonymous]

Private schools, like any organization, will have variance in quality of the workers (teachers, admins, coaches, etc), but there are always going to be very strong examples of each within a school.

That all but guarantees that your kid will have some significant relationships with really impactful adults outside your family.

Those benefits are hard to put a price on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Public schools are under scrutiny and pressure over the scores of low-performing kids. Teachers there focus on the bottom group because that is what Principals and central office demand.

Even in FCPS AAP, the differentiation is modest, not huge, and some believe better behavior is the main benefit.

Many, not all, public elementary schools have stopped - or significantly reduced - direct instruction in areas such as spelling, grammar, multiplication table memorization, and cursive writing. Many privates still teach all of those areas explicitly and in depth, particularly consistent with this are the Catholic schools. Also, for reading, most Catholic and almost all Montessori schools stuck with Phonics-centered literacy instruction - and skipped the whole language/balanced literacy Lucy Calkins crap.

This right here...my kids in Catholic school have homework every night that they write down in a planner. They read novels. They do math with a pencil. They have spelling and grammar as subjects in school. They know their times tables.
Our class sizes are getting huge though. When we started the average class size was 14 and now it's 22. The weirdest part is that the increase is almost completely girls.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public schools are under scrutiny and pressure over the scores of low-performing kids. Teachers there focus on the bottom group because that is what Principals and central office demand.

Even in FCPS AAP, the differentiation is modest, not huge, and some believe better behavior is the main benefit.

Many, not all, public elementary schools have stopped - or significantly reduced - direct instruction in areas such as spelling, grammar, multiplication table memorization, and cursive writing. Many privates still teach all of those areas explicitly and in depth, particularly consistent with this are the Catholic schools. Also, for reading, most Catholic and almost all Montessori schools stuck with Phonics-centered literacy instruction - and skipped the whole language/balanced literacy Lucy Calkins crap.

This right here...my kids in Catholic school have homework every night that they write down in a planner. They read novels. They do math with a pencil. They have spelling and grammar as subjects in school. They know their times tables.
Our class sizes are getting huge though. When we started the average class size was 14 and now it's 22. The weirdest part is that the increase is almost completely girls.

Are you in an area and at an age where there are a lot of "mean girl" bullying problems and kids start really excluding others? That might explain the increase. I've noticed a lot of girl parents pulling their kid from public in upper elementary for this reason--more so than boy parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Public schools are under scrutiny and pressure over the scores of low-performing kids. Teachers there focus on the bottom group because that is what Principals and central office demand.

Even in FCPS AAP, the differentiation is modest, not huge, and some believe better behavior is the main benefit.

Many, not all, public elementary schools have stopped - or significantly reduced - direct instruction in areas such as spelling, grammar, multiplication table memorization, and cursive writing. Many privates still teach all of those areas explicitly and in depth, particularly consistent with this are the Catholic schools. Also, for reading, most Catholic and almost all Montessori schools stuck with Phonics-centered literacy instruction - and skipped the whole language/balanced literacy Lucy Calkins crap.

I don't know about instruction quality but there are a couple FCPS AAP centers that are big pressure cookers because the kids are all super-prepped and advanced in math, etc. when they enter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public schools are under scrutiny and pressure over the scores of low-performing kids. Teachers there focus on the bottom group because that is what Principals and central office demand.

Even in FCPS AAP, the differentiation is modest, not huge, and some believe better behavior is the main benefit.

Many, not all, public elementary schools have stopped - or significantly reduced - direct instruction in areas such as spelling, grammar, multiplication table memorization, and cursive writing. Many privates still teach all of those areas explicitly and in depth, particularly consistent with this are the Catholic schools. Also, for reading, most Catholic and almost all Montessori schools stuck with Phonics-centered literacy instruction - and skipped the whole language/balanced literacy Lucy Calkins crap.

This right here...my kids in Catholic school have homework every night that they write down in a planner. They read novels. They do math with a pencil. They have spelling and grammar as subjects in school. They know their times tables.
Our class sizes are getting huge though. When we started the average class size was 14 and now it's 22. The weirdest part is that the increase is almost completely girls.

Are you in an area and at an age where there are a lot of "mean girl" bullying problems and kids start really excluding others? That might explain the increase. I've noticed a lot of girl parents pulling their kid from public in upper elementary for this reason--more so than boy parents.

Actually it's most pronounced in 1st and 2nd grade (our 2nd grade is 85% female) and when I ask parents why they switched I ALWAYS get a story about their sensitive quiet daughter being traumatized by a chair throwing style incident.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public schools are under scrutiny and pressure over the scores of low-performing kids. Teachers there focus on the bottom group because that is what Principals and central office demand.

Even in FCPS AAP, the differentiation is modest, not huge, and some believe better behavior is the main benefit.

Many, not all, public elementary schools have stopped - or significantly reduced - direct instruction in areas such as spelling, grammar, multiplication table memorization, and cursive writing. Many privates still teach all of those areas explicitly and in depth, particularly consistent with this are the Catholic schools. Also, for reading, most Catholic and almost all Montessori schools stuck with Phonics-centered literacy instruction - and skipped the whole language/balanced literacy Lucy Calkins crap.

This right here...my kids in Catholic school have homework every night that they write down in a planner. They read novels. They do math with a pencil. They have spelling and grammar as subjects in school. They know their times tables.
Our class sizes are getting huge though. When we started the average class size was 14 and now it's 22. The weirdest part is that the increase is almost completely girls.

Are you in an area and at an age where there are a lot of "mean girl" bullying problems and kids start really excluding others? That might explain the increase. I've noticed a lot of girl parents pulling their kid from public in upper elementary for this reason--more so than boy parents.

Anecdotal but just in our neighborhood there are several girls I know of that moved to private because of exclusion and bullying issues and no boys. All kids can be mean but girls can be especially cruel, boys are more willing be civil to other kids at least even if they aren't friends.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Applications for admissions to most private schools in the DMV area area keep getting more competitive every year. One school we are applying to for 9th ( from our K-8) told us that applications have been up 70% this year.
I can understand why applications were up during the pandemic , but why are people still increasingly applying to privates five years later ?
Has the quality of education gone down at the public schools? Did people do well in the stock market over the past few years?
Just asking a genuine question.

I think you are correct on both points. People do question what public schools are doing these days. And portfolios have been skyrocketing in recent years. So there are many more families that can afford Sidwell and GDS and so on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just read an article that staff at Alice Deal in DC chose to eliminate reading full novels from the 8th grade curriculum.

last year's 8th grade at Maret did not read a full book or write a full essay until the end of year.

That’s outrageous and frankly if I had a kid there I’d be livid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I just read an article that staff at Alice Deal in DC chose to eliminate reading full novels from the 8th grade curriculum.

Holy sh*t. I don’t want to start a public/ private debate but is that true? Can someone confirm. If so, what a disgrace. These kids deserve better.