If your child started at public, how did your child do academically in private middle and/or high?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:PP, your hypothesis got me curious. According to the Dept of Education, there are 10x as many public school students as private school students. So assuming each school type is just as likely to produce Intel finalists, there should be a 10:1 ratio of public:private. And your theory suggests the ratio should skew even more toward public school students -- 15:1 maybe?

But when I check the Intel finalist list, it's actually only about 4:1, which suggests private school students are outperforming public school students pretty significantly.

How does that make sense under your hypothesis?

Also, FWIW, the Intel finalists seem a much more mixed bag than you suggest, with very few schools proximate to the major research facilities.

Your hypo is a nice story, but I am skeptical of it standing up to empirical scrutiny.

I hadn't looked at the data in a couple of years

For the most recent list, I count 44 from privates (out of 300) and 64 from science-focused public magnets. I suppose privates do slightly better than their representation in the overall population, but given the ability of private schools to weed out students who aren't satisfactory and their ability to cream students off of the top, wouldn't we expect them to to better than merely hold their own?

Interestingly, the privates on the list tend to be places like Bellarmine and Harker in the Silicon Valley, a place that has a tech focus. The lawyers' kids at DC privates and the investment bankers' kids at the New York Day Schools are few and far between, although the DC area and Long Island are well-represented by public schools.

All those kids from Great Neck on the list are quite near Cold Spring Harbor. The kids from Montgomery Blair are close to NIH. Perhaps, however, this is a function of research labs co-locating with large metropolitan areas that have affluent suburbs, and I would really need to do more careful measurement to support this hypothesis.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:On average, private schools tend to do better in teaching writing, history, literature etc. The small class sizes mean that teachers can assign lots of essays and give lots of feedback. They also tend to offer courses in Latin and Art History, which public schools dropped long ago.

Not true. Most (all?) area publics offer AP Art History and Latin. When we looked into Sidwell a few years back, they didn't offer Latin.

[Anonymous]

Maybe PP should change his hypothesis entirely to argue instead that private schools do better in math/science, and public schools do better in languages/history.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:On average, private schools tend to do better in teaching writing, history, literature etc. The small class sizes mean that teachers can assign lots of essays and give lots of feedback. They also tend to offer courses in Latin and Art History, which public schools dropped long ago.

Not true. Most (all?) area publics offer AP Art History and Latin. When we looked into Sidwell a few years back, they didn't offer Latin.

Perhaps you were misinformed -- Sidwell has offered Latin and Art History for at least the past 10 years.

[Anonymous]

Sidwell curriculum guide currently lists both Latin and art history. http://www.sidwell.edu/upper-school/academics/departments/US-Modern-and-Classical-Languages/index.aspx

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:On average, private schools tend to do better in teaching writing, history, literature etc. The small class sizes mean that teachers can assign lots of essays and give lots of feedback. They also tend to offer courses in Latin and Art History, which public schools dropped long ago.

Not true. Most (all?) area publics offer AP Art History and Latin. When we looked into Sidwell a few years back, they didn't offer Latin.

Churchill does not offer either. They dropped Latin for Sign Language.

[Anonymous]

Blair offers both AP Art History and Latin.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:PP, your hypothesis got me curious. According to the Dept of Education, there are 10x as many public school students as private school students. So assuming each school type is just as likely to produce Intel finalists, there should be a 10:1 ratio of public:private. And your theory suggests the ratio should skew even more toward public school students -- 15:1 maybe?

But when I check the Intel finalist list, it's actually only about 4:1, which suggests private school students are outperforming public school students pretty significantly.

How does that make sense under your hypothesis?

Also, FWIW, the Intel finalists seem a much more mixed bag than you suggest, with very few schools proximate to the major research facilities.

Your hypo is a nice story, but I am skeptical of it standing up to empirical scrutiny.

I hadn't looked at the data in a couple of years

For the most recent list, I count 44 from privates (out of 300) and 64 from science-focused public magnets. I suppose privates do slightly better than their representation in the overall population, but given the ability of private schools to weed out students who aren't satisfactory and their ability to cream students off of the top, wouldn't we expect them to to better than merely hold their own?

Interestingly, the privates on the list tend to be places like Bellarmine and Harker in the Silicon Valley, a place that has a tech focus. The lawyers' kids at DC privates and the investment bankers' kids at the New York Day Schools are few and far between, although the DC area and Long Island are well-represented by public schools.

All those kids from Great Neck on the list are quite near Cold Spring Harbor. The kids from Montgomery Blair are close to NIH. Perhaps, however, this is a function of research labs co-locating with large metropolitan areas that have affluent suburbs, and I would really need to do more careful measurement to support this hypothesis.

I doubt the data is available, but the relevant comparison would be private school kids who take HS science classes to public school kids who take college track science classes. I think we are all aware of the fact that many HS students barely graduate high school and in fact an alarming percentage across the county do not ... to include these marginal students in your 10:1 ratio analysis is just silly when looking at winners of science contests.

But truly ... this entire thread, as a PP noted, is completely useless unless you were seeking the answer "it depends" ...

[Anonymous]

Our DD went from AAP in FCPS to a top private in junior high and, quite frankly, she HATED IT. She didn't have trouble making friends but academically she was light years ahead of everyone else and she basically ran out of advanced classes to take.

This was a few years ago and she's now at Harvard and she still complains to us that she would have gotten into TJ and then gone to a great college anyway. She may be right but it's hard for us parents to admit it given how much money we spent on private education.

[Anonymous]

http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/private-schooling-myth-debunked-20131012-2vfda.html#!

This new study claims private schooled kids do not perform academically better than those educated in public school.

[Anonymous]

My child started in public and went private in the 7th grade.
It was an adjustment for sure in most subject areas. That said, he was way ahead of the curve from day one when it came to rolling joints and swearing in Spanish.