Top private (Sidwell, GDS) versus top public (JKLM) for early years: what are the differences?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Do private schools avoid this?

Why do schools feel compelled to do this?

I feel like it is crushing my children sometimes, especially the youngest ones where you can either go sledding or do your homework. We usually find a way to do both, but having a ten year old know on Friday afternoon that they have x y and z hanging over their heads that they have to do by Monday, is just not what I remember from 5th grade AT ALL........ and it feels really wrong....

PP, you sound like a seriously thoughtful and cool parent, a person I bet I'd like IRL. For that reason, I'm going to try not to sound like a total dick here.

What you just said in your longer post, and especially the part I've pulled out above^^^, is one of the top 2* reasons we chose an independent school for our kid. It is not easy, and we are making serious financial sacrifices to do it.

Our kid is in 5th grade now, and he never, ever has homework over a weekend. He didn't have homework at all really until 4th, and even then it was one reinforcing math worksheet 3 days a week. (well, and "read for 20 minutes at least.") As a parent, I choose to believe the considerable research that concludes that homework at the elementary school level adds little to nothing to critical thinking ability and knowledge retention. The case in middle school is somewhat more compelling, but not to warrant a crushing homework load.

So we are attempting to buy our way out of what I believe, after thoughtful consideration, is a bullshit model of testing, curriculum = testing, and homework for homework's sake. ** the other of the top two reasons we save less for retirement than we could in order to pay tuition is the rich curriculum that is not the same as it is at our IB school, Murch.

Hmm, I have a kid at KLM and Deal. I'm no fan of homework can either. 5th graders had zero homework aside from a single project. Deal does not have much either. Hardly ever more than an hour, and usually less than 20 min or its done at school before class or in class. But this is just our experience.

If you want to send your kid to private, just do it OP. You don't need other people to justify. We've been at private and now at public. I just wish people would stop w the blanket statements on both sides.

[Anonymous]

In which case, if the OP would be willing to turn down an offer from a top ranked private on the assumption that her family could move in bounds for whatever JKLM school it wanted before next fall, presumably there is also time/the opportunity to see what her lottery results are and to factor the relevant charter into the mix, unless charters are off the table for some other reason.

[Anonymous]

Hmm, I have a kid at KLM and Deal. I'm no fan of homework can either. 5th graders had zero homework aside from a single project. Deal does not have much either.

So to confirm, it is your assertion that a 5th grader at Janney, Lafayette, and/or Murch has no homework whatsoever from August to May? Except for a one-time project.

Yeah. No.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Hmm, I have a kid at KLM and Deal. I'm no fan of homework can either. 5th graders had zero homework aside from a single project. Deal does not have much either.

So to confirm, it is your assertion that a 5th grader at Janney, Lafayette, and/or Murch has no homework whatsoever from August to May? Except for a one-time project.

Yeah. No.

You missed the end of my paragraph where I said, "But this is just our experience." Though I see that I could have been more clear by saying our class. (Assuming the larger group understood that by KLM my kids attended only one of the schools.)

I didn't add that many parents complained about this, as the other classes did have moderate homework. Buy, my kid did not have homework that year. My larger point is that any experience can be turned on its head to justify your decision. The pp I quoted said he didn't want to be a dick, but was buying his way out of a "bullshit model" that includes copious homework. I mean this is silly because not all public school classrooms have copious homework or "homework for homework's sake" just as he is not totally buying his way out of homework or buying into to meaningful homework.

Let's just concede that our choice is fine without having to skew an entire system. Let us use our own critical thinking skills to acknowledge that our own experiences, values, hopes, fears, and expectations fuel our decisions. We don't need to recruit people; just have the confidence to quietly own your choice.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It seems like if it would be hard to do private school because of money then I would definitely do private. My son went from 1-5 at Janney and now he's in 8th grade at Deal middle school and has a great time socially and academically. He will be going to SJC scholars program for HS and it has all worked out. I would go in public school until high school if I were you! Good luck!

what is the SJC scholars program?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Public pluses and downsides: Jklm filled with bright motivated kids and parents; whatever is lacking is not having PE everyday is trust me made up after school, tons of sports and enrichment opportunities on campus. These kids get plenty of exercise. Testing doesn't become a downside until third grade and it does impact the curriculum for about two months a year, but class sizes are totally manageable (we have twenty) and love being part of a neighborhood school and teachers are super responsive in fact I'd say more so because you see them every day at drop off and pick up as opposed to being in a car pool line. My teachers have always been super responsive.

Private downsides and pluses: more art is great, no testing provides more freedom in older grades, prettier facilities sometimes. And ... Smaller classes can be a plus or a minus. I can see it going either way. Sometimes privates are too small to find your tribe. Middle school is where there is a big divide that begins to take place. If money is any issue, apply in middle.

2 months a year? Can that be right?

No, not in my kids' experience.

not at Mann, and our scores are usually fairly high.

Although with the PARCC, the test is happening twice and the idea that third graders are going to be able to type out answers is ridiculous, so more time is being spent getting used to the computer experience - but again, my kids have no idea that the scores really matter and we never tell them what they get, so the person on the other thread who said that the kids feel the pressure of the test just would not be right in terms of our school, and I bet other JKLMs as well.

I think people are relaxed about the PARCC now because everyone has agreed it won't count? Anyway, still not a lot of time being spent at Mann on test prep

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good guess, LOL! Very close.

I, too, worry about happiness and, actually, about education -- in the sense of turning our kids onto the delights of reading, thinking, problem-solving, empathizing, figuring things out...

Not so much an issue (for the kids, at least) at the elementary school level -- though the instrumentalist of many parents is already apparent at that stage. But by HS, even (maybe especially) the kids who love to read and think are under tremendous pressure to just power through crushing workloads with no time to really reflect on what they're learning, much less to pursue interesting tangents. My own childhood and adolescence was filled with such opportunities and when I arrived at college I was like a kid in a candy store.

But had my HS education looked like the Big 3 experience today, I'd have been burnt out and/or needed a gap year

This is what my experience was like. I graduated from a private high school here in the DC area (graduation year 1995), not big three, but probably 'big five' if that exists. (I haven't paid attention to know what the classification being used here is). I was accepted to an Ivy League college but was SO burnt out by the time that I got there that it took me two years to recover. Grades were terrible in freshman and sophomore years of college and then I pulled them up in Junior and Senior years. I was just co completely exhausted by getting into college that all I could do freshman year was zone out and hang out. More importantly, it took me a very long time to enjoy learning again after high school. I loved learning in elementary and middle schools, hated all the pressure around it in high school, and only regained my love of learning in the later years of college.

Also, 17:16's email rang very true with me. At this point we could afford private without much stress because we live well below our means in a condo and we have only one kid. But I really don't think I could ever send my child to have a similar experience to that which I had in school. Besides the academic pressure, there was so much political stuff going on. From 7th to 10th grades, I was best friends with a girl whose family was incredibly politically connected. I spent summers on the Cape with her, hobnobbing with her politico family members. She would have been a great connection in adulthood if I ever would have followed up the connection. Instead, I have avoided her like the plague because, well, I just don't have very good memories of how I felt either at school or in that friendship. I constantly felt like my normal, not politically connected family was inferior and that she was doing me a favor to be friends with me. At the time, this was only a little bit about money and mostly about political connections. There were other bright spots in y life that helped, like the community that I had at my violin studio and the kids I met through my soccer team. But overall, I became more and more miserable at my school as I got older and realized that what everybody cared about was in order of importance: 1) what type of family political connections you had; 2) how much money you had; 3) what car you drove; 4) where you vacationed (or didn't! gasp!) in the summer.

As others have stated, the friends that I like from my private school are not sending their kids to private school -- they have them enrolled in public school.

To the poster who said that her dc did not experience 1-4, I would say you are probably not at one of the tippity top schools. It was really interesting to realize after coming from DC that so many others had experienced a hierarchy based almost exclusively on money, whereas while money and political connections frequently go hand in hand here, it is definitely the "I am important because of who my parents are, not what they have" here and it really is all about politics. The other thing is the way I first learned about elections was best friends having to move back if elections were lost and the parents did not become lobbyists. But really an awful environment for kids from normal families....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow -- must be different schools (or cohorts or both) -- HS DC says 1-4 are really alien to her experience. Sorry you went through that -- sounds awful.

is your child below 7th grade or not at STA, NCS, Sidwell or GDS?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good guess, LOL! Very close.

I, too, worry about happiness and, actually, about education -- in the sense of turning our kids onto the delights of reading, thinking, problem-solving, empathizing, figuring things out...

Not so much an issue (for the kids, at least) at the elementary school level -- though the instrumentalist of many parents is already apparent at that stage. But by HS, even (maybe especially) the kids who love to read and think are under tremendous pressure to just power through crushing workloads with no time to really reflect on what they're learning, much less to pursue interesting tangents. My own childhood and adolescence was filled with such opportunities and when I arrived at college I was like a kid in a candy store.

But had my HS education looked like the Big 3 experience today, I'd have been burnt out and/or needed a gap year

This is what my experience was like. I graduated from a private high school here in the DC area (graduation year 1995), not big three, but probably 'big five' if that exists. (I haven't paid attention to know what the classification being used here is). I was accepted to an Ivy League college but was SO burnt out by the time that I got there that it took me two years to recover. Grades were terrible in freshman and sophomore years of college and then I pulled them up in Junior and Senior years. I was just co completely exhausted by getting into college that all I could do freshman year was zone out and hang out. More importantly, it took me a very long time to enjoy learning again after high school. I loved learning in elementary and middle schools, hated all the pressure around it in high school, and only regained my love of learning in the later years of college.

Also, 17:16's email rang very true with me. At this point we could afford private without much stress because we live well below our means in a condo and we have only one kid. But I really don't think I could ever send my child to have a similar experience to that which I had in school. Besides the academic pressure, there was so much political stuff going on. From 7th to 10th grades, I was best friends with a girl whose family was incredibly politically connected. I spent summers on the Cape with her, hobnobbing with her politico family members. She would have been a great connection in adulthood if I ever would have followed up the connection. Instead, I have avoided her like the plague because, well, I just don't have very good memories of how I felt either at school or in that friendship. I constantly felt like my normal, not politically connected family was inferior and that she was doing me a favor to be friends with me. At the time, this was only a little bit about money and mostly about political connections. There were other bright spots in y life that helped, like the community that I had at my violin studio and the kids I met through my soccer team. But overall, I became more and more miserable at my school as I got older and realized that what everybody cared about was in order of importance: 1) what type of family political connections you had; 2) how much money you had; 3) what car you drove; 4) where you vacationed (or didn't! gasp!) in the summer.

As others have stated, the friends that I like from my private school are not sending their kids to private school -- they have them enrolled in public school.

To the poster who said that her dc did not experience 1-4, I would say you are probably not at one of the tippity top schools. It was really interesting to realize after coming from DC that so many others had experienced a hierarchy based almost exclusively on money, whereas while money and political connections frequently go hand in hand here, it is definitely the "I am important because of who my parents are, not what they have" here and it really is all about politics. The other thing is the way I first learned about elections was best friends having to move back if elections were lost and the parents did not become lobbyists. But really an awful environment for kids from normal families....

And you would be wrong. Might be because DC's a nerd and her friends are much more interested in what you're reading, listening to, eating, watching, drawing, thinking about, playing, or obsessing over than any of the stuff you mentioned. Then again, it could be that not all public schools are alike and that experiences at NCS/StA or Exeter in the 1980s and 1990s don't really tell you much about the variety of ways different kids from normal families experience Sidwell or GDS today.

[Anonymous]

Should have been "not all private schools are alike."

Neither are all public schools -- or even all JKLMs -- but that wasn't the point I was trying to make in the previous post!

Agree with an earlier poster that broad generalizations aren't really useful here,

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Wow -- must be different schools (or cohorts or both) -- HS DC says 1-4 are really alien to her experience. Sorry you went through that -- sounds awful.

is your child below 7th grade or not at STA, NCS, Sidwell or GDS?

Yes, DC is in high school at one of the schools you've listed. Also has friends, through an EC, in two of the others.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:the UVA trick wouldn't be worth it. competition is incredibly stiff. though UVA has several very good state schools, still seems like a strange tactic.

I disagree. If you are at a charter that does not accept seniors, all one parent has to do is move across the river for a year, change driver's licenses, voter registration, etc, and then pay tuition for the kid to go to the DCPCS and you have the in state tuition taken care of, the preferential admissions for in state applicants - if your kid seems likely to get in and be willing to go to UVA, Virginia Tech, or William & Mary, we would do it in a heartbeat. But then we have been bending over backwards and turning our lives upside down for years for the sake of our kids' educations - try having 3 kids in 3 different schools for two years and then come back and talk to me about "strange tactics."

I did it for law school, and UVA's tuition was at the time an incredible bargain for in state residents. So I graduated from college and came home but stayed across the river, and suddenly only had to pay $6k for law school every year and got an edge in the admissions process, and no one considered it cheating.

I know people who have worked for two years to establish residency in California for Berkeley law school, UT Austin, etc. I guess it just sounds strange because it sounds like we are uprooting a child, but we wouldn't have to. You just have to technically uproot a parent. And I really don't consider it cheating. I think the DC Tag program should qualify us for the in state rate everywhere instead of just providing a measly $10k every year, because the lack of a decent college option here is another problem with staying in the district if you are a public school family.

UVA cannot accept a student attending a DCPS/Charter as in-state. Similarly, you cannot qualify for instate Virginia tuition AND DC TAG. Well, I suppose you can try, but you will be caught lying on one form or the other.

For the final time, no one is talking about trying to get DC Tag and in state preference We are talking about separating for the senior year, having joint custody, and paying out of state tuition for the final year of DCPCS from Virginia. We know parents who have paid out of state tuition to send/keep their kids in Md schools while they lived in DC. All of this has been done, can be done, and is completely legal. That is why they set an out of state tuition rate for most public schools in most states and DC.

This is not cheating, the same way parceling a child out to live (in Md) with a grandparent while going to a HRCS in DC is not cheating - we were DC residents when said child applied, we continued to be DC residents and had our other children in IB DCPS, the Charter School knew about it and understood, we were the ones who went to the parent teacher conferences, we just could not handle the one child's commute with so many kids. We retained custody of the child, and the child came home Friday through Sunday.

As I said, we have jumped through enormous hoops to get our kids a good education, and I don't think we have cheated along the way, and we have no intention of cheating. As I also said, there is a fair chance that at that point any separation may be real even if not legally formalized, and I have spent many years living in Virginia and am completely comfortable with living there again, and we think it would be worth paying DC tuition for one year if we have a kid who is willing and likely to get into a good state school in Virginia.

THAT may be the biggest stumbling block, because right now none of our kids want to go to UVA and I am nervous about the frat/sorority culture and would rather send the boys. But there is also Virginia Tech. This is a long way in the future and I am surprised by the vehemence of the reaction here.

We do everything by the book, always have, always will. We do not lie our way into schools or lie to stay in schools and we are not proposing to do that here. Right now the out of state tuition for senior year would be $14k. So we are not talking about paying peanuts for our honesty either. IF we ever get to the point where this is a real possibility, we will probably try to find out whether having joint custody is enough to make the child a resident of both DC and VA. I would imagine it would have to be, because while the parents can live in different adjoining states or cities, the child in question can only go to one school.

But these are legal questions, and we have not fully investigated the issue, but it does seem like it would be unfair if a couple had joint custody and one parent lived in Virginia not to treat the child as a Virginia resident, even if the child went to a school in DC - public or private. And as I said, if we thought we had good odds, we would fork over the money for out of state tuition to DC for senior year. Again, by the book.

I think DC screws its residents and want nothing to do with DC Tag because while originally it was intended to compensate for the difference between in state and out of state tuition, the amount - 10k - has remained the same while tuitions have skyrocketed. Maybe because we have split up children before we don't see this as such a drastic move. But as I said, this is much more honest than people who live in VA and have DC rental properties here using those addresses to go to Deal....

[Anonymous]

In other words, you aren't hoping to defraud DC -- just VA. Because you think you've been screwed by DC...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In other words, you aren't hoping to defraud DC -- just VA. Because you think you've been screwed by DC...

I don't think the term fraud applies here, and anyway we are so far off topic it does not matter.......

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Good guess, LOL! Very close.

I, too, worry about happiness and, actually, about education -- in the sense of turning our kids onto the delights of reading, thinking, problem-solving, empathizing, figuring things out...

Not so much an issue (for the kids, at least) at the elementary school level -- though the instrumentalist of many parents is already apparent at that stage. But by HS, even (maybe especially) the kids who love to read and think are under tremendous pressure to just power through crushing workloads with no time to really reflect on what they're learning, much less to pursue interesting tangents. My own childhood and adolescence was filled with such opportunities and when I arrived at college I was like a kid in a candy store.

But had my HS education looked like the Big 3 experience today, I'd have been burnt out and/or needed a gap year

This is what my experience was like. I graduated from a private high school here in the DC area (graduation year 1995), not big three, but probably 'big five' if that exists. (I haven't paid attention to know what the classification being used here is). I was accepted to an Ivy League college but was SO burnt out by the time that I got there that it took me two years to recover. Grades were terrible in freshman and sophomore years of college and then I pulled them up in Junior and Senior years. I was just co completely exhausted by getting into college that all I could do freshman year was zone out and hang out. More importantly, it took me a very long time to enjoy learning again after high school. I loved learning in elementary and middle schools, hated all the pressure around it in high school, and only regained my love of learning in the later years of college.

Also, 17:16's email rang very true with me. At this point we could afford private without much stress because we live well below our means in a condo and we have only one kid. But I really don't think I could ever send my child to have a similar experience to that which I had in school. Besides the academic pressure, there was so much political stuff going on. From 7th to 10th grades, I was best friends with a girl whose family was incredibly politically connected. I spent summers on the Cape with her, hobnobbing with her politico family members. She would have been a great connection in adulthood if I ever would have followed up the connection. Instead, I have avoided her like the plague because, well, I just don't have very good memories of how I felt either at school or in that friendship. I constantly felt like my normal, not politically connected family was inferior and that she was doing me a favor to be friends with me. At the time, this was only a little bit about money and mostly about political connections. There were other bright spots in y life that helped, like the community that I had at my violin studio and the kids I met through my soccer team. But overall, I became more and more miserable at my school as I got older and realized that what everybody cared about was in order of importance: 1) what type of family political connections you had; 2) how much money you had; 3) what car you drove; 4) where you vacationed (or didn't! gasp!) in the summer.

As others have stated, the friends that I like from my private school are not sending their kids to private school -- they have them enrolled in public school.

To the poster who said that her dc did not experience 1-4, I would say you are probably not at one of the tippity top schools. It was really interesting to realize after coming from DC that so many others had experienced a hierarchy based almost exclusively on money, whereas while money and political connections frequently go hand in hand here, it is definitely the "I am important because of who my parents are, not what they have" here and it really is all about politics. The other thing is the way I first learned about elections was best friends having to move back if elections were lost and the parents did not become lobbyists. But really an awful environment for kids from normal families....

And you would be wrong. Might be because DC's a nerd and her friends are much more interested in what you're reading, listening to, eating, watching, drawing, thinking about, playing, or obsessing over than any of the stuff you mentioned. Then again, it could be that not all public schools are alike and that experiences at NCS/StA or Exeter in the 1980s and 1990s don't really tell you much about the variety of ways different kids from normal families experience Sidwell or GDS today.

I think the "nerds" get the best education everywhere and are least affected by social pressures because they have opted out, as long as they do not get bullied because of it......... they are their own subculture, but is nice to know that said subculture still exists at least at one or two of these schools....... that is why my brother had a great experience at STA