How much extra academic work do your children do...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve never seen someone keep it a secret- almost everyone I know (and I talk to a lot of parents) has their kid do some kind of academic enrichment or tutoring. It’s just part of the culture here combined with the fact that everyone is looking to accelerate their kids (chapter books in kindergarten, algebra in 6th grade, DE classes in high school). No matter how smart your child is they can’t do that without a lot of outside help.

The more interesting question is why are we in such a rush (my eldest was taking math classes in HS that my engineer brother was taking in his Junior year of college). We’re all locked in a weird arms race.

No we aren’t. Those are some poorly educated parents if they think that pushing chapter books on 5 year olds makes any difference long term. Pushing math faster than necessary will guarantee that the slow but steady smart kids who followed the guidelines will be much more proficient than the ones who sped through the necessary basics.

I suspect you do not have older kids who are applying to college, internships or other competitive opportunities. Whether you like it or not your kids live in a competitive environment where opportunities from scholarships, top colleges, prestigious high schools to internships and sports teams are subject to fierce competition. I have never met a parent who seriously regrets doing too much. But I know a lot of parents who wish they had done more.

[Anonymous]

I could never spend $100/hour on a tutor. We do lots of visits to the library and I taught both of them to read. We did spelling tests on the weekends at home at the end of K and into 1st. I buy a lot of math workbooks. They are in a weekend language class, but that's aimed more at retaining a language they learned while we lived overseas briefly than learning it. I don't discuss any of this with anybody.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:...and if the amount is greater than zero, do you keep this fact a secret? This could include music lessons and language classes.

At my children's schools there was definitely a culture of not wanting other people to know how much supplementing, acceleration, and enrichment we were all doing on the side. A close friend who lives in the Midwest says people are very open about it there.

Do you think people are more secretive about it at good schools or middling schools?

My children are in college now. We hired a reading tutor for the one with dyslexia. One had music lessons for their instrument. We did typical enrichment activities like libraries, museums, and hiking. They each had a few activities. No tutoring to accelerate. They both did very well academically in HS (one of the DCUM FCPS “pressure cookers”) and in college. Both attend excellent DCUM approved universities - top ten for their major but not one of the crap shoot schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:...and if the amount is greater than zero, do you keep this fact a secret? This could include music lessons and language classes.

At my children's schools there was definitely a culture of not wanting other people to know how much supplementing, acceleration, and enrichment we were all doing on the side. A close friend who lives in the Midwest says people are very open about it there.

Do you think people are more secretive about it at good schools or middling schools?

My children are in college now. We hired a reading tutor for the one with dyslexia. One had music lessons for their instrument. We did typical enrichment activities like libraries, museums, and hiking. They each had a few activities. No tutoring to accelerate. They both did very well academically in HS (one of the DCUM FCPS “pressure cookers”) and in college. Both attend excellent DCUM approved universities - top ten for their major but not one of the crap shoot schools.

Where those fools go

[Anonymous]

Yes, my children do a lot of supplement. Not by tutors, but by my spouse and me. School just isn’t enough. Schools are teaching only grade level material or below. If your child is either at grade level or above, they will receive no new material at school.

There are no “good” schools. Schools only seem good and with high test scores because they have a high percentage of kids with parents that value education and are engaged in educated their children at home. What differentiates the good schools from the bad schools is how the kids that attend are parented. It isn’t the actual school or teachers.

[Anonymous]

We recently moved, and I feel like my eyes are being opened with this thread. I had to fight really hard to get my youngest child (5th grade) into the math class he was previously in. I had to pay for private testing to get a FSIQ, and even when that came back high, he still had to wait until after standardized testing to move into the higher class.

We were previously at a small Catholic school in the Midwest. They just had all the kids take a math placement test at the beginning of the year, and the kids were placed in the appropriate class.

For whatever reason, it wasn’t difficult at all to get the kids into more advanced classes for high school. Maybe parents burn out on this stuff?

[Anonymous]

We get the kids music lessons, and we make sure that they read great literature at home. Most of the stuff they read in school is really bad until about 10th grade.
I don’t know what the world is going to be like when they are adults, but whatever happens, I want them to be able to access an internal meaning to their lives and an appreciation for what it means to be human.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We recently moved, and I feel like my eyes are being opened with this thread. I had to fight really hard to get my youngest child (5th grade) into the math class he was previously in. I had to pay for private testing to get a FSIQ, and even when that came back high, he still had to wait until after standardized testing to move into the higher class.

We were previously at a small Catholic school in the Midwest. They just had all the kids take a math placement test at the beginning of the year, and the kids were placed in the appropriate class.

For whatever reason, it wasn’t difficult at all to get the kids into more advanced classes for high school. Maybe parents burn out on this stuff?

The bolded part above is called “tracking” and it is how education is supposed to work: kids are grouped by ability and then given instruction appropriate to their individual capabilities. It is still more common in “red states,” or republican-dominated areas like the Midwest.

Now, PP, you live in the “land of equity,” where democrats are trying to eliminate all higher-level or accelerated classes; democrats already eliminated the gifted and talented programs entirely in NYC and Washington State.

There is a pilot program in FCPS to eliminate advanced elementary math and replace it with the “Equity Cubed” or E3 math curriculum, so every child receives the exact same instruction regardless of their individual ability.


Elections have consequences. If you want your child subjected to the dumbed-down DEI or “equity” education, just keep voting in democrats to destroy public education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We get the kids music lessons, and we make sure that they read great literature at home. Most of the stuff they read in school is really bad until about 10th grade.
I don’t know what the world is going to be like when they are adults, but whatever happens, I want them to be able to access an internal meaning to their lives and an appreciation for what it means to be human.

Sounds cliche

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We get the kids music lessons, and we make sure that they read great literature at home. Most of the stuff they read in school is really bad until about 10th grade.
I don’t know what the world is going to be like when they are adults, but whatever happens, I want them to be able to access an internal meaning to their lives and an appreciation for what it means to be human.

+1, and we don't hide it. What we're reading at home doesn't come up much, but sometimes it does and I've described our approach to parent friends before. That said, one of our home reading literature books for younger kids, The Wind in the Willows, showed up (in an slightly abbreviated form) as classroom reading for our third grader this year. I was encouraged by that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We get the kids music lessons, and we make sure that they read great literature at home. Most of the stuff they read in school is really bad until about 10th grade.
I don’t know what the world is going to be like when they are adults, but whatever happens, I want them to be able to access an internal meaning to their lives and an appreciation for what it means to be human.

I really love this. It's what the old concept of a "liberal arts" education (or the classical "quadrivium") was supposed to be about.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We recently moved, and I feel like my eyes are being opened with this thread. I had to fight really hard to get my youngest child (5th grade) into the math class he was previously in. I had to pay for private testing to get a FSIQ, and even when that came back high, he still had to wait until after standardized testing to move into the higher class.

We were previously at a small Catholic school in the Midwest. They just had all the kids take a math placement test at the beginning of the year, and the kids were placed in the appropriate class.

For whatever reason, it wasn’t difficult at all to get the kids into more advanced classes for high school. Maybe parents burn out on this stuff?

The bolded part above is called “tracking” and it is how education is supposed to work: kids are grouped by ability and then given instruction appropriate to their individual capabilities. It is still more common in “red states,” or republican-dominated areas like the Midwest.

Now, PP, you live in the “land of equity,” where democrats are trying to eliminate all higher-level or accelerated classes; democrats already eliminated the gifted and talented programs entirely in NYC and Washington State.

There is a pilot program in FCPS to eliminate advanced elementary math and replace it with the “Equity Cubed” or E3 math curriculum, so every child receives the exact same instruction regardless of their individual ability.


Elections have consequences. If you want your child subjected to the dumbed-down DEI or “equity” education, just keep voting in democrats to destroy public education.

WA state democrat chiming in here with a quick fact-check, because the PP I’m replying to is providing incorrect information: there has been NO elimination of gifted and talented programs at a state level in Washington state. Only one district has altered their G&T programs, and that’s Seattle, and they’re moving from standalone gifted and talented schools to a model of providing services within classrooms at zoned schools. How this looks in practice depends on the teacher and principal, but I know plenty of people who never put their kids in a specialized school even when they were qualified because their zoned school fully met their gifted child’s needs. It really depends. Anyway, the shift to end gifted and talented schools hasn’t even happened at all grade levels yet. It’s also part of a vast plan to close schools that will affect every student in the district.

Many districts here have quite robust hi-cap and gifted and talented programs, including standalone public schools, standalone classrooms, pull-outs for certain subjects, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If kids are ranked, even informally, nobody wants to share resources. And if rankings are real and affect outcomes further down the line, then people are much more hush hush about it.

Also, there is the phenomenon where a school gets a reputation for being "good" because of high test scores, but it is all because of the work that parents do on the side. The academics in the classroom are weak, which surprises newcomers to the school who are unaware of the secret supplementing.

This is exactly how our private prek-8th school is. We’re on the west coast so it’s not just a dmv thing. We have test-in gifted private schools as well as some very difficult to access private HSs. Families join our school and then complain about the academics after 1-2 years.

There’s an entire culture of secret supplementing to ensure that your kid will either do well enough on standardized tests to get into gifted private school or competitive 5/6-12 schools, or to ensure that your kid will get one of the 3-4 (or less) slots that our school typically maxes out at at each of the selective private HSs. That also requires getting into the top math track for 6th grade.

Some people will move away or switch as early as 3rd or 4th grade when they realize their cohort has too many smart kids or sports recruits of their kid’s gender.

Anyway, through “no” RSVPs for parties, cancelled outings, missed scout meetings, and failed carpools, plus chatty kids, I realized that 75-80% of kids my in kid’s grade do private tutors, RSM, mathnasium, Kumon, etc. There’s even a not-so-secret market of summer teacher tutoring that parents pass from one to the other, with the end result that one clique of parents always magically has access to our school’s teachers for private tutoring at home.

To me this pretty wild because my children's teachers are thoroughly average and not people I would hire for tutoring to get my children ahead. They are competent enough during the school year but never differentiate for the smart kids and are too focused on the slow kids.

My thoughts exactly. HS teachers could be useful in middle school but you typically need college professors for effective HS tutoring.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’ve never seen someone keep it a secret- almost everyone I know (and I talk to a lot of parents) has their kid do some kind of academic enrichment or tutoring. It’s just part of the culture here combined with the fact that everyone is looking to accelerate their kids (chapter books in kindergarten, algebra in 6th grade, DE classes in high school). No matter how smart your child is they can’t do that without a lot of outside help.

The more interesting question is why are we in such a rush (my eldest was taking math classes in HS that my engineer brother was taking in his Junior year of college). We’re all locked in a weird arms race.

No we aren’t. Those are some poorly educated parents if they think that pushing chapter books on 5 year olds makes any difference long term. Pushing math faster than necessary will guarantee that the slow but steady smart kids who followed the guidelines will be much more proficient than the ones who sped through the necessary basics.

Smart kids will become behavior cases in "slow and steady" classes.

Children either have behavior problems or they don’t. Smart kids don’t exhibit bad behavior unless they have a behavior issue. Parent claim their kids are bored but that very small amount of super smart kids know how to use their time wisely.

If they use their time wisely and get their work done, yes, they are bored. They have to sit there and wait till the other kids are done.

Your kid should ask the teacher for more work. My child is in MS and finishes math quickly on the most accelerated track. The teacher then gives them more advanced problems to work on.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:If kids are ranked, even informally, nobody wants to share resources. And if rankings are real and affect outcomes further down the line, then people are much more hush hush about it.

Also, there is the phenomenon where a school gets a reputation for being "good" because of high test scores, but it is all because of the work that parents do on the side. The academics in the classroom are weak, which surprises newcomers to the school who are unaware of the secret supplementing.

This is exactly how our private prek-8th school is. We’re on the west coast so it’s not just a dmv thing. We have test-in gifted private schools as well as some very difficult to access private HSs. Families join our school and then complain about the academics after 1-2 years.

There’s an entire culture of secret supplementing to ensure that your kid will either do well enough on standardized tests to get into gifted private school or competitive 5/6-12 schools, or to ensure that your kid will get one of the 3-4 (or less) slots that our school typically maxes out at at each of the selective private HSs. That also requires getting into the top math track for 6th grade.

Some people will move away or switch as early as 3rd or 4th grade when they realize their cohort has too many smart kids or sports recruits of their kid’s gender.

Anyway, through “no” RSVPs for parties, cancelled outings, missed scout meetings, and failed carpools, plus chatty kids, I realized that 75-80% of kids my in kid’s grade do private tutors, RSM, mathnasium, Kumon, etc. There’s even a not-so-secret market of summer teacher tutoring that parents pass from one to the other, with the end result that one clique of parents always magically has access to our school’s teachers for private tutoring at home.

To me this pretty wild because my children's teachers are thoroughly average and not people I would hire for tutoring to get my children ahead. They are competent enough during the school year but never differentiate for the smart kids and are too focused on the slow kids.

My thoughts exactly. HS teachers could be useful in middle school but you typically need college professors for effective HS tutoring.

HS STEM subject teachers have real degrees, so they could provide enrichment in college level STEM topics.

What gets me is elementary school teachers hiring themselves out as enrichment tutors over the summer. Like if you were capable of teaching advanced material, why didn't you do that during the school year??? Terrible ethics, I would never hire someone like that.