I’ve noticed that on the private school admissions thread, many of the same discussions tend to get repeated over and over again, as parents new to the process often ask several of the same questions. To focus the discussion and hopefully help out some of the new parents, I’ve written this FAQ.

Almost every one of these topics is controversial. I’ve tried to note those contentious issues, but also keep this FAQ position-neutral. This approach may make the FAQ less interesting, but hopefully more useful.

If you think other topics should be added, or if you have useful additions to fill in gaps in existing topics, please post them. I can edit the original post to add them as appropriate, and to keep the FAQ updated over time. I'm going to maintain some editorial control though, so don't expect me to post everything anyone proposes.

Part 1

Basic School Info: Dealing with Information Overload

Is there a simple list somewhere of private schools in the DC/MD/VA area?
Yes. Here are links to a few lists:
http://www.independenteducation.org/our-schools
https://m360.aimsmddc.org/frontend/search.aspx?cs=1883
http://www.vais.org/members_find2.asp?source=map®ion=2
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/businesscareers/21125.html

What are the entry grades/numbers for each school?
[To be added once research complete. Please help by posting info for each school. A partial list is here.]

What's the difference between a "progressive" and a "traditional" school?
These terms refer to educational philosophy and teaching approach, not political leanings. Below are some links to information on progressive and traditional education approaches, and you can find many discussions by searching the DCUM archive. Neither approach is necessarily better or worse, but some people prefer one over the other. In the DC area, schools like Green Acres and Friends Community School are known for being progressive in approach.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_theory (describing various educational theories)
http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/10907.page

What are the "Big 3"?
When someone posts about the "Big 3," she's usually referring to Sidwell, StAlbans/NCS, and GDS. People will debate at length whether this term should instead refer to other schools, and whether or not other schools are better. Similarly, some people post about the "Big 4," the "Big 5," or the "Big 10." There really is no way to rank any of the schools definitively -- the best school is the one that fits your child and your family. It's probably a good idea to avoid all of these "Big __" terms whenever you can, because they really upset some people and can quickly lead a discussion thread off-topic with debates about terminology and rankings. It's often best just to refer to specific schools by name, or to refer generically to "well-regarded schools" or something similar. If you search the DCUM archive, you can easily find a dozen threads with people fighting about these terms and their implications.

"Hey, why did someone just trash the school my child is applying to?!?"
Don't get too upset when someone trashes your favorite school. It happens all the time on DCUM. Sometimes the reasons are legitimate, sometimes they’re spiteful, and sometimes they might be strategic. Use your own judgment about how much weight different comments deserve.

Where can I find info about all these schools?
Spend time looking at each school's website, because it will have lots of info about the school's curriculum, teaching philosophy, sports, extracurriculars, test scores, etc. Some data on test scores and other academic awards is compiled here: http://goo.gl/GgQvR . Information on college matriculation for many schools is analyzed here: http://matriculationstats.org/ . Try to find the school that is right for your child and your family, and don't make important educational decisions based on some simplistic ranking of schools.

How do the private schools compare to public schools? Is private school really worth it?
There are many different private and public schools, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, so it's difficult to compare them universally. A lot also depends on your own personal views and experiences. This can be a very controversial topic, so proceed with care. You can get lots of different opinions, but rarely much agreement.

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New - August 2, 2020

As this has not been updated since 2012, some updates/edits have been made to reflect the private school admissions process in 2020 (and beyond). Much of this guide is taken from this post, with some additions and edits. (This is a living document, so please reply with any suggestions and I’ll see what I can do! Also, any links included were live at the time of writing, send me a note if links become dead.) Below you can find the new and improved guide:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vSN8OzCoj6PEDIFRV0_xOGPgSeDctjtxrp3dvYZSMyWnYccx5Hdt2knP30zUWXY6VTOYe_Fq2crBQFQ/pub

Anonymous wrote:So, then 99.9 wppsi actually hurt a childs chance of getting into schools? We already have no priority, diversity and boring jobs working against us, do I need to add this to the list too?

There was a discussion of this exact topic several months ago, but I don't think it reached any clear conclusions because no one knows for sure, and different schools might approach the issue differently: http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/45/39002.page#263335 .

On the issue of which schools give good experiences to children with scores at 147 FSIQ or higher (99.9%), here's another thread that discussed the question at length: http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/56777.page . From quickly skimming the thread, it seems like these high-scoring kids are in a wide variety of places (privates, public magnets, G&T centers, and homeschool), and almost all parents report their children are doing well. I only saw one person recommend against a particular school. It seems like you could just pick the school you think is best for your child, and then switch later if you don't think the school is meeting your needs -- and indeed, as any child grows, the definition of the "right school" might change over time.

Good luck.

SAM2 wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Here is a profile on gun ownership in America from 2005. http://www.gallup.com/poll/20098/gun-ownership-use-america.aspx ....

I'm curious. Does anyone have statistics on handgun ownership? I wonder what percentage of those total firearms numbers are attributable to rifles. I'd imagine a fairly high percentage, but I don't really know.

I spent some time searching for stats. Interesting stuff.

Per Dep't of Justice study in 1994 (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/pubs-sum/165476.htm):
* 44 million Americans owned 192 million firearms, 65 million of which were handguns. [Approximately 34% of firearms are handguns, and 66% are rifles.] Although there were enough guns to have provided every U.S. adult with one, only 25 percent of adults actually owned firearms; 74 percent of gun owners possessed two or more.
* The proportion of American households that keep firearms appears to be declining.
* Sixty-eight percent of handgun owners also possessed at least one rifle or shotgun.

Per FBI research in 2005 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/offenses/expanded_information/data/shrtable_07.html), at least 75% of firearm deaths are from handguns. and less than 1% of firearm deaths were from rifles/shotguns/other. 14% of the time, the specific type of firearm was not identified, but judging from the reported stats, it seems that 98-99% of the unreported situations would involve handguns.

Anonymous wrote:Here is a profile on gun ownership in America from 2005. http://www.gallup.com/poll/20098/gun-ownership-use-america.aspx ....

I'm curious. Does anyone have statistics on handgun ownership? I wonder what percentage of those total firearms numbers are attributable to rifles. I'd imagine a fairly high percentage, but I don't really know.

NP here. I think 11:39/12:01 is correct that (assuming the test scores are accurate indicators) there is a pretty big difference between 99.0% and 99.9%. If you think of how a bell curve is shaped, you can see that as you get to the far-right of the curve (higher percentiles), you get significantly fewer kids and bigger score spreads. Put another way, to move a kid 4% from 95% to 99% requires a score 10 points higher on the test (125 vs. 135), but scoring another 12 points higher than that (135 vs. 147) only moves the percentile up 0.9% from 99% to 99.9%. Here is a link to an IQ rarity chart with those numbers: http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQtable.aspx .

The big question is whether the WPPSI is giving accurate scores at those high levels. I think there's a lot of evidence suggesting the accuracy level goes down significantly at those high percentiles. Here's one write-up: http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/highly_profoundly.htm . Nevertheless, diminished accuracy is a lot different than zero accuracy, so even at those extreme scores, the test has some reasonable bearing on the reality of the situation.

Bottom-line: If your child scored 99.9% on the FSIQ (score of 145+), then she's likely extremely smart, but you've probably already realized that from just being around her.

If you're interested in learning more about the topic, here is an academic who seems to be one of the leaders of the field in this sort of research, and he helpfully posts links to many of his writings at his website: http://faculty.education.uiowa.edu/dlohman/ . It's really fascinating stuff.

I think this link gives the data for all MoCo schools, and county-wide statistics: http://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/regulatoryaccountability/glance/currentyear/SAAG2009.pdf . Watch out, the file is big.

Also, I was surprised to discovery that 30+% of MoCo students are FARMS, and 10% are SPED. More than I would have guessed.

The best place I found to find real price info is the forum page at Edmunds: http://www.carspace.com/csGroups . Click on the particular make/model you want, and see what price others got. Here is the page for Odysseys, for example: http://townhall-talk.edmunds.com/direct/view/ed_displayMakeModelRelatedDiscussions!make=Honda&model=Odyssey .

Anonymous wrote:Ivy and Bean series
Little House series
Wizard of Oz series
Charlotte's Web
Stuart Little
Magic Tree House (after about 2-3 you'll be bored with the formulaic approach, but the first couple aren't so bad)
Alice in Wonderland

I have read or am reading all of the above to my 5 (almost 6) year old boy/girl twins and they love them.

How did you deal with the adult themes in these books? For example, how do you address the farmer's threatened slaughter of Wilbur and Charlotte's ultimate death, in Charlotte's Web? Similar issues arise in Wizard of Oz. I have not read Little House for a while, but I seem to recall some difficult themes there too. Those themes seem a little hard-hitting for such young kids. When I read Wizard of Oz to my child, I kept having to make creative adjustments to the story to dodge some of these issues (and my child definitely recognized the edits I was making and quizzed me about them). I later read a few articles from educators who warn about books that kids can read/understand, but have trouble processing emotionally.

Please understand I'm not suggesting you are doing anything wrong by reading these books to your children. They're your kids, so I assume you know best what they're capable of handling. I'm just curious how you gauged the issue and identified the line without crossing it.

I too think about the threat of terrorist attack as a factor to consider in deciding where to live. But then I decide it's really not much different than factoring in things like the risk of shark attacks in NC, or mountain lion attacks in CO, chemical plant explosions in TX/LA, shootings in places with high % of handgun ownership, freeway accident % in places requiring heavy car use, etc. All add to the risk profile. Some are particularly dramatic (like terrorist attack or sharks), but they might not be any more risky on a statistical basis than many other mundane threats.

Perhaps it's all a rationalization on my part to intellectualize the risks, but that's how I think about it.

OP, I unfortunately don't have an answer for you, but I do have a suggestion. In addition to asking for input here, I think that after you receive your acceptance letter from Maret, you could ask the Maret admissions office to give you names/emails/numbers of 3-4 AA families at Maret, so you can talk to them directly about their experiences there. That way, you can be very direct and clear in your questions with someone who should have answers. Alternatively, you could call/email the school's diversity coordinators directly to ask them for contacts with parents.
http://www.maret.org/parents/mpa/mpa_diversity_committee/index.aspx
http://www.maret.org/parents/mpa/mpa_contacts/index.aspx

Good luck!

Everyone has their own method of getting organized. For me, I just started making a list of every school that sounded potentially interesting. I focused on those close to my house and my office, or ones that offer bus service. For each school, I wrote down the cost, the location, the grades offered, and any other key details. Then, I started gathering info -- whenever I heard anything interesting about a school, or read something here, or saw something on the school's website, I added it to my notes. When open house season started, I spent a few Saturday mornings visiting schools. It's time consuming, but it helped keep me organized, and eventually I was able to create a good short list of 3-4 schools that our family applied to.

Here's one list of local independent schools: https://www.aisgw.org/parent_information/schools.aspx?pageaction=list&LinkID=

Good luck!

WXPN

Anonymous wrote:It tends to be a hair-splitting exercise at that level of distinguishing all of the above schools that are excellent. There was a Worth Magazine article in 2003 where Potomac ranked higher than some of the others. Then, the Dec. 2007 WSJ article ranked Holton, TJ, Sidwell and NCS as the best schools in this area to get kids into the top colleges.

I think that trying to use any one of those college matriculation articles to differentiate among these schools is going to lead to lots of inaccuracy. Each of those articles focused only on the high schools that supplied a small handful of colleges, so there was a lot of luck involved. For example, if a hypothetical high school sent 40% of its class to Yale that year but none to Harvard, and the article only looked at Harvard, then the high school would still rank low. At one point, I tried to combine the results of all three articles to improve the reliability some, but I think even those results are not terribly reliable (although they're probably better than any one article can give). Here's what I got when I combined the results:

% of students attending colleges covered by the 2007, 2004, and 2003 articles
St. Albans 16.84%
NCS 16.34%
Sidwell 14.33%
GDS 11.31%
Thos Jefferson 10.08%
Holton 6.33%
Potomac 6.09%
Landon 5.01%
Maret 4.94%
Richard Montgomery 4.45%
Winston Churchill 4.30%

There's a website called matriculationstats.org that's attempting to apply an interesting methodical approach to developing numbers like these for a much broader group of top colleges. I don't think he's added too many DC schools yet, but he's got some.

All that said, I think PP's point about hair-splitting among excellent schools is dead-on accurate. In comparing excellent schools like these, I think OP's focus on other intangible aspects that you like is the right way to go.

I know that legacy plays a role in college admissions, but I think many on DCUM over-estimate that role. If you think that the main reason students from top high schools are getting admitted to top colleges is because of legacy, then how do you explain the high NMSF, SAT, and AP scores from top high schools? I think the answer is that children of well-educated parents are more likely to be well-educated and test well (through some combo of nurture and nature). So certainly legacy can play some role for some kids and some schools, but I think lots of other things play bigger roles.

Maybe I'm not understanding OP's comments. Below are links to the curricula for three of the schools, and they all seem fairly academic, at least as academic as is reasonable for 5 and 6 year olds. I see science, reading, and math here. I'm not sure why you'd think "they'll be taught nothing for a year or two."

http://www.beauvoirschool.org/podium/default.aspx?t=22709
http://www.gds.org/podium/default.aspx?t=122876
http://www.sidwell.edu/lower_school/academics/index.aspx