Reply to Are progressive schools a bad fit for parents who want to see academic progress?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You have to know your child. It was not a good fit for my older child, who has learning disabilities. It was fabulous for my younger child, who is a self starter and intellectually curious. He loved the freedom and we definitely saw academic progress.[/quote]

Why was it not a good fit for the child with LD? Why would traditional have been better?[/quote]

Progressive schools are based on the idea that if you give kids the right tools, they can explore and draw their own conclusions. My kid with LDs needed much more explicit, teacher-directed instruction.[/quote]

That is helpful thank you. What did that look like in the classroom for the older child? Did he just seem lost in the progressive school? [/quote]

Yes. And getting super dysregulated because he couldn't understand the expectations or the unspoken social rules that everyone else intuitively knew. And once he was diagnosed with dyslexia, our providers said he needed explicit instruction.

On the other hand, I can't emphasize enough how good it was for my gifted kid to be given the space to work things out for himself and to go as far and as deep as he wanted to. He thrived on the ability to make connections for himself (those same connections that his brother needed to be taught).[/quote]

But even the most gifted kid needs to be taught grammar and spelling. [/quote]

🤷🏽‍♀️ He figured it out even without weekly spelling tests of random words (which don't really teach the rules of spelling anyway). To the extent I had to choose between critical thinking and spelling, I chose thinking. But I didn't have to choose.[/quote]

But you don’t know if he would have been better off in a traditional school with teachers who can better guide his inquiries. Maybe that was part of the progressive school. But no matter how smart and gifted a kid is, I don’t think just letting them teach themselves is at all sensible. Kids like that should be getting a ton of content served to them and start learning the research and writing skills that will enable them to enter into a profession. Otherwise what you just have the kid randomly reading books. Which maybe is what you want for your kid, but I think a lot of us envision something more guided and rigorous. Because especially if you are PAYING for this, you should expect that your child will be challenged and instructed. [/quote]

He got plenty of guidance. He's in high school now and doing great. None of us can know if our children would be doing even better with a different path, but as long as they are doing well, that's an absurd question.[/quote]

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