Reply to FAQ: Comparing Public versus Private School Education

Forum Index » Private & Independent Schools

Reply to "FAQ: Comparing Public versus Private School Education"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]
I was forced by financial constraints (brought about by divorce) to pull my DS from the private elementary school that he and I both loved. Broke my heart to have to do it.

Now that he's entering high school and my cash flow's a bit better, we're looking at going back to private again. I must say, I can't wait.

The single best thing I would say about his years in public is that DS can get along, really, really comfortably, with just about anyone -- the kids with the "street-wise" affect, blue-bloods, newly arrived immigrants, you name it. His middle school, remarkably, had an almost equal balance of black, white, Latino and Asian kids. True diversity is the norm for these kids.

As I say, I loved his old private school, but I don't believe he would be as nonplussed by racial, social and class differences had he gone to private straight through.

The downside: unquestionably, his academics have suffered. The classes at the public schools he has attended are bursting at the seams. The curriculum often seems wanting. The arts are given short shrift: he had to choose in middle school between art and foreign language. The testing culture has run amok. There isn't nearly enough time to run and play.

And -- my pet peeve -- there has been this odd little common thread of commercialism that has been woven into the curriculum since elementary school: "write a travel brochure" or "analyze a television commercial."  In third grade, one assignment was to basically create a marketing plan: "If you were to open up a lemonade stand in our neighborhood, show where you would place it and why." What gives, MCPS?

There have been a ton of "completion grades" for homework assignments -- the teachers don't actually look to see what you've done, just that you did the assignment. How qualitatively good does the students' work turn out to be in that instance? There are also a lot of times when students swap papers with their desk mates for grading, or when the teacher, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of kids, decides by a lottery system whose homework will actually be checked and graded.

The assignment for a recent writing class in English was to take two weeks to read a book -- no book in particular -- which would later become the basis for a take home writing work. But really? Pick a book, ANY book?

And while I know any school can have the random teacher who is less than adequate, my son in middle school had a science teacher who basically stopped coming to class: She would phone in sick, usually on very short notice, making it a scramble for the school to even find a substitute teacher for her. It was a struggle to get rid of her, and the entire school year had elapsed before they did. A whole year of learning lost. In most privates, the unions not being a factor, I assume this problem would have been dealt with much more quickly.

I hope I can be clear-eyed as my son goes back to private. I know it won't be perfect. As I recall, private school was much complicated to navigate socially and sometimes unpleasantly clubby, both for the kids and their parents. But I'll take that snootiness ten times out of ten, compared to class sizes double or even triple what he's looking at in private -- to say nothing of all the other disappointments I've experienced in public schools these past few years.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics