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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have not been happy with my kid's education at a TT. I think these schools are way overrated and hit or miss. They don't do differentiation, and the math is not great at a lot of them. We stay because we like the city, but if you don't, I don't think these schools are worth staying. Parental involvement and a happy life are worth far more than whatever slight educational advantage the might or might not provide. FWIW, both my husband and I went to big name Ivies, did well and didn't feel all that different from the kids who went to these schools. I went to a private school in middle America, and he went to a totally average high school in the middle of the country. He graduated summa, me magna without much effort. [/quote]

Thank so much for the honest reply. Would you mind sharing if your kids are still in Lower School or are they in Middle or High School? We've not been happy either and know many other families who think their kid is not learning anything, particularly in math. We've heard that things pick up significantly in Middle and High School but from such a low base we're not even sure if we'd be happy with the pace even once that kicks in. [/quote]

Not PP but my kid switched from a 2T private middle school to a public one and the public math was both more difficult and much more differentiated; honors and non-honors math at the private school were basically the same material, the honors kids just were expected to pick it up a bit faster and so had a bit more time built in for enrichment, whereas in public there's a whole separate honors track and the honors kids are studying material in 8th grade that the non-honors kids would study in 9th. (some publics even got a year beyond that, we just weren't lucky enough to get into one)

FWICT from when we were shopping for other private schools, this seems to be a pretty typical approach in most of them, I suspect in order to keep parents happy - your kid might never make it to the honors track, but you don't want them to ever be in a position where they've fallen too far behind and could only get up to it if they took a year's worth of intense math over the summer, so you keep everybody studying blankety blank and it's just that some kids are in blankety blank honors.[/quote]

Honest question, what is the 2T math curriculum you experienced? My DC's private middle school "accelerated" is Algebra in 7th and Geometry in 8th, and all of the 2T high schools we applied to seemed to have a track in 9th grade to accommodate this. I found very few public middle schools who did this, but if we'd gone the public schools route (not SHS), we might have found a way to take the Regents and then found out if the public high school could accommodate this (although very few seemed to offer Calc BC outside of the very STEM heavy schools and SHS).[/quote]

It was the school's own curriculum - there wasn't a standard textbook - but I think in 8th grade they covered about half of Algebra I. I know that the list of books they assigned for summer math enrichment used the non-accelerated, non-Pre-Algebra book before 8th grade. So not even keeping up with the standard public school honors pace of 8th grade Regents Algebra.

7th grade Algebra and 8th grade Geometry is pretty rare - a few city public schools (like Lab Middle, IIRC) offer it, and I think a few suburbs like Scarsdale too, but not even very many private schools do; top of my head the only two I can think of are Speyer and HM (and I don't get the impression that many kids at HM do it). Most TT schools seem to have "Algebra I Honors" for 8th graders that consists of Algebra I and maybe a little early Algebra II material.[/quote]

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