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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have recently visited a very $$$$ DC school and observed some classes.  I am a parent very active in our own neghborhood school, which is pretty decent...I dont see to much difference in what they do and how they do it.  Is it just the name we are paying for?  Or is it fear of the children being influenced by general population at the PGCPS?  The average parochial or religious based private school compared to my heighborhood school is in my opinion not a good use of my money...they really dont offer too much more......
Parental involvement is the key to a successful school

My husband and I are now struggling as to where to put our children.  Do we put them in $$$ schools because they are better schools and in the long run they will do better academically or will they still have the same education as long as we stay as involved as we are?[/quote]

I'm not sure which school you visited or which school you are zoned for, but I can comment on the major differences we're noticed between our zoned school (one child is there) and the $$$$ independent school. 
1) class size - neighborhood school has 27 in DD's kinder class with no aide, private school has 15 plus math and reading specialists, so with pull out in those subjects the leveled groups are never more than 10 kids
2) specials - the bulk of the neighborhood school's day is devoted to math and reading, no matter the grade, because they are teaching towards proficiency on the state tests, that leaves very little time for anything else. DD gets things like PE and music on a rotating schedule for a 20 minute block maybe once a week. At other DD's school, the math and reading blocks are no longer than the blocks for science (daily) or social studies (also daily) or the specials like art, music, etc. She gets PE 4 days a week and at least one "special" (usually 2) a day that are 45 minute blocks.
3) school  communications - neighborhood school is not very organized and there is nothing proactive as far as getting info out to parents. I typically have to confirm things with friends with older kids because announcements on the PA are how they transmit info. My child is 5, so info about events and dress down days is often forgotten or slightly confused by the time she gets home. This is in contrast to the web portal for my other DD's school that is a centralized source of info about anything we could need - schedule, homework, events, etc. 
4) miscellaneous - obviously there are far more field trips and supplemental events and services that happen at the private school. The tuition pays for that. The facilities are amazing. The meals included with tuition are healthy and pretty tasty. The neighborhood school is pretty bare bones as far as facilities and they have had one field trip this year. I send lunch because I teach in county and the meals we serve at my school are not good. There's a huge difference in P/T conferences. At the neighborhood school we were scheduled for a 5 minute conference. The teacher hadn't prepared anything and just said "she's doing great." At the other school, the conferences are blocked for 1/2 hour and they walk through all of the objectives for the report cards and showed samples of the work and how it was evaluated.

There are a lot of other differences too, but most are just the types of things you'd expect due to the disparity in funds available to the schools for various things. My eldest was also at a parochial school for a few years and I would say it fell somewhere in between the 2: smaller classes, but not as small as the independent school, way more communication between school and home, but not as slick and pretty as the private school, facilities were comparable to the neighborhood school, curriculum also was pretty comparable.

This post is getting way too long, but I think these choices depend a ton on the child. Our eldest really needs the school we sign checks for each month. It has made a tremendous difference in her quality of life. She's happy and challenged and feels safe at school. Those things weren't true until we moved her to the independent school. My DD at the neighborhood school is doing fine and enjoys going to school and she is happy there for now. We'll play it by ear year by year for both of them. I think for many people, the differences start to become more apparent or matter more as the child gets older. Kindergarten is more about learning to be in a structured classroom and socializing with others. So at that age I think class size and facilities are the big differences between the neighborhood school and a place like GDS or Beauvoir. As they get older, I think the substantive contrasts between one school and another and "fit" become more obvious.

One thing I will say, is at least from my experience, the kids will not have the same education. Our neighborhood school essentially does not teach science or writing in any meaningful way because they are incredibly focused on getting the numbers up on math and reading proficiency. So at the independent school, my daughter does have a substantively different curriculum than she would as a TAG kid at the neighborhood school. I can't speak for the TAG centers because she did not get drawn in the lottery, so we never visited and just committed to the independent at that point.[/quote]

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