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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My son is a K student in GDS.  I have been thinking about the same problem since he entered prk there.   My friends' children in very good public school could write a full paragraph the end year of K.  They also did research paper writing about the frog's life.  But my son's class just showed parents what they could do in playground now. Now I really don't know if it is worth the money to go private.  My view is that what students can achieve in playground was a development by themselves over the one year in the school, not related to school very much.  I am afraid my son will be left behind accademically, compared to public school students.  Could someone share more of their experience in private and their views about it?  Maybe the writing in K is not important?  I recently feel so frastrated that we paid the money while it seemed that great public school could provid similar or even better education.[/quote]

FWIW, I watched other parents worry about this when our kids were in Prek at GDS.  I don't think it was GDS-specific so much as a function of the transition from home to FT school.  Especially for mothers who closely watched/superintended their preschoolers' learning experiences, school felt like putting the breaks on progress rather than taking it to the next level.  Part of that was that individualized attention was replaced by a situation in which the program had to work for a group, but another part was that a broader/more stable base was being laid down than the kids were getting at home where, typically and understandably, parents often focussed on the things their little ones were good at or interested in or on the things they themselves valued.

Flash forward many years to HS. Most everyone stayed.  And now thinks their kids are better educated than they would have been had they done public the whole way.  Are they right now?  Were they right before?  My take is that they were too quick to judge in the early years and didn't know what to look for.  (Often focussed on skill acquisition and speed vs. reasoning and breadth/depth).  Invented spelling (coming up next!) drove a few crazy, but there were lasting payoffs (good phonics, comfort with writing, adorable mementos) and kids did, in fact, learn conventional spelling (both with lists and as they became experienced readers).  Basically, invented spelling lets kids write before they read and it doesn't reduce writing to correct letter/word/sentence formation.

Re now.  Having taught at an elite college in the area for years, I've seen a lot of work produced by high-performing students from MoCo and Ffx public schools.  My DC's work in HS would have stood out among the undergrad papers I typically received.  Similarly, DC's textual interpretation skills are more sophisticated than what I generally encountered in undergrad seminars.  I taught in humanities, so can't compare math/science to my undergrads, but DC has post-AP work in both.  Ditto foreign language.  So I don't worry about DC coming out of private school behind or us having wasted our money.

That said, there are some trade-offs.  Depending on personality and interests, the workload can be brutal and the competition demoralizing.  (I don't assume this is a public vs. private school thing, but school- and kid-specific.)  There's also a socially-engineered quality to the environment that has its pros and cons.  On the one hand, my kid will never assume that people of color are less intelligent than whites.   (A not uncommon assumption at the U where I taught).  On the other hand, standards about what it means to do something well (and about respect for different choices) are out of sync with mainstream America and I could see that leading to alienation and/or rude awakenings somewhere down the road.

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