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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Private schools also don't need to spend time teaching to, and taking, standardized tests.

There's greater freedom for teachers on curriculum, more attention as well as more feedback per kid and in general the ability to meet the kids where they are in any classroom.

--Public school parent who attended private schools and who thinks that while Privates are 5-10% better, the costs outweight the benefits.[/quote]

[b]What does "greater freedom for teachers on curriculum" really mean or look like? I ask because it seems that there are certain things you have to learn in certain grades no matter what.[/b] My kids have learned those things. But, they have not had any of the same teachers during ES, so I know that not all teachers use the same curriculum to teach the same information. They haven't even had the same math books or read the same literature even though they are in the same school. Parent of twins have commented that it feels like their kids go to two different schools sometimes. Each have had several teachers who have introduced new models and methods that they had studied over the summer in professional development courses that no other teacher in the school is using yet. So that seems like a lot of freedom to choose a curriculum.

Also, with baseline testing, pre-unit benchmarks, etc. No child is being given text that is below their own personal reading level and at least one of mine has tested out of math units and been given advanced enrichment work instead until the next pre-unit test; there are reading and math and enrichment specialist who work with kids who are advanced or struggling, plus on-line programs that allow a student to go farther and deeper based on ability, and Individual Education Plans with teams of special ed instructors and supports to enable every child to access the curriculum. So clearly the public school students are being met "where they are" in the classroom.

So when you make those two particular comparisons, are you talking about something different than this?[/quote]

The teacher aide above can probably answer this better than I can, but: DCPS teachers are given a curriculum from DCPS central office. It pretty much tells them what they want to teach and how to do it.

At my private school, for instance, we did things very differently. The teachers developed the curriculum (not the central office). Instead of studying "world history" every year we had "central subjects." In forth grade we spend the entire year on Ancient Greece. We learned the language (top a degree), studied archaeology and architecture, sewed our own chitons with a sewing machine, made shields in shop class, investigated mythology at great length, wrote mythology plays and concluded the year with the olympics in which the whole school came to watch. It was awesome.  
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