Reply to Top private (Sidwell, GDS) versus top public (JKLM) for early years: what are the differences?

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Reply to "Top private (Sidwell, GDS) versus top public (JKLM) for early years: what are the differences? "

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What is off the grid?

Btw another poster eschewing privates all the while detailing and name dropping as best possible her own list of privates.[/quote]

the reason to name drop is that other posters who have decided to go public have been accused of "painting all privates with a broad brush" and not being familiar with any of them - not even bothering to investigate.  I think the people who went to privates here and are not sending their kids help provide context when we know what schools they were/are familiar with.

Off the grid in my book is sending your kid to an EOTP school, where lots of kinds of learning is going on, not all academic, while the pressure cooker the poster above was referring to (choosing the challenging and presumably private school that she never had for her daughter), and admitting that she had made a mistake.

Pressure cookers tend to be the privates or even Wilson potentially, where you have the Janney kids duking it out for the Ivy League schools, and much less real diversity in the social circle no matter how "diverse" Wilson is on paper.

Just my opinion.[/quote]

Generally, "off the grid" refers to moving far enough away from population centers that you need to supply your own power -- literally.  In this context, as I indicated previously, I think it would mean moving to a community where there was a different attitude toward education than what I've seen in major US cities on both coasts.  Is sending your high SES kid to an east of the park school in DC so s/he can avoid "duking it out" with other high SES kids from your neighborhood (in either public or private school), going "off the grid" or just playing the same game on a field where high SES provides more of a competitive advantage?  I think that there are pros and cons to each option -- Wilson or Walls, other DC public schools (including charters), local private schools -- but none of these choices are off the grid.  They're different niches in the same ecosystem.  And these kinds of choices are HS/MS decisions for people who have chosen to live in affluent neighborhoods in DC.  [b]They don't speak to the question of what's at stake in choosing between Janney/Key/Lafayette/Murch/Mann and Sidwell or GDS for elementary school.

[/b]As an aside, re pressure cookers -- ironically, the pressure cooker atmosphere to me involves the obsession with APs and acceleration that kicks in in HS here/now (sooner if you live in the burbs and your kid tests gifted).   BASIS is self-consciously built on that model.  Its pitch is you don't have to be smart or rich to take lots of APs (or take Algebra in 6th grade) -- you have to be disciplined and motivated and be given the resources.  (And we have to be allowed to kick you out if you don't get with the program). [b]For my kid, what was valuable about the private L/MS experience was breadth and depth and play and experimentation, which is a very different educational model.[/b]  HS at the same school has been a decidedly mixed bag -- with the AP/acceleration model arguably eclipsing the other approach in the later years -- or maybe an attempt to do both in a way that's utterly unrealistic given time pressure and previously instilled standards about what it means to do something well.

[/quote]

PP, sorry, so what is "at stake" then? Please help (i.e. elaborate).

Thanks!

[/quote]

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