Reply to Stay at TT or Retire to Suburbs

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There will be smart classmates and good teachers at both.  Downsides to public will be rote curriculum (current philosophy is to ensure consistency through control), teaching to the standardized test, larger class sizes, many of eliminated tracking/gifted programs at elementary and middle school levels, bureaucracy, populations like ESL and special needs which take up a lot of resources, worse overall college matriculation, grade inflation which makes it diffiuclt to stand out.  Downsides to private are cost, more legacy/donor families, less economic diversity, usually no tracking at lower school level.[/quote]

Hoo boy.

"Rote curriculum": no, the broad pedagogy is the same at both places, nobody's having you spend half of your time memorizing crap anymore.

"Teaching to the test": not really, though we did find that when we moved to NYC the teachers spent a lot more time teaching writing in general because that's a major component of the NY state exam. (but all year, and not specifically directed to state exam questions)

"Larger class sizes": suburbs barely have any gap with privates now - like 18 versus 22 - and the city is in the process of matching suburbs.

"Eliminated tracking/gifted programs": public schools do lots of tracking, if anything this more of a problem in private schools.

"Bureaucracy": seriously? how many associate deans of blahdeblah does your private school have?

"populations like ESL and special needs which take up a lot of resources": yeah, heaven forbid our kids are exposed to any of those people.

"worse overall college matriculation": sure, because the private schools have most of the rich kids.

"grade inflation": the modal GPA at Horace Mann is an A-.[/quote]

HM students have sky high SATs, the fact the mode is an A- speaks to grade deflation, they would have a 4.infinity at a decent suburban public.

ESL does not add to a classroom

You have to be horribly ignorant to think even 4T privates charging over 65,000 a year have 18 students in a classroom as the norm

If you can afford it without sacrifices, go to private school. [/quote]

FWIW, 18 was the class size at Fieldston during my kid's brief tenure there.[/quote]

We looked at a lot of private high schools and the class sizes seemed to be around 17-20ish. Even at the small schools I didn't see any super small classes. I don't think class size, within reason, is that much of an issue if you're dealing with well behaved high school kids.  More of an issue for younger kids or in environments where you may have disruptors. Very small class sizes are nice but I'm not sure how well they prepare kids for college. One of the things I thought about when deciding on a HS was whether going from a very small K-8 to a very small high school would make the transition to college more challenging for my kid. Perhaps it's better to learn how to navigate a larger environment when your kid still has support at home. I've heard people making this argument when sending kids to SHS vs private.[/quote]

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