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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here.  Thanks everyone for the serious replies.  I'm not trying to argue for or against enrichment, just truly trying to understand.  I have a kid who will be entering K next year so I have very little knowledge or experience with schools today, nor do I feel like I could even judge what a good curriculum would look like.  My kid loves numbers so I guess that's why my original question sounded like it was more geared towards math enrichment, but I think I generally refer to academic enrichment.  Non-academic enrichment seems clearly worthwhile to me.  Certain things like instruments or dance or foreign language you have to learn when you are young or you'll never have the same proficiency.  Even with sports, you will likely never have that chance again to play on teams with your age cohort.  And the skills you pick up from those extracurricular activities can greatly enrich your life as an adult.  Despite what some have said, I don't believe the goal of schools is to teach these extracurriculars.  You may have PE but it's to exercise your body, not to provide proficiency in a sport.  You may have band but it's to expose you to the possibilities and see if there is an interest there.  None of these offerings are central to the mission of a school.  But math and reading, those should be the bread and butter of the schools.

It sounds like people are saying schools today are just not teaching the basic subjects adequately.  What are you comparing today to?  Do you have in your mind a standard of teaching or some timeline of when kids should be learning certain math concepts for example?  Are there specific examples of how the schools are falling short?  As I mentioned, I am a product of public schools and MCPS specifically.  I have no idea if the curriculum back then was good or bad and I doubt my parents gave it a second's thought.  I always thought I had a good education (went to a "W" school), but looking back, I now realize there were some gaping holes.  I don't think math concepts were explained in depth for example, because I met classmates in college who had a much firmer grasp on fundamental concepts.  And I distinctly remember not knowing what nouns and verbs were until I started taking a foreign language in 7th grade (not because I was a bad student but it was never taught).  I also remember only learning about how to write simple essays (a thesis and 3 supporting paragraphs with a topic sentence each) until 9th grade.  Is all that normal or would my W school have gotten a failing grade from you all?

But despite all those failings, I turned out fine.  I still learned the math that I needed to go to a great college and I caught up on the more fundamental concepts in college because it was easier for my adult brain to grasp anyways (and while I did well in math in HS, I LOVED math in college like multivariable calc and linear algebra, so the lack of good foundation did not turn me off math).  And by college I was a good writer and went on to a top 3 law school.  I'm not bragging and I know my education could have been better and I could be better today than I am but the point is I turned out acceptable.  At the end of the day, does it matter if a kid learns algebra in 6th grade vs 9th grade?  (I have no idea when kids today learn algebra so please don't correct me, I am totally making up grades here).  As adults, we use maybe up to basic algebra in our daily lives?  And there are plenty of horrible writes in the legal field...

Again, I am not trying to challenge anyone's enrichment choices.  We all have limited time and I am trying to decide, in the future, if it would be more worthwhile to spend time enriching non-academic areas or academic areas.  My personal experience is telling me non-academic enrichment but I don't want to screw up my kid's chance at a good future because I am not getting with the changing times. [/quote]

We are in MCPS. The people we know who send their kids to MCPS and themselves went to MCPS says that it used to be much stronger. I don't know because I have nothing to compare it to, but I will say that one frustration, made worse by the pandemic, is that they teach to kids who are below grade level, and kids who are at or above grade level are getting very little attention. Magnets are now done by lottery among qualified kids. I know quite a few people who can afford private and have switched. For us, we would have to make huge sacrifices to send out kid to private, so instead we do outside work -- an RSM course for math and an AoPS course for ELA. So far it has worked well for us, but only because we really don't have to rely on the school to challenge our kid.[/quote]

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