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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If kids are ranked, even informally, nobody wants to share resources. And if rankings are real and affect outcomes further down the line, then people are much more hush hush about it.

Also, there is the phenomenon where a school gets a reputation for being "good" because of high test scores, but it is all because of the work that parents do on the side. The academics in the classroom are weak, which surprises newcomers to the school who are unaware of the secret supplementing.[/quote]

This is exactly how our private prek-8th school is. We’re on the west coast so it’s not just a dmv thing. We have test-in gifted private schools as well as some very difficult to access private HSs. Families join our school and then complain about the academics after 1-2 years.

There’s an entire culture of secret supplementing to ensure that your kid will either do well enough on standardized tests to get into gifted private school or competitive 5/6-12 schools, or to ensure that your kid will get one of the 3-4 (or less) slots that our school typically maxes out at at each of the selective private HSs. That also requires getting into the top math track for 6th grade.

Some people will move away or switch as early as 3rd or 4th grade when they realize their cohort has too many smart kids or sports recruits of their kid’s gender.

Anyway, through “no” RSVPs for parties, cancelled outings, missed scout meetings, and failed carpools, plus chatty kids, I realized that 75-80% of kids my in kid’s grade do private tutors, RSM, mathnasium, Kumon, etc.[b] There’s even a not-so-secret market of summer teacher tutoring that parents pass from one to the other, with the end result that one clique of parents always magically has access to our school’s teachers for private tutoring at home[/b].[/quote]

To me this pretty wild because my children's teachers are thoroughly average and not people I would hire for tutoring to get my children ahead. They are competent enough during the school year but never differentiate for the smart kids and are too focused on the slow kids. [/quote]

It’s a big thing for reading for summers before grades K-2 and for math for grades 2-5. What I’ve seen happen is that kids who the teachers have worked with get out in the “advanced” groups for those topics in the next year, and because the teachers know the kids well, they consistently make sure the kids are placed with the “good” teacher the next year.

I think it confers the greatest advantage to parents whose kids wouldn’t be in the high reading group or advanced math track based on the previous year, but who are close. The teachers tutor exactly to the next year’s curriculum and also give familiar kids the benefit of the doubt when leveling conversations happen. [/quote]

Wow, that sounds like a very toxic school environment. I'm sorry you had to navigate that.[/quote]

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