Reply to Diversity of schools - can this work both ways? Am I being unreasonable?

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Reply to "Diversity of schools - can this work both ways? Am I being unreasonable?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]i think its okay to not choose say eastern for your child for high school.  but a problem i see is people pulling happy kids out in upper elementary school and skipping out on the middle school feeder (which their child wants to attend w established friends) because they are concerned about high school.  that always strikes me as a little bit like the woman who leans out professionally at a stage before she even has kids or something.[/quote]

I actually live on the Hill and what happens WAY more frequently is that a family chooses the MS feed (SH, I don't know any E-H families) to keep their kid with their cohort, and then all or most of that cohort bails for charters or private either before MS or after the first year. I've seen this happen three times. It is terrible for the kids, who go from being excited about MS to feeling lonely and isolated, and the parents feel like they missed their shot to get them a positive MS experience.

Families are put in an impossible situation because you get one shot for Basis and Latin in 5th grade and then it's over, and you don't know who is going to take that shot, and who will win it, until it's over. So you can't just assume that your kid's friends are all going to be headed to SH for 6th grade. If they lottery for Basis/Latin and get in, they'll probably go. So you're going to lose part of the cohort in 5th. Then there will be families who didn't get spots and decide that's enough for them to decide to do private or move. And then you have families who will try SH and give up quick.

And you don't know who this will happen to until it's over. One day someone will just say "Oh we were offered a waitlist spot at Latin II and we decided to take it" and now your kid's best friend doesn't go to school with her anymore. And it will happen 5-10 times between 4th and 6th grade.

[b]It's a prisoners dilemma[/b]. So yeah, a lot of us decide we're not going to sit around and watch it happen, and seek other MS/HS options in advance. I don't want to be making MS choices in the middle of MS in response to what other families have already done. You have to be proactive.[/quote]

On board with everything you said except that it is a prisoner's dilemma. In order for it to be so the outcomes have to be equal, save for the choices of others. In this case SH does not measure up to Latin/BASIS/private except for perhaps known cohort. People who left for Latin didn't do so because the quality of SH was the same but for the concern about others leaving. They chose Latin because it is an objectively better environment with an objectively better HS path.[/quote]

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