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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]And the bad years weren't awful.[/quote]

Want to echo this in particular; my youngest just finished 4th grade in a 32-kid class with no teaching assistant and a grouchy overworked classroom teacher, and yet nevertheless it was a *huge* year for him academically because the demands of the new ELA curriculum - weekly writing assignments and tons and tons of reading comprehension practice - pushed him to level up in that even if he wasn't getting much personalized attention on it in class; he went from having us beg and plead to churn out a lousy little weekly one paragraph reading response at the start of the year to Doing Creative Writing For Fun On His Own Time at the end of the year.[/quote]

That is great to hear. Two additional things to note - first, I think that kids who just finished roughly grades 4-6 or 4-7 were most impacted by not being in the classroom during covid, so the challenges with them are greatest and. So a lot of complaining (not by you - by others) about kids currently struggling in elementary schools are compounded by that.

Second, when choosing a public school, if you can be very flexible about location, be sure to ask a lot of questions about resources. There are some schools where the PA's raise a lot of money to provide assistant teachers (some schools have one full day in each classroom), extra art, language, music, etc. These schools operate more like a private school. Having the full time assistant teacher makes a big difference as they can break down to smaller groups, and the assistant teacher can help with a lot of menial tasks so the teacher can focus more on teaching.

I would personally rather send my kid to a school like this than "settle" for spending $70k on a private school you are not excited about, particularly because exmitting out of that private school will not be easy. The analysis depends in part on how much money you have and also exactly what private school you are considering. But this advice really applies even if you have infinite wealth.[/quote]

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