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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Our kid earned top grades for almost everything at YY and in 6th grade at DCI. We switched to a private for 7th grade, where we were told that his Mandarin was weak and his math and ELA were mediocre. We scrambled to catch up with his new classmates, causing us all a lot of stress. So glad we've stopped drinking the Kool-Aid.[/quote]

This type of thing makes me a bit skeptical.  Doesn't the private have an interest in making you feel like you made the right choice?  Doesn't the private have an interest in holding themselves out as better (partly to justify their cost)?

I'm sure the private has more kids going to top colleges - some, if not most of it, has nothing to do with the private itself though; it has more to do with privilege and ability to supplement and cultivate than actual merit.

This is from a blog post about Silicon Valley, but it bears on so many aspects of life - here's the link to the full post https://medium.com/social-capital/techs-diversity-problem-february-24-2019-snippets-56d0fd2fa62e, and below is a blurb that seems most relevant.

Today, we’re going to talk about the dark side of this codified set of social rules: it is not equal-opportunity. It works for some people and not for others.

People in power have known for a long time that in a free society where you can’t simply use force to preserve your empire, the best tools for preserving power aren’t explicit, and they aren’t even economic; they’re social. If you leave it up to hard work and economics alone, your position at the top will erode quickly: talent, motivation and grit are distributed across the population in a way that most definitely does not favour the powerful. The world is full of people who are hungrier than you, more talented than you, will work harder than you, and want it more than you. So, naturally, we’ve evolved all kinds of institutions whose purpose is to make sure that the gates of opportunity will be favourably open for those who come from the right zip codes and who have the right parents. Institutions like elite schools and country clubs, other distinguishing factors like speech and accents, and even social graces like table manners play a real social role in making sure that “the right people” can always preserve a natural head start over the much larger (and, usually, more capable) group of people who do not have that advantage.

These days, it’s quite frowned upon to admit this openly; we like to talk about how we live in much more of a meritocracy. But a lot of the time, the “merit” that goes into that meritocracy is essentially a codified expression of existing advantage: think of elite universities that evaluate extracurricular activities in high school as admission criteria, for instance. Spending lavishly on piano lessons and educational vacations early in life, as a way of gaining admission into Swarthmore, then GSB, and then a coveted junior position on an elite career path is a fantastic way for power to buy itself another generation. Furthermore, the meritocracy perception only gets stronger, because among that peer set, the people who do the best are in fact the ones who are the most talented, work the hardest, and generally deserve it most. For the most part, among the modern elite, people look around at their peers and see a pretty good correlation between how well they’re doing and how hard they’re working. The trick is to make sure you’ve adjusted your blinders appropriately, so that the illusion remains vivid.[/quote]

Come on, parents who can afford to host au pairs during the elementary years, pay for tutors, and enroll their DCI students kids in summer immersion camps abroad, generally wind up with kids who languages than those who can't afford the external inputs to support language acquisition. Unless a big ethnic community is on the scene to help provide these inputs to poor kids, they have to be bought, or provided by a school system.  The issue isn't merit/ability/worthiness it's the absence of essential inputs in urban school systems where gimmicky, quick-fix approaches to instruction tend to trump what works.

My cleaning lady's kid attends one of the two MoCo Mandarin immersion programs.  The family doesn't speak Chinese at home. Her child attends an immersion camp at his school for a month of each summer for free,and receives extensive free tutoring (with a native-speaking tutor) in a small group with other low-SES students throughout the school year.

YY and DCI don't bother with those sorts of supports.  It's a shame.[/quote]

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