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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’d buy a house you can afford, in a neighborhood you like, with a commute you can manage and send your kid to Catholic school.  Stay away from the FCPS nonsense. [/quote]

We were lucky to be in a great FCPS elementary, but if I had to do it all over again, this is absolutely what I would do. And we are not Catholic. But Catholic schools are excellent, time tested, and not affected by the kind of crap coming out of Gatehouse.[/quote]

There is a misconception that Catholic schools are "excellent" especially by comparison to FCPS schools, but it depends on what your definition of "excellent" is.  Are they "excellent" at weeding out kids with special needs? Sure - often times, they do not provide the depth and breadth of special needs services to students so those parents send their special needs kids to public schools to get those services.  Are they "excellent" at assigning lots of busy work to give parents the impression that their students are always busy, churn out a ton of work product and are buried under homework which must mean that they are learning more than the kids in public school. Yep, sure do.  Are they "excellent" because their student bodies are predominantly made up of a homogeneous pool of MC-UMC families with active parents who work together as a community to prioritize compliance instead of free-thinking? Yes again.  Catholic schools are excellent at keeping MC-UMC predominantly white, similarly thinking families together to learn without the "distraction" of poor students, special needs students, LGBTQ students, and students whose families have different (read: more leftist) world views.  Is that "excellent?" Apparently large swaths of families think so.

But the actual level of instruction provided at each grade level is often times not as high as what one would receive in the public school system.  In our FCPS pyramid, there is a very large and active K-8 
 Catholic school. The parents are extremely vocal about the exceptional quality of education they are paying for.  Then they send their kids to the local public high school after they graduate from the Catholic school and realize that their kids have not been offered the advanced math options that FCPS offers in 5th-8th, or foreign language options in 7th/8th, and many of those kids are competent in Honors classes but fail to excel in AP classes where critical thinking is emphasized over rote memorization and regurgitation.  Then the public school kids start running circles around them in the classroom.[/quote]

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