Biggest sellers (beyond the religious education which DD gets through our parish anyway) were arts, music, PE, AND FL in ES multiple times a week EVERY week all year long, not just as a once a week "special" that would change every marking period.

We also wanted to avoid over crowded classes and the constant shifts of educational fads.

Anonymous wrote:If you are asking if you NEED to spend thousands of dollars on private schools when you live in an excellent school district, of course not. Can your kids get an excellent education from public schools? Of course.

Choosing to pay for private school is a complicated social and economic decision and it's generally not something you can quantify. If you don't feel like its necessary, don't do it.

15:17 again. I agree with this poster.

Sad to say I think sometimes private school is just another country club to join. It doesn't make financial sense to join a country club either, but people do it because they seek status and reassurance.

Clearly, in cases where the public schools are underperforming, it's a different question, as you also say.

What is often hard for me to visualize is that for many people $35k a year just isn't all that much money, so for them it's not major stressful decision.

But imagine an analogy: there is a 100% free road that takes you from point A to point B in an hour. There is a parallel road that costs $1k a week (that's private school) and contains only Range Rovers and Lexuses and gets you from point A to point B in 45 minutes. You can't fault the OP for asking when it can look to many people like the differences are that small.

Also btw, public schools do not have nearly as much standardized testing as people on here are claiming. And I wonder how many tests their children had to take for admission to those schools and how much they had to prep for them.

My kids don't swear in routine conversation, not enjoy bring around kids who do

We decided to move our DD from public school to a private high school in order to receive the type of education services that teachers responsible for 125 kids/day just can't provide. The level of feedback she receives on her written work just isn't possible when a teacher is grading 125 papers. In-depth seminar-style discussions aren't as possible or fruitful with 25 to 30 kids in a class. Science labs are more frequent and less constrained by large classes. At her new school, her average class size is 14 but is as low as seven in some subjects. Additionally, she is freed from endless rounds of standardized testing and uniform district-wide curricula.

My DD is also the beneficiary of an extensive support/advising/counseling network that a large public high school just couldn't match. For example, she has a weekly standing meeting with her advisor to review how things are going. DC is new to the school and had to switch two classes to better suit her level (one up, one down). This was done in the blink of an eye. No back and forthing, no red tape or layers of bureaucracy to deal with.

Whether these services are worth $35,000 is a calculation that each individual family must make for itself. If we lived closer to the margin, she certainly would be enrolled in the local public. However, because we can afford to send her we are happy to allocate our resources on behalf of what we think is a better academic experience.

This is certainly a difficult question. For me, I'm happy that my kids don't have to take standardized testing and waste hours of class time prepping for them. I'm thrilled that their teachers actually know them (for better or worse). I love the fact that the curriculum is really thoughtful and changes when necessary. I like the fact that my kids don't have to take so many AP classes because it is unnecessary at our school. Instead, they are able to take truly interesting classes that get them excited about learning. I don't know that getting into a certain college that our neighbors can't get into has any place in my decision to send them to private. Indeed, in our neighborhood, most of the kids will go on to great schools regardless of where they went to high school. It may even work in the public school kids favor, college-wise.

If you are asking if you NEED to spend thousands of dollars on private schools when you live in an excellent school district, of course not. Can your kids get an excellent education from public schools? Of course.

Choosing to pay for private school is a complicated social and economic decision and it's generally not something you can quantify. If you don't feel like its necessary, don't do it.

Price of personalization or price of exclusivity >>> price of standardization or price of commoditization

Our private school teaches handwriting. I value that.

OP, it's going to be hard to find clear empirical evidence, because it's too easy to discount the many arenas in which private school students excel more than public school counterparts by claiming their successes are the result of high SES and strong family relationships.

How about this for empirical evidence?: There are hundreds of really smart parents in DC and elsewhere who are willing to spend $20k+ per child to send them to private schools. And many other families are clamoring to get their kids admitted or obtain financial aid to send kids to private school. And there is fairly little attrition from most top private schools. These are informed consumers. So whatever the attraction might be, the market data suggests those private schools are worth their current pricetag because that's what people are willing to pay. If the price increased and applications dropped off, or quality of applicants diminished, then that would signal they are not worth the money at the higher price. But until then, the Invisible Hand suggests they are worth the price tag.

OP,

Why a person sends their kid to school is based on more than one data point of where they go to college.

The bigger question is, why do you care?

Op you just don't get "it".

No high-stakes testing at private schools is worth every penny! https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/study-says-standardized-testing-is-overwhelming-nations-public-schools/2015/10/24/8a22092c-79ae-11e5-a958-d889faf561dc_story.html

DS's independent school in NWDC provides better -education- (not 'service,' wtf?) than our assigned school.

Empirical evidence: the curriculum is balanced among subjects that are important for civilized societies and not skewed in favor of the two topics hit heavy on the PARCC.

Empirical evidence: child spends more time immersed in critical thinking across platforms than kids at IB NWDC DCPS. As evidenced by the daily schedule and the percentage of time devoted to projects reliant on critical thinking vs. rote memorization, regurgitation and rubrics.

Subjective evidence: kids love school, look forward to school.

Subjective evidence: kids are better spoken and have more poise and presence than neighbor kids due to advanced opportunities during school day for public speaking, debate, and prolonged engagement with faculty unrelated to topic mastery.

"I feel...." doesn't answer this.
"A higher percentage of kids from private school attend college...." really doesn't prove anything because of the correlation of wealthy parents (who can afford private school) and higher intelligence/higher college participation. Meaning: Those kids in private school probably would have attended college anyway if they hadn't attended private school.
"My private school provides religious education..." OK, I suppose that can't easily be replicated in public school though parents can provide religious education extracurricularly.

If your next door neighbors' kids got into equivalent colleges/universities and/or excelled academically equivalently as your private school educated kids, did the private school necessarily outperform the public school? (And "outperform" often means "provides better peers" because there's a bigger difference between the students at high and low performing schools than there is between the faculty/resources/equipment/labs/etc at high and low performing schools.

Bottom line: If you live in a neighborhood with fairly high performing students, why send your kids to private school? Can you conclude the private school provides significantly (at least $20K year per kid) better service? If you are like my parents were, had a single kid and lived in a neighborhood with poor performing peers (all of my street buddies were burned out pot heads and coke addicts and hardly any graduated high school), then private school (where I attended) certainly provided a better product and service due to the high performing peers (Vin Scully's kids, movie stars' kids, etc).