Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:"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).

We switched because our child was discouraged and unmotivated by his excellent public school. Many of the teachers were stressed and unhappy and frankly not all that bright. The privates really provide a warm environment that motivates kids to excel and they provide much more feedback on written work and other school work than we ever received. Our child was tuning out in public school and we were unhappy with the curriculum. No doubt some kids excel in public, I wish mine did - it would be a lot less sacrifice and expense for us.

+1. Try firing a bad teacher in a public school.

Anonymous wrote:Op you just don't get "it".

+1 and never will.

Anonymous wrote:"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).

We switched because our child was discouraged and unmotivated by his excellent public school. Many of the teachers were stressed and unhappy and frankly not all that bright. The privates really provide a warm environment that motivates kids to excel and they provide much more feedback on written work and other school work than we ever received. Our child was tuning out in public school and we were unhappy with the curriculum. No doubt some kids excel in public, I wish mine did - it would be a lot less sacrifice and expense for us.

I like hearing these responses. But, I think it all really boils down to a status symbol. The education is really not that different, at least not $30k different. Maybe I o lay feel this way because my kids are really happy and thriving in a good public school, surrounded by the kids of really engaged and smart people. Maybe it's because I'm not a teacher and don't care about how you structure your lesson plan. All schools are basically teaching these kids the same basic thing. Privates dress it up and charge $30k and people will pay it, because people like to buy expensive things with small frills that make them feel better than.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

I have also heard this argument, but it seems to me that you could go to public school and still get a whole heck of a lot of after-school activities in arts, music, sports, and language for much less than $35k.

New Poster here. Part of what I like about our children's independent school is that the arts, music, and modern languages are interwoven with the more traditional academic areas of math, science, reading and writing in a thoughtful interdisciplinary approach. In our local public, that interdisciplinary approach sadly isn't available. Also, I like the emphasis our children's school places on writing skills, including research papers, persuasive writing, scientific writing, and creative work. The volume and complexity/sophistication of their writing assignments is significantly greater than that of kids in our local public school, and than kids in the AAP equivalent where I live. I believe our kids would have more advanced STEM classes available in some public schools than at their independent school, but that hasn't been an issues and as of now it seems our school provides more than enough advanced STEM classes for our kids' interests. I am lucky to have good friends with kids at our local public as well as at a number of independent schools and we share information pretty readily, so I'm pretty comfortable hat I have sufficient information to assess that our children's independent is a better fit than our local public school (or several other private schools with emphases or approaches that I don't think would fit our kids as well).

Whether the differences in the educational experience for a particular child is worth the price of tuition is a personal issue, relating to a family's resources and priorities. For us, paying tuition has very little real impact on our savings or other spending, which makes it easier to determine the price is worth it (otherwise we wouldn't be doing it!). But, I could easily reach another conclusion if we have other extraordinary financial obligations, or if our income were much lower than it is. I don't think there is one right answer. And I never decided that "private school" provided better services than "public school," we just decided that, of teh alternatives available to us, the particular private school our kids go to was the best choice. That's a very different determination.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

I have also heard this argument, but it seems to me that you could go to public school and still get a whole heck of a lot of after-school activities in arts, music, sports, and language for much less than $35k.

Sports/phys Ed should not be an optional after school activity. It should be an integral part of the curriculum. It is absolutely not age appropriate to have so little gross motor activity in lower elementary grades.

Anonymous wrote: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.

I'm a public school teacher, and even if you just count the SOL as one test, it has a huge impact on my classroom teaching--both style and substance.

Better access to teachers, a curriculum aligned with my educational philosophy, lower student-teacher ratio.

College admissions are VERY low on my list of values. Mostly it is subjective. It is my money. If I want to spend it drinking the private school Kool aid, I don't know why anyone cares, other than to say "thank you" for not adding my children to the overcrowded local public.

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

That's funny, because the private school kids I went to my Ivy League college with used way filthier language than anything I ever heard in my NoVa public high school. They were much more promiscuous too. I remember thinking they were both oddly sheltered yet fast.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

I have also heard this argument, but it seems to me that you could go to public school and still get a whole heck of a lot of after-school activities in arts, music, sports, and language for much less than $35k.

If only you could buy an extra 90 minutes of time to do them!

Anonymous wrote: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.

I have also heard this argument, but it seems to me that you could go to public school and still get a whole heck of a lot of after-school activities in arts, music, sports, and language for much less than $35k.