DCUM Forum

Anonymous

03/22/2026 18:45 Subject: Best private schools in NYC?

Ive lost the plot. But also everyone here seems so angry. Why? And what is about to happen with the math curriculum at TTs? Why the hate on Singapore math?

Anonymous

03/22/2026 18:36 Subject: Re:Best private schools in NYC?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hope you continue to avoid “us.” This kind of silliness is why left. Unless you have Logan Roy money, it’s a bad idea to raise your kids with this attitude, no matter how good the school is. Rarely seen it turn out well.

quote=Anonymous]A reason families who attend TTs don’t take posters’ criticisms seriously is because it’s schizophrenic. “Only rich kids are cool there.” “Rich kids are dweebs and never cool so they’re losers together.” “The academics are too easy compared to my average public school in NJ.” “The academics are a hot house environment, too much stress.” You people are ignorant and we avoid your type(s) as much as possible.

You don’t see it turn out well because you don’t see it all. We actively avoid your ilk

Good, keep it that way. There are a lot more of us than there are of you and we're much more fun to spend time with.

Yes, lower class people pop out babies with abandon so there are, in fact, more of your kind.

Fun? I don’t know about that. You appear to be talking about our school and our institutions. You wouldn’t catch a TT parent posting about public elementaries, we couldn’t care less what lack of education goes on there.

Seems like you at least care a great deal or you wouldn’t be wasting your time with people you consider beneath you.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 18:08 Subject: Re:Best private schools in NYC?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hope you continue to avoid “us.” This kind of silliness is why left. Unless you have Logan Roy money, it’s a bad idea to raise your kids with this attitude, no matter how good the school is. Rarely seen it turn out well.

quote=Anonymous]A reason families who attend TTs don’t take posters’ criticisms seriously is because it’s schizophrenic. “Only rich kids are cool there.” “Rich kids are dweebs and never cool so they’re losers together.” “The academics are too easy compared to my average public school in NJ.” “The academics are a hot house environment, too much stress.” You people are ignorant and we avoid your type(s) as much as possible.

You don’t see it turn out well because you don’t see it all. We actively avoid your ilk

Good, keep it that way. There are a lot more of us than there are of you and we're much more fun to spend time with.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 15:58 Subject: Re:Best private schools in NYC?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I hope you continue to avoid “us.” This kind of silliness is why left. Unless you have Logan Roy money, it’s a bad idea to raise your kids with this attitude, no matter how good the school is. Rarely seen it turn out well.

quote=Anonymous]A reason families who attend TTs don’t take posters’ criticisms seriously is because it’s schizophrenic. “Only rich kids are cool there.” “Rich kids are dweebs and never cool so they’re losers together.” “The academics are too easy compared to my average public school in NJ.” “The academics are a hot house environment, too much stress.” You people are ignorant and we avoid your type(s) as much as possible.

You don’t see it turn out well because you don’t see it all. We actively avoid your ilk

Good, keep it that way. There are a lot more of us than there are of you and we're much more fun to spend time with.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 15:45 Subject: Re:Best private schools in NYC?

Anonymous wrote:I hope you continue to avoid “us.” This kind of silliness is why left. Unless you have Logan Roy money, it’s a bad idea to raise your kids with this attitude, no matter how good the school is. Rarely seen it turn out well.

quote=Anonymous]A reason families who attend TTs don’t take posters’ criticisms seriously is because it’s schizophrenic. “Only rich kids are cool there.” “Rich kids are dweebs and never cool so they’re losers together.” “The academics are too easy compared to my average public school in NJ.” “The academics are a hot house environment, too much stress.” You people are ignorant and we avoid your type(s) as much as possible.

You don’t see it turn out well because you don’t see it all. We actively avoid your ilk

Anonymous

03/22/2026 15:30 Subject: Best private schools in NYC?

Anonymous wrote:Also, the phonics controversy has devastated American literacy. That’s why everyone talks about it — the math stuff is just about to come out. Virginia failed an entire generation of children. If you give one bit of a shit about education, you know about it. It’s not one person’s obsession, it’s in the NY Times.

I give a “shit” about education and show it by sending my kids to TTs and not caring about what goes on in publics one iota. The incentives are to teach to the dumbest common denominator and equalize racial outcomes (good luck without lowering standards to mouth breathing)

Anonymous

03/22/2026 14:58 Subject: Best private schools in NYC?

Also — very good point on the curriculum being dull. It’s so corporate. Kids are so easy to spark and make excited about the world. Until they develop exec function around 11-12, we should stuff them to the gills with content. Reading chunky books like The Giver and arguing about it as a group is literally the best way to boost reading comprehension scores.
People have ideas about how education “should” work, but they are often just expensive ways of being wrong — hence Lucy Calkins. She made sooooo much money destroying selling a defective product. All these new ideas make money.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 14:28 Subject: Best private schools in NYC?

You do better at math longterm if you do math facts young. It frees cognition. It’s easy with young kids to get them to do — make it a race or game.

While people are dying on the sword of these prestigious places, we could be having these conversations. EdTech infested these places a decade ago and public ed. Cursive, whole books, text books, letting them outside, turns out it’s all better for them longterm academically.
These places are behind the times and the research. Instead of SEL, recess, but no, let’s argue about connections.

Anonymous wrote:Agree with you about math facts, though I think some of that is an assessment problem - we no longer have a curriculum designed to help kids do fast arithmetic in their heads, and yet this is still something that most of our standardized tests push them on. The goal is to make sure that kids understand concepts well enough to wield calculators effectively when they’re older; the problem is that it bores the crap out of the more proficient ones and heightens the gap between kids who receive tutoring and kids who don’t.

As for ELA: I’m all for Science of Reading, my kids were at a Calkins district that also supplemented with enough phonics to not make it a complete disaster but they still struggle with spelling and decoding, but I think the other big problem - and it’s still ongoing - is that reading has become this tidy compartmentalized thing now; we de-emphasize the whole class reading a book and give everyone their own perfectly calibrated book, we do endless reading comprehension practice on synthetic little passages… we’ve made reading bland and corporate and taken all of the messy fun out of it. (Which is why so many kids don’t read anymore) If you’ve got kids choosing books out of a little bin with a reading level indicator on it then you’ve screwed up badly.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 14:24 Subject: Re:Best private schools in NYC?

I hope you continue to avoid “us.” This kind of silliness is why left. Unless you have Logan Roy money, it’s a bad idea to raise your kids with this attitude, no matter how good the school is. Rarely seen it turn out well.

quote=Anonymous]A reason families who attend TTs don’t take posters’ criticisms seriously is because it’s schizophrenic. “Only rich kids are cool there.” “Rich kids are dweebs and never cool so they’re losers together.” “The academics are too easy compared to my average public school in NJ.” “The academics are a hot house environment, too much stress.” You people are ignorant and we avoid your type(s) as much as possible.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 13:42 Subject: Best private schools in NYC?

Agree with you about math facts, though I think some of that is an assessment problem - we no longer have a curriculum designed to help kids do fast arithmetic in their heads, and yet this is still something that most of our standardized tests push them on. The goal is to make sure that kids understand concepts well enough to wield calculators effectively when they’re older; the problem is that it bores the crap out of the more proficient ones and heightens the gap between kids who receive tutoring and kids who don’t.

As for ELA: I’m all for Science of Reading, my kids were at a Calkins district that also supplemented with enough phonics to not make it a complete disaster but they still struggle with spelling and decoding, but I think the other big problem - and it’s still ongoing - is that reading has become this tidy compartmentalized thing now; we de-emphasize the whole class reading a book and give everyone their own perfectly calibrated book, we do endless reading comprehension practice on synthetic little passages… we’ve made reading bland and corporate and taken all of the messy fun out of it. (Which is why so many kids don’t read anymore) If you’ve got kids choosing books out of a little bin with a reading level indicator on it then you’ve screwed up badly.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 13:30 Subject: Best private schools in NYC?

Also, the phonics controversy has devastated American literacy. That’s why everyone talks about it — the math stuff is just about to come out. Virginia failed an entire generation of children. If you give one bit of a shit about education, you know about it. It’s not one person’s obsession, it’s in the NY Times.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 13:26 Subject: Best private schools in NYC?

Some are from me, and my kid didn’t go to Brearley, and I don’t know what you are talking about when you say Brearley mom. I pulled my kid from a hill and sent them to a K8 because I was tired of the parents, not that impressed with the academics, aka, they were making the same mistakes with math all these schools are (no math facts, all Singapore) and when asked for an absurd donation by the development office, I found out the headmaster made over 3 million dollars and felt like a moron.

These schools give the kids a ton of homework, but if they aren’t using a good curriculum, it’s just busywork. There are a lot of bad trends in education right now and some of the places go headlong into them because of poor leadership. I knew kids who went to these places in college, and it was a mixed bag. The ones who were born on third base but thought they hit triple are “on the links” a lot with the same kids they went to high school with, having the same arguments, trying to impress the same people. It was always something I wary about going into a K12, my kid being able to have a conversation outside her elite upbringing, the small world of it, but my friends now who went to these places grew out of the snobbery and are well-read and interesting so I gave it a go.

Mississippi is leading the nation in literacy for poor children simply by going back to the way to teaching reading the way we used to before whole word. We’d all do well to take a serious look at what our money is paying for. If it’s “connections” and attitude, great, not interested — a little too small town for the taste of someone who left a small town.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 13:18 Subject: Re:Best private schools in NYC?

Anonymous wrote:^its Brearley parent. It’s the same obsession with phonics and teaching their daughter not to be subservient or “just trust authority.” Same crap.

Agree. It’s definitely the same poster and I noticed the exact same thing on style and specific complaints.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 11:31 Subject: Re:Best private schools in NYC?

Anonymous wrote:Recent posts exhibit some reasons why we go to TTs. Public schools are forced to accept sex offender parents who resort to crude sexual language the second they hear any disagreement. Also note the stupidity of assuming (1) an anonymous poster’s gender (2) assuming anyone who can pay tuition gets into these schools (not, it is not only my financial acumen that my children in, it’s that I’m not a pervert and cretin like you) (3) drawing the conclusion Stuy students have better careers and financial success (buying a house in Bayside to escape Flushing isn’t exactly the dream of TT students). You’re trash, bud, and your spawn will never socialize with ours.

For posterity, someone posted three times how a TT parent engaged in demeaning bedroom acts with their spouse and then wrote a five paragraph essay about censorship and how the X-rated post shouldn’t have been taken down. They did all this in the name of demeaning private education and how Bernie/Occupy Wall Street was the future. Jealousy can make some go crazy.

Anonymous

03/22/2026 11:28 Subject: Re:Best private schools in NYC?

^its Brearley parent. It’s the same obsession with phonics and teaching their daughter not to be subservient or “just trust authority.” Same crap.