As my daughter nears middle school, my husband and I have started to wonder…public or private school? Private school is not something we ever contemplated for our children. We live in a great public school system and both of us graduated proudly from public school systems in California which were not as good as the school system we currently attend.
I attended an Ivy League college and my recollection, confirmed by others with a similar mediocre high school experience as mine, is that:
— It took me two years to catch up with classmates who went to good high schools.
–There are good public high schools and good private high schools and there are also mediocre private schools. I only knew three other people from a Catholic high school who were going to college with me and they felt their high school was even worse than mine.
–What were some of the marked differences from the prep school/top public high school kids and me ? Foreign languages really stood out. Despite meeting my foreign language requirement in high school, I tested into beginning French which was basically a remedial class with a dozen of us from bad public high schools and even worse accents. Good high school = foreign language fluency, as in conversational or being able to read magazines in a foreign language. Some kids had opportunity to study abroad in high school; not at my school!
Breadth of classes. My friend from the Catholic High School was envious of a kid from Palo Alto High School (a great public high school) who had Asian History at her school. I couldn’t believe that my friend from Stuyvesant High School (a magnet school in NYC that routinely sends two dozen kids to Harvard) had economics; micro AND macro! And my freshman dorm pre-med friend who studied with the nuns in Cleveland really learned how to think, as in problem solve. He tested into the advanced pre-med chemistry class. I did not; at my high school, it was more about regurgitation than really understanding how to apply your knowledge…and no AP Chem class either!
I remember bitterly complaining with other like-kind kids and vowing that my kids will never have to play catch up when they go to college! So my advice would be not so much public or private but how good is the school? A great public school can kick the pants off a mediocre private school. There is a list below from the Wall Street Journal about which schools successfully send the most kids off to top schools but if these schools are not an option, dig deep to find out: 1) Is there a study aboard program? 2) How many honor and AP classes are offered? Look for a wide range of class offerings. 3) How many kids are fluent in one or more foreign languages? What does the curriculum include? Language labs? Small class size? Native speakers as instructors? 4) What are examples of kids being taught to problem solve versus regurgitate? 5) Finally, where the pedal hits the medal … what is your college placement record? And the corollary, are you double counting the smart kids that got into multiple top colleges? What schools are the kids actually ATTENDING.
OK, maybe college placement is getting a little ahead of ourselves. I do think that it’s not necessarily Ivy League or Bust, but more about the right fit. The same goes for public versus private school.
My O.B. who lives in the same city as me but at a different elementary school, puts public education into perspective. She describes her oldest daughter as smart but not a genius, social to a fault, not academically inclined without being pushed, and not disruptive. In short, to a teacher with 20 plus students, she’s invisible. Couple that with two working parents who don’t have the time to be omnipresent volunteers at school meant that her daughter was getting no attention. She switched her to private school by 2nd grade (but she was glad to have 3 years of free public education). When her daughter got interested in boys, she switched her again to an all-girl school. In contrast, she says two other doctors at her practice also attend the same elementary school and are having a great experience. But the kicker…her partners have spouses that are stay-at-home moms and volunteer like crazy at their school.
My experience at public elementary school has been mixed and entirely dependent on the luck of the draw. My middle daughter is having an amazing experience. My oldest has had great years, medium years, and one god-awful year which, luckily, is not this year. All in all, public school, with or without volunteering like crazy, has been a pretty good experience.
But, as middle school approaches, our parental anxieties start to heighten. To be an informed consumer, I started to research private schools in our areas and, more importantly, studies on how children perform in public versus private school settings. I found some very interesting and surprising results!
New York Times: Public Schools Perform Near Private Ones in Study http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/15/education/15report.html
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0510/p11s01-legn.html