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<p>Public magnets need to publish that they are doing a good job in order to maintain the support of the taxpaying public. Besides that, the public magnets are relatively young; they need publicity more than the Eastern private schools which have had relationships with the top schools for more than a century.</p>
<p>IMSA was founded in the mid 1980’s. So was my D1’s rigorous entry-by-test public magnet. I’m wondering if that was a time when creating these types of schools was especially in vogue.</p>
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<p>Well, it worked for the founders of youtube and yelp…There were also several people on the groundfloor of Paypal from this school. (BTW, is leaving school to work on startups a failure?)</p>
<p>And seriously, if you think that public math/science schools don’t have good humanities classes, then you are severely misinformed. I’d bet the humanities classes at TJ, TAMS, IMSA, etc. are better than Exeter, Andover, and co…</p>
<p>Private schools pretty much all post the college profile which lists college matriculation data and will have some statement on their graduates getting into top schools. The IMSA rhetoric seems somewhat more over-the-top then what I’ve seen. There was no high school magnet program in our community. The high school abandoned IB after just three years due to lack of interest. The main focus of the school was football and marching band. Private high school was a good option for our kids, especially since their admissions testing resulted in scholarships. I think a lot of families don’t realize that many private high schools seek out top students through merit aid, same as on the college level.</p>
<p>Oh, sorry. Blood sugar is down and I hit a nerve. Sorry Collegealum. Of course, I know magnets can have terrific humanities. A dear friend’s son graduated from TJ. He’s doing history in college. Lovely boy.</p>
<p>I will say that the whole magnet idea makes me a little uncomfortable, though. My understanding is that magnets are about being angular and I wanted my kids to have very broad educations during high school. But choice is a good thing. I’d be the first in line to vote funds for such schools, even the IMSA, which seems a little frightening judging by the website.</p>
<p>The friends whose boy is at startups was not self-supporting last we talked. Yes, leaving college can be a good thing, witness Jobs and Gates. Not always though. And this is an Asian family and they don’t get it at all.</p>
<p>Annasdad did say this school has Ph.D.s teaching humanities too. So they are pushing the envelop on all sides.</p>
<p>sewhappy, interesting. Which private school did your kids go on full scholarship, testing so well? My kid’s private gives only need based. Another private in our neighborhood gives out merit scholarship. They have a reputation of being mean and has a high turn over 30%. Yet their average SAT is below my kid’s private by about 50 points in each subject. Not that SAT scores mean anything.</p>
<p>My kids’ magnet is an IB program, so it’s not particularly specialized. It’s probably best for kids who aren’t primarily math/science types, although there are plenty of those there as well.</p>
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<p>Let’s take a look at the “About” page for, say, Phillips Academy. Here’s an excerpt. </p>
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<p>It’s easier to pull this kind of understated writing off when your history extends back more than 200 years, and when you’ve got an endowment larger than that of some UN members. 
The new kids on the block need to be a little more explicit. </p>
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<p>It depends on the magnet. In my district, some magnets emphasize a particular career field or general academic field (math/sci or humanities), but still provide a well-rounded curriculum. The amount of angularity is imo overrated. IMSA’s graduation requirements (over three years, not four) include 8 semesters of science, 6 of math, 6 of English, and 5 of social studies, and two more semesters in math or science. Most college-bound kids take one math course and one science course every year. IMSA students must take one additional math or science course for two out of three years. For a science-loving kid, that sounds more like heaven than hell. Take a look at some of the humanities seminars available to these kids–20th Century Poetry, Gender Studies, History of Philosophy. Hardly all STEM all the time, though that’s certainly possible, with English electives like “Speculative Fiction”.</p>
<p>I know that some of you are really bothered by the super-STEM environment of some of these schools. How would you feel about an entry-by-audition performing and fine arts school? Academics are squeezed into the morning hours. Afternoons are for drama/music/etc. coursework. Is it ever OK for a high school student to specialize, to say that they have such a love and talent for something that they want to fully immerse themselves in it at an early age?</p>
<p>Igloo, when we relocated to the Northeast last year at start of my DD’s junior year the whole concept of merit for private high school seemed to be completely unknown. I think it’s regional. In the land of college preps, apparently not common.</p>
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<p>I appreciate the apology. However, it is really annoying when people decide what is appropriate for what age group. Kids aren’t locked into tech careers even if they start doing college-level material early. Who said they were? Of course a school is going to brag about the kids who stay in tech careers, because that was the mission of the school. </p>
<p>This is what I think is perverse. It doesn’t take 10 years to learn how to count, add, subtract, multiply, and divide; yet this is what the school district enforces…Then magically when you hit 12, then people can learn faster. Then as they get to 18, they can reason abstractly, and so they can learn at a college pace. Let me clue you in. It doesn’t work like that for everybody. Some people start out learning at a college pace, and can reason abstractly from the beginning. Many of the people who end up in academia start out that way. </p>
<p>Imagine if you took one of your college classes and spread it out over 10 years, inserting busy work as a filler. That was the only thing you get to learn for 10 years. And when you aced the exams, people would freak out because what you were doing was “impossible” and therefore there must be someone cramming the material down your throat at home. Maybe they would purposely “lose” their records of your aced exams, so you had to do the same thing again. Or perhaps get 3 different editions of the same level of textbook. Public school for gifted kids is a Kafka-esque nightmare…</p>
<p>SlitheyTove, that’s a really good post, your points are well taken. I don’t have angular kids who demanded an angular education so I can’t really speak to this type of school at all. I’m glad the option is out there for the kids who need it.</p>
<p>Collegealum, I agree with your post, too. And have lived the nightmare of public school gifted programs. Don’t get me started. The first wrong thing about them is calling them “gifted” . . .</p>
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<p>I think it is more than OK. Some kids know really early what they are going to do with their lives if others don’t get in the way of it. It’s a judgment call, but usually I think parents can spot this type and I certainly believe in supporting these kids in their interests.</p>
<p>Sewhappy - re post 617 – this isn’t the east coast. IMSA is sort of like Caltech insofar as they are both excellent schools that aren’t well known by Joe Schmoe. </p>
<p>I see no reason why IMSA shouldn’t be proud of sending its grads to top schools, keeping in mind that many still want to stay local which is why you’ll see NU and UChicago so high.</p>
<p>To sewhappy, Actually, merit scholarships in private svhools are quite common. In our area, we have about 10 private schools, all with more than 100 years of history. Only about three grants need based. All the others merit scholarships. I am mainly surprised those who give out merit scholaships don’t do better on the standardized testing than my kid’s school. Wonder why.</p>
<p>Probably the private high schools trying to raise their average scores are the ones offering merit? That would make sense.</p>
<p>You know, reading about these high-powered magnets and other options out there makes me glad I’m almost done having a kid in high school. It can be so challenging shepherding them through high school. It really is so critically important and with college costs looming it makes the whole search process very challenging. Those in pubic systems with strong high schools and magnets are very fortunate.</p>
<p>There is a magnet school in Houston called school for performing and visual arts. They require 3 hours of practice in the area of specialization (dance, instrument, voice and whatever else). They waive several core class requirements as needed by the state to stick to a very minimum academic curriculum while they concentrate on the chosen art.</p>
<p>Goodness, offline for four hours and 40+ messages of calumny. Sorry I can’t respond to each and every point, but I’ll try to hit the high ones.</p>
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<p>No; 'twas Hunt who dragged Dersiewicz back into the conversation after he (and mostly I) had been dormant for several days. I was responding to that, and it went from there. I did say well upthread, FWIW, that I was only using Yale because that is what Deresiewicz referred to. I imagine the situation is the same at many other highly selective universities.</p>
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<p>PG, as usual, misinterpreted what I said, possibly intentionally. SlitheyTove got it - see the last sentence of post 591.</p>
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<p>Absolutely. She’s 18 and has no way to go on her own dime (though she may well wind up with some work study). It will be a combination of my dime and (I hope) the school’s dime and PG’s dime. The proportion is yet to be determined.</p>
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<p>Or perhaps just one of the innumerable threads on CC involving parents trying to convince themselves that elite schools are worth the additional money it costs to go there?</p>
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<p>Hardly. Google three words easily discernible from this thread. The first four search results will give you my full name, email address, snail mail address, fax number. With just a little more effort you can find my company name and cell phone. I have no need to remain anonymous, for I’ve said nothing that I’m not willing to stand behind. I come from the early days of CompuServe, where real names were required - and where the conversations were just as robust, though less nasty and less filled with unsupportable nonsense. </p>
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<p>Agsin, hardly. I’m a private school graduate. My dad taught at a private college for 32 years. My older D is a graduate of a private school. Of the 11 schools my D is applying to, 7 are private.</p>
<p>I have no problem with private schools, even elite ones, like Yale. Where I have a problem is with some of the overblown claims made for them, usually by alumni or parents of students.</p>
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<p>At last Hunt and I find common ground; that is exactly the situation at my D’s school and exactly the dilemma that prestigious-college-obsessed parents faced. </p>
<p>Twice a year, I help out the admissions office at my D’s school’s preview day, greeting prospective parents and answering their questions. Many ask about colleges; I give the standard answer: there’s no guarantee that the HS will help a kid get into any given college, although the record shows (as xiggi helpfully pointed out, and as I detailed way upthread) our graduates do get into very good colleges indeed. Are they “better” colleges (however you define that) than the same kids would have gotten into had they stayed at their home schools? In the case of kids like my D, who come from low-resource schools, I think the answer is “very likely yes.” In the case of kids who go to the wealthy suburban schools, many with very fine gifted programs, I think the most honest answer is “who knows?”</p>
<p>When I give this answer, the look on a significant number of parents’s faces tells me that it’s unlikely their kid will be applying - or at least, I’ve introduced a significant element of doubt into the equation. And I’m not doing this as a lone wolf - that is very much the party line.</p>
<p>Even after kids are admitted - at the outset of the mandatory kids-and-parents summer orientation, one of the school’s VPs tells parents, bluntly, that it is highly unlikely that their kids will graduate with 4.0’s - historically, only about 2% do. He also reiterates the mission, and that it’s not fundamentally about improving a kids’s chances to get into a highly selective college, though that is a common byproduct. Every year, there are parents who at that point make the decision to decline the offer of admittance and not enroll their kids. And that’s fine with everybody concerned.</p>
<p>(As an aside, as to whether our school will help a kid get admitted to a highly selective college, it depends a lot on the college. Some colleges appreciate our kids and give them special consideration. Others not so much, and a few clearly don’t look beyond the GPAs, no matter how much they make rhetoric about holistic admissions.)</p>
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<p>Many choose not to (nearly a third wind up in non-STEM majors). My D may well be one of those, and that’s just fine. It’s a boon to society to have people who are not in scientific careers who have a deep understanding of scientific subjects. And it’s a boon to an individual kid in a non-STEM field to have developed the kinds of thought processes that are fostered by a rigorous scientific education.</p>
<p>D of a friend graduated a number of years ago. Went to college for engineering, and after a year decided it was not for her. Wound up switching her major to the foreign language she had studied in HS (and would not have had the opportunity to study at almost any other HS in the US) and now has a very nice position in a job where fluency in that language is a requirement.</p>
<p>There are lots of similar stories. The school provides an excellent all-around HS education. Yes, its focus is math and science (established by the legislation that created it); but it is not exclusively so.</p>
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<p>And two years of foreign language, though almost all the kids take three, and a few (including my D) double up and start a second language.</p>
<p>And many of the most enthusiastic STEM kids take a lot more math and science than required. Even my I’m-still-not-sure-STEMs-for-me D will wind up with a semester more math than the minimum.</p>
<p>The one weakness, IMO, is in fine arts, where the offerings are minimal.</p>
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<p>They play Terra Nova tonight. Parallel worlds and fiction would be needed to make such a statement verifiable. Better than Exeter and Andover for … humanities? Riiiiight!</p>