<p>cptofthehouse, one more thing is that you are talking about your choice to send your kids to private schools. What I am saying is that many people like my family have NO choice. We not only don’t have private schools near us but we cannot afford that. There appears to be a huge assumption on this thread that everyone has such a choice.</p>
<p>ConcernedDad, I just want to mention that while my kids did not take Latin (they took French and accelerated in it), Latin is indeed offered throughout our high school (four years of levels). Also, a lot of reading and writing was required in the Honors levels of English and History courses at our rural no name public school. When my kids got to selective colleges, they felt well prepared to write papers and do the reading and were not overwhelmed even though our school did not have AP courses at the time in those subjects. So, I’m not sure broad brush strokes apply here.</p>
<p>Yes, my son has both Latin and Greek, 4 years of each which put him in prime position to apply as a Classics major. Also had the opportunity to take college courses at a 4 year university senior year. Had an impact on his app, I’m sure, as he had very low test scores and still did as well as kids with similar academic stats but much higher test scores.</p>
<p>I think anyone who lives in a downright dangerous and truly abysmal school district would consider private schools for their kids and there would be no questions why. The question arises when the public schools are certainly adequate and sometimes even good, very good. I think it comes down to the kids you have and the alternatives out there and, of course, the affordability. Certainly most people make their public schools work. If you have high flying kids, it probably makes little difference where you put them in school or college for that mater, as they will be performing way up there regardless. I think it is the middle ranged kids that can reap the most benefits as the true lower level kids tend to do poorly anywhere, and many cannot get into private schools and if they do get in, they are at high risk of getting thrown out. Since private schools have no requirements to meet any special needs of kids, any who issues and disabilities may not have them addressed, whereas the publics have to make attempts to do so. </p>
<p>As I mentioned before, it is impressive to see a class of kids from a high risk area, like Rice that graduates a large number of college bound kids. That is something privates can do: beat the neighborhood school odds, but as Sybbie mentions, Rice can cherry pic and spit out the “pits” so to speak which makes their accomplishments a bit less impressive.</p>
<p>My son who graduated from a private high school in the city has many classmates who are first generation to go to college. Without a doubt there are many kids who beat their neighborhood and public school odds in their accomplishments. Most of them were not the very top kids who get NYC magnet school picks, so for them the private option was the best environment and best quality academics.</p>
<p>We moved our kids from a very selective, famous private school to a selective public magnet high school in 11th and 9th grades, respectively. (We were lucky to have a great public school to move them to, and if that hadn’t been true we wouldn’t have made the move. There were several reasons for it, not all of which had to do with the kids. We were both changing jobs, our income was going down significantly, my wife’s new job was as an official in the state Department of Education, and she felt a responsibility to have her children in public school if possible.)</p>
<p>Our experience was like 2collegewego’s: The private school, justly famous for its left-liberal politics, was all about diversity, but was one of the least diverse places ever. Some of the faces were colored differently, but the students and the families practically thought in lock-step. Only a handful of students were not at least very affluent, if not rich, and that handful quickly learned to imitate their classmates. The public school was dizzyingly diverse – 47 different home languages, only about 1/3 white, every social class well represented. The school also had a wonderful culture of respect and friendships across ethnic and class lines. A lot of that was no doubt due to its being a citywide magnet school with a huge percentage of immigrants – no identifiable group had anything like a majority, everyone had chosen to be there (and some kids had 90-minute-plus commutes each way to get there), and the school DID have the power to kick kids out, at least for academic reasons. </p>
<p>The public school was not educationally better than the private school in every respect, or even many respects, but both kids agreed that they learned more about diversity their first week there than they had in years of talking about diversity at their private school. And lesson #1 was that when there is absolutely no shared culture among the students’ families, the school has to be very selective and brutally direct about the values it thinks are important. The private school was a baroque tangle of opposing messages, some spoken and some unspoken, with all sorts of secret codes, like dinner at the home of the Duchess of Guermantes. The public school was like the Jumbotron at a stadium: Clap Now! But at the public school, they learned to distinguish kids whose families were Tamil from those who were Punjabi or Gujurati, Palestinian Christians and Palestinian Muslims, Muslim girls who embraced hijab and those who struggled to escape it, and enough different people in each group to establish that no group was in fact monolithic.</p>
<p>The public school was also far more diverse in the academic level of its students. The private school’s average 1600-scale SAT was ~1320; the public school’s was ~1150. The kids at the top of the classes were very similar, although at the private school the majority were humanities-focused, and at the public school they were STEM-focused. And, indeed, the public school did a better job of teaching math and science, and the private school did a much, much better with English, history, languages. The out-of-class STEM activities available at the public school completely eclipsed those at the private school. Music was excellent at each. At the private school, everyone did sports; at the public a decent number of kids did some sport sometime, but nowhere near 100% participation year-in and year-out. </p>
<p>Here are the colleges attended by each of my kids’ ten closest classmate/friends at each school: </p>
<p>Private: Brown, Carleton, Chicago, Harvard, Kalamazoo, Macalaster, NYU, Oberlin, Penn (2), Pitzer, Reed, RPI, Stanford (3), Toronto, Vassar, Wesleyan, Yale</p>
<p>Public: Brandeis, Brown (3), Drexel, Harvard (3), UMBC, McGill, NYU, Penn (3), Pratt, Smith (2), Swarthmore, Yale (2)</p>
<p>That doesn’t look like the private school has any clear advantage, but the results for their public school friends don’t look anything like the results for the school as a whole (20%+ to Temple, and 50%+ to other public colleges in Pennsylvania). It does point up two important differences between the schools, though: (1) The private school students are in a national college market, and only a handful of the public school students are willing to leave the Boston-Washington corridor plus their state. (2) The private school students are much more likely to go to LACs, which both resemble their high school experience and are heavily promoted by their counselors.</p>
<p>Motivated, self-starting, hard-working, high-scoring kids did just fine either place. They didn’t need the private school, although the private school probably upped their chance of attending a top college by expanding their sense of what were top colleges. Anyone not already perfect, however, was probably much better served by the private school, with its labor-intensive counseling and its lovingly crafted recommendations, and far more knowledgeable counselors.</p>
<p>I did not read every word of every thread, but one thing my daughter learned in private school is that rich, privileged kids don’t have to follow the rules. That was a bit of a disheartening lesson to learn, but some good also came out of her three years of private high school.</p>
<p>We did think that the private school offered a more diverse environment than our local, very vanilla public. There were different religions represented and a variety of cultural backgrounds. Her first year, her closest friend was from Lebanon. The school was single sex, so that was very different and not always good.</p>
<p>In my son’s private school, I think that there is a focus on developing character. His coaches work with the kids so that they behave as gentlemen. I think that manners are reinforced and respect is ingrained. My son is not the student that my daughter is; however, he does more writing (though not necessarily more home work) than his public school buddies.</p>
<p>We are lucky here in Maryland because we do have many school choices. Although perhaps when there is only one choice, the people of the community work harder to make the public schools better.</p>
<p>I would also agree that college counseling is superior at the private schools where the counselors have smaller student loads. Students are much more likely to attend schools out of the area.</p>
<p>There could have been choices, Soozie. Many of the top boarding schools do offer financial aid and merit awards. It is possible your girls could have gone that route, and there are loans as well. To draw the line at sending them to a private at the college, rather than at the high school level was a conscious decision. Several of my kids’ classmates did go to boarding schools on financial aid and scholarship and loans just as your kids did for college. It all comes down to where and when you make that decision. We pretty much made it at an early age with our kids, and had we just had two, I think we could have afforded to send them to private colleges as well. We assess year to year what we can afford and project from that point and things do change, in our case, a lot. </p>
<p>Your kids did well coming from their public schools, but there are certainly kids who may do better at a top private prep or other type of school than at your public school. It’s truly an individual thing. And for some kids having a wide socio eco range of classmates, at those impressible ages is not such a great thing; in my case the socio more than the economics. Some kids just don’t have the filters and discipline to stick to what their goals are when there appears to be much easier paths all around. My kids did fair to middling at a rigorous prep; and I have no doubt they would have done the same at any less rigorous school without the peer pressure and high performing classmates and standards, only the curriculum would not have been at that level. Yours were such that they would probably have done well anywhere. </p>
<p>The OP asked if privates prepared kids for college better than publics, and my answer was and remains that it depends more on the kids and the type of school rather than whether the schools are public or private. There are many kinds of kids and many kinds of public and private schools. There may well be some public schools that would done as well or better for my kids than the privates they attended, and there are certainly many very successful kids who graduate from our district high school and get into the top colleges.</p>
<p>I get it, soozie. Our only “choice” is public or parochial, and the parochial options are unaffordable. Now, if we were catholic, as parishioners in the diocese, there’d be a substantial discount, even scholarships for the low income. But, as mentioned earlier, a private school has the right to make its services available to whomever it wishes.</p>
<p>In the meantime, it was the urban public for us. Now, it certainly wasn’t the scourge of the inner city, but yes, we have police on the premisis. Yes, there is gang activity. Annual report shows just over half the kids on free/reduced lunch, but that number is now over 60% in the ms, so the demographic continues to change. Twenty percent are ELL. Forty-five percent are minority, mostly Hispanic. It doesn’t prepare as well as top privates. How could it? But it’s still a decent education, and the only affordable game in town.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This sounds intriguing but what do you mean? Do you have an example? </p>
<p>I actually am trying to think of something comparable at our kids’ school but I can’t think of anything that approximates this. But where we live is probably quite different.</p>
<p>JHS, my kids attended a top ranked public school, Wootton High School. You can check Wootton out. For years they were ranked among the top 50-70 schools by US News and have had LOTS of AP and actual college courses taken by their kids. In fact, I think every AP test offered in life is avaialble at Wootton. Not only that, but these kids tend to do very well in college. </p>
<p>Notwithstanding all this, if you were to check our Naviance site, the Wootton kids have a harder time getting into top schools such as IVYS other than Cornell. Very rarely does someone get into Yale, or Harvard and MIT.They do have success in other private schools such as Tufts and NYU. Those that did get into top ivys tended to have higher SATs than that of other schools such as private schools. For example, no one that I know got into Brown from Wootton with under a 1480 (Math and CR) SAT and usually needed 1500. This isn’t true for other schools that I have seen using their Naviance site.</p>
<p>On the other hand private schools here in DC such as Bullis, Sidwell and Georgetown Prep and others have had MUCH greater success with ivy schools and other top notch private schools and will find it a bit easier to get into than that of public schools even from such public schools as Wootton. Maybe a reknown public school such as Thomas Jefferson will have different results than what we have experienced here at Wootton.</p>
<p>For what it’s worth, my daughter went to college and was in the honors program. She met many kids who attended lessor known private schools and noted that their writing didn’t compare to hers. I guess that we can’t make a generalization about the quality of private school offerings. Some are spectacular indeed and some may not be as good as decent public school. However, I would bet that for the reasons given in my prior post ( number 74), a greater percentage of kids from private schools get into the IVYS and MITs and other top notch schools than those of public schools.</p>
<p>Again, big differences, determined by different schools. As I said earlier, the private school that my boys attended has more diversity, both socio-eco and ethnicity than many of the school districts in our county. Also, it was very clearly demonstrated that the rich, famous and powerful did not get away with any more at that school. They threw them out just as quickly as anyone else there and they got called up for demerits just as quickly. My current rising college son graduated from a city high school that is about as diverse as they come in terms of ethnicity. </p>
<p>There were and are kids going to those private schools, by the way, that would have been better served by their public schools. The grading curve is tough at the one private, and the grades are not weighted. It’s very difficult to be at the top of your class there as there are so many very academically talented kids. There is an intensity about academics that is much more focused than at many public schools because of that filter the admissions process uses and the narrow band of the type of kids selected. Several kids who did leave and go to less rigorous school, public or private tended to do much better grade wise at those schools which can make a difference in some scenarios. One young lady who left the school after 10 years there, never considered herself very smart until she went to public schools and could just whiz through her classes. In one of my particular cases, the school was not a good social fit for one of my kids. I know he would have been much happier in that aspect at a single sex Catholic school. </p>
<p>Soozie, I’m impressed with how your kids former high school really shored up their elite school admissions process. I remember you saying that your D was one of the very few who got into an Ivy historically from there and that HPYM were not destinations from their classes. The public high school in the district where my kids went some years ago in the midwest had a graduating class of 700 kids, and did not ever have that many kids going to the most selective schools. The flagship state and neighboring state flagships tended to make up 3/4 of the college choices, and to get more than one kid going ivy in any given year would be suprising. And it is considered a “good” public school district with 90% of those kids going to college wit 80% going to a 4 year college. </p>
<p>Now I have a kid going from a lifetime of private schools to a large public for college next year. It’ll be interesting to see how he enjoys it , how well he is prepared, how well he does. Hopefully the training during those most impressionable years where we put the money to provide the best fit and quality academics for him will have prepared him for a big major university where it is all there, but you gotta go for it after years of having more personal attention. He will be in the minority by far, coming from a private school background going there.</p>
<p>Oh, also wanted to add that the top rated private school was NOT the place to go for admissions to public universities, particularly their honors programs, merit and other awards where the gpa or class rank is considered. A 3.4 is very good at this school. It can be a problem when going for All American status, certain honors programs and awards. And though the college counselors are great when working with select colleges, they are very weak when it comes to state schools, Catholic schools, and financial/merit awards.</p>
<p>Well, we home-school, not private-school, but I think our kids are very well prepared. (DH is the one who home-schools 'em; he has a PhD and professional teaching experience. And he spends tons of time with each kid.)</p>
<p>Our kids don’t do AP courses, so they don’t place into sophomore year right off the bat, but we don’t want 'em to. We want them to be well-rounded, and if that means taking core courses, then so be it.</p>
<p>Home-schooling is obviously not for everyone, but it has definitely worked for us. And, best of all, it’s free.</p>
<p>ConCerned Dad – DH is teaching our kids Latin and Greek in home-school. Older son will be going to U of Alabama in the fall on a near-full-ride merit scholarship (Honors College). He will be double-majoring in History and Classics (prepping for Law School), and he will be taking both Latin and Greek at advanced levels.</p>
<p>So, it is possible to learn Latin and Greek outside of the private-school context. But you have to work at it, that’s for sure. (Our kids had an advantage in that their home-school teacher, their dad, is a Byzantinist.)</p>
<p>There’s only one private school in my general vicinity (meaning, easy driving distance) that I would consider to be appreciably better than the public schools around here. And that one is affiliated religiously (Catholic/Benedictine) to enough of an extent that it would likely pose a problem for us (which is not to say that they aren’t welcoming to non-Christian student, or that they aren’t entitled to run the school curriculum as they see fit – just that it would be problematic for us). Otherwise? The private schools in this general area don’t really have anything much to offer compared to the public schools, other than personal preference for smaller communities. I could have sent my kids to one of the several elite city schools that IMO, <em>do</em> offer a better education (and in fact my nephew went to one of those), but there was a hassle factor of a schlep downtown and back that simply wasn’t compatible with our lifestyle and schedules. And I have no problem saying that I ‘gave up’ on a better education for them because I didn’t have the leisure time to chauffeur them downtown and back every day.</p>
<p>LadyD- homeschooling is not “free”. Even in a family where one parent has a secure (for now) job with health care benefits, the second income may be what’s required to provide for an ill parent, take care of a child with special needs, provide life or disability insurance for the family, etc. It’s great that your family can take the imputed income of one of the adults and apply it to in-home education- but that hardly makes it “free”.</p>
<p>I have a cousin with a progressive neurological disorder who had to end her home schooling years when she was diagnosed. Her meds cost a fortune- her employment outside the home is what makes it possible.</p>
<p>Your family is very lucky that you don’t need your husband’s employer to provide medical insurance.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t see it as you do. We never discussed what high school our kids would attend. They attended the only one available to them, our local public school. There are not day private schools nearby. But as I said, we could not afford private anyway. I would never send my kids away to boarding school even if I could afford to (but I can’t) as we wanted them to grow up at home (some people here do send their kids to boarding schools, but their kids didn’t get into better colleges than my kids, btw). You say there is financial aid at boarding schools and I am sure that is true. But as middle class, this would involve many loans (we would have had no money on hand and would have to borrow it). I cannot afford to borrow for two kids for high school and then again for college. So, money and loans have been for college, not K-12. We did pay for nursery school. 
Yes, I did choose to pay and borrow money for college and not high school because there was a free choice for high school. For college, there really is not a free choice for my kids in their fields of study. I also see nothing wrong with public school for K-12. I attended public school and did fine too. We worked with our public school for accommodations for our kids’ learning needs (they didn’t entirely do the normal path at our local schools). Our kids also had enriching ECs and summer activities. Boarding school was never an option and even with aid, it still costs money. Our local high school was clearly not the best but I do believe that many students, like mine, can thrive anyway and they did. I think there were merits to growing up in the country and not being among a competitive atmosphere where the talk is of what college you will attend and what your SATs scores are, and so on and so forth. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I highly doubt our high school shored up their elite school admissions process. They are not really tuned into that at all. Yes, when D1 got into college, she was the only student in her year who went to an Ivy League school. Previous to that, there usually was one or two kids who went to an Ivy or Stanford per year. Since she graduated, I think there has continued to be just a couple per year going to an Ivy. This year sounds unusual with about five kids or so going to Ivies or MIT, but someone said it was an unusually strong class. The senior class typically has about 160 kids in it. Only 2/3’s of the kids from our HS go to college. But again, typically a couple may go to an Ivy per year, even before my kids came along. </p>
<p>When people talk on CC of how prep schools send more kids to elite colleges, that is because their student bodies are heavily concentrated with top students. The difference with our high school is that we have a handful of “Ivy level” top students. But these students are as qualified and as prepared as their private school counterparts. We just have less of them in the student body.</p>
<p>
This is not necessarily true. I received substantially better financial aid from my private high school than I have from Brown. No loans were required, either. However, I’d imagine it really varies by the private school.</p>
<p>^^^Uroogla…was your prep school FREE?? If not free, I am saying that my family could not put money toward K-12 education when we still had to pay and borrow money to pay for college educations. Could not do both. So, even with aid for boarding school, it would have cost SOMETHING for two kids to attend, I am sure. (but price aside, I had no interest in sending my kids away for high school anyway)</p>
<p>You say no loans were required for your prep school but unless it was a full ride, then your parents had to pay SOMETHING for you to attend. I am saying I had no money on hand to pay for high school and would have had to borrow whatever it would have cost after scholarships. I could not afford to borrow money for high school for two kids AND for college both. I am already struggling to pay for college itself.</p>
<p>Also, your parents may be in a different income bracket than we are. We were very happy with Brown’s financial aid, which went up when our second child entered college one year after our Brown kid entered. But after she graduated Brown, their financial aid policies got a LOT better. If she were to have applied after she graduated, based on their new policies, we would have had NO loans. If she were to apply right now on our current income, she’d be eligible for nearly a free ride.</p>
<p>I was discussing this topic with my son who recently graduated from an excellent public HS in northern California. Most kids take 7-10 AP classes only available jr/sr year. He got into a number of excellent schools but no ivies. He is going to the perfect school for him and we’re happy not to be paying $55k! His class of over 300 has two students going to an ivy/Stanford, (maybe some ivy acceptances were turned down difficult to know). However the local private school with 1/3 the class size had at least 10-15% ivy/Stanford acceptance. I know a number of kids from the private schools and while bright they are no brighter than some of my sons’ friends who were rejected with perfect SAT and grades. I know there is an overabundance of capable kids applying to the top schools, we just went through it but it does seem skewed towards accepting the private school kids. Just my two cents no need to flame me.</p>
<p>Sorry, to clarify, I wasn’t saying that it was affordable for all, but I did want to make it clear that loans are not necessarily an integral part of an aid package for middle and upper-middle class families at some of these schools.</p>
<p>Obviously, a free private high school would be rare if one even exists. Olin comes to mind for colleges, and I understand that even they’ve stopped that policy.</p>