<p>The</a> 50 Best Private Day Schools in the U.S.</p>
<p>New York, New York, and more New York with a sprinkle of Boston. The poor presidential girls almost missed the VIP list.</p>
<p>pinecrest in fort lauderdale</p>
<p>The best private day school is… home school.</p>
<p>Come to think of it, it is also the best private night school.</p>
<p>What are you doing, xiggi, trying to summon the ghost of POIH? :D</p>
<p>One of these schools is a block from my house. The kids sit on people’s stoops and smoke cigarettes. Most of these kids come from tons of money and famous parents in creative fields. You know their names. To those who have much, much is given. </p>
<p>Most of these kids are perfectly lovely. I’m sure the classes are great. I’ve known some of the teachers. Nice people. A few bad apples burnt down a local public school’s playground and their daddys paid the school off.</p>
<p>I think we have some good schools on the west coast.
One of the things that makes them strong is teacher autonomy.
Teachers choose their curriculum /add to it without being penalized.
Oldest attended same grade school that Gates & Bezos sent their kids to.
( she would have attended public, but she didn’t get in to the alternative school we wanted & the neighborhood schools could not accommodate her)
The only testing was occasional spelling or math quizzes.</p>
<p>@consolation … big smile!</p>
<p>I don’t see “New York, New York, and more New York with a sprinkle of Boston” at all. Sure, the usual suspects are there, but I think they belong there. (Which of the New York schools on that list do you think ISN’T one of the top 50 private day schools?) There are three schools from my area, and they got the right ones (maybe there could have been a fourth), and what seems like a pretty accurate collection of schools from neighboring areas, too. There’s a certain school in Dallas there, too.</p>
<p>A few thoughts:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>There are a lot of closet preppies out there!</p></li>
<li><p>Great private schools cost a lot more in New York, the Bay Area, D.C., and Boston (except Roxbury Latin) than they do in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.</p></li>
<li><p>Why hasn’t anyone circled back and asked whether the recent revelations of widespread sexual abuse of Horace Mann students in our generation shed any new light on Eliot Spitzer’s otherwise-incomprehensible involvement with prostitutes?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>
</p>
<p>Hey, I never said I analyzed the entire list. Perhaps I should dug deeper than the first 5 – which are indeed NY, NY, and a sprinkle of Boston.</p>
<ol>
<li>Trinity School (New York, NY)</li>
<li>Roxbury Latin School (Boston, MA)</li>
<li>Brearley School (New York, NY)</li>
<li>Horace Mann School (New York, NY)</li>
<li>Winsor School (Boston, MA)</li>
</ol>
<p>To emulate an Ivies Plus listing, let’s go to ten schools:</p>
<ol>
<li>College Preparatory School (Oakland, CA)</li>
<li>Collegiate School (New York, NY)</li>
<li>Spence School (New York, NY)</li>
<li>Harvard-Westlake School (Los Angeles, CA)</li>
<li>Dalton School (New York, NY)</li>
</ol>
<p>So, it becomes NY, NY, and an extended sprinkle of Boston cum California. Adding some fruits and nuts to the salty, I guess!</p>
<p>But let’s add five more to grab the distant “suburbs” and Philly and DC action!</p>
<ol>
<li>Chapin School (New York, NY)</li>
<li>Princeton Day School (Princeton, NJ)</li>
<li>Saint Ann’s School (New York, NY)</li>
<li>Germantown Friends School (Philadelphia, PA)</li>
<li>National Cathedral School (Washington, DC)</li>
</ol>
<p>
</p>
<p>PS I do not think I intimated that any of the schools did not deserve a spot on that list. Actually I made no comments, as I would be talking entirely out of school. I simply do not know a thing about those East Coast schools. Ya know, that provincialism that my friend Pizzagirl might mention occasionaly. I do, however, note that a couple schools from RedneckHicklandia (Texas) grabbed a spot …way down the list.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Probably true, but the teacher’s autonomy is the result of a collaboration between the administration/leadership to define the appropriate curriculum and hardly a free-for-all that the autonomy might intimate. Another difference is that performance IS analyzed and results weighted properly, not to mention parental approval. Poor and undedicated teachers do not last long in an environment that focuses on what it important, namely that the students get the education someone is paying for. </p>
<p>Teacher’s autonomy is also a right that is earned over time.</p>
<p>Since no day school competes in a national market, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the ordinal ranking in the list. The schools with which I am familiar in the bottom half of the list are pretty amazing schools, and nearly indistinguishable from the schools with which I am familiar in the top half of the list. So I assume that the “ranking” is quite compressed.</p>
<p>As long as we are focusing on the top of the list, however: 3 of the first 11 are single-sex schools for girls. That’s kind of interesting.</p>
<p>East Coast vs Everywhere Else</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, the south and southeast, including Texas, came in second in this list- 8 spots. The midwest had the fewest, represented mostly by Illinois, with 4 spots.
The west coast garnered 7.
Of course, the region with the most- more than all of the other regions combined- was the northeast, with 31!</p>
<p>That says a lot about the level of difficulty and competition regarding college admissions. I’m not surprised. </p>
<p>For those on the east coast who are lamenting the extreme hype, anxiety and competitiveness of college admissions, there are other places to live where your blood pressure could be reduced.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind is that some of the non-NY schools made the list because they are where lots of faculty from top colleges in the locale send their kids.</p>
<p>Roxbury Latin=lots of Harvard and some MIT faculty; other Boston area colleges also represented</p>
<p>UChicago Lab-Lots of UChicago faculty</p>
<p>Hopkins–lots of Yale faculty </p>
<p>Princeton Day–lots of Princeton faculty</p>
<p>I’m sure there are others. Still, not only are “faculty brats” advantaged in terms of the homes they come from, they’ve got better odds than legacies and athletes of getting into top colleges. Should make the number of kids getting into top colleges look good.</p>
<p>Please note Regis–it’s FREE. All male Catholic boys school l here in NYC. There’s an entrance exam plus an interview. However, extra factors taken into account include socioeconomic–the less wealthy and educated your parents are, the better your chances of admission, though there are still a lot of kids from affluent families there.</p>
<p>I like it since my high school is on it 
As to the validity of the list, who knows…some great schools on there, undoubtedly.</p>
<p>Moonchild: “For those on the east coast who are lamenting the extreme hype, anxiety and competitiveness of college admissions, there are other places to live where your blood pressure could be reduced.”</p>
<p>That is true, and perhaps meant in jest, but remember, this is where some of our families have been for generations. The northeast is old. Many of us are not here because we are strivers.</p>
<p>…honestly, why do parents send their kids to these schools? Students can be more than successful by going to (free) public schools. Just saying.</p>
<p>My 24-year old daughter has a teaching position at the elementary schools on the same campus as one of those high schools. As a parent whose children went to public schools, it has been quite an eye-opener for me. I see the appeal!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is true for some areas, and … not so true for plenty of cities where the decision to make the necessary sacrifices is viewed as a no-brainer. Urban school districts are hardly the same as the suburban ShangriLas that target the people who could vote with their feet. </p>
<p>While most (if not all) of those schools would NOT welcome changes in the way “we” finance K-12 education, much could be said for a different model where “free” schools would be financed by a combination of property taxes AND parental contributions with few exceptions, and the creation of hybrid lower cost private schools. And NO, those would not be charter schools. Simply stated, we should have a system that separates the funding of the schools from their … operations. </p>
<p>And, fwiw, if public schools ceased to be totally free, the public might care more about their operations and “success” and be better prepared for the next steps. The price sticker of a college education would be lesser if people were not lulled to believe that education is indeed … free. Because it is not, if when you do not get an invoice in the mail.</p>
<p>Knowing the private schools in suburban Philly quite well, I find these rankings a puzzle. The three schools included in the top 50 are all excellent schools but not of a different caliber or quality than their peers that were not included, So, as with the collegiate rankings, take it with a grain of salt. Can anyone really say whether Oberlin is X places above or below Kenyon, Grinnell or Mac? No. Or that Reed is number whatever? Just seems like another way to get readers, online or otherwise.</p>
<p>Being from Texashicklandia, I thought may be our out post declared war on this listing and excluded themselves but alas I found two somewhere down the list. So we need them kicked out of top 50 pronto and let the provincials rule.</p>