@blossom, NA only sent 2 to Muhlenberg last year. I saw the Muhlenberg presentation a few years ago, and they have the presentation dialed in for giving a warm feeling for the school; I would not feel bad if any of my kids had gone there. That said, of the 2017 class at NA, 21 went to Ivies (of a class of 100), and more than half to what I’d consider very selective schools (Amherst, CMU, Georgetown, etc.).
this an interesting topic
Your kids are currently in 6th grade, correct? For next year, look into the Caroline D. Bradley scholarship, which is a merit-based scholarship that covers 4 years of HS tuition wherever your child might gain admission. As you might guess, it’s extremely competitive. One applies in the 7th grade and has to meet certain benchmarks for standardized tests in order to submit an application. There is more information on it on CC, if you search for it.
http://educationaladvancement.org/caroline-d-bradley-scholarship/
Regarding your question, I would ask if you are more concerned with the journey or the outcome. If it’s the outcome, I’d not invest in private school, as there are no guarantees. If it’s the journey, and you feel that the investment is worth it for the intangibles, then that’s a different question.
As you have twins who are wired differently, with different interests and talents, it may be that the solution for each will differ.
Best of luck as you move forward.
Any concern about the lack of socio-economic, race/ethnic diversity at some of these private high schools?
They are likely more racially and ethnically diverse than the public school.
If some parents here are REALLY interested in the topic I think they should check out the prep school forum on CC. Threads like the following would be helpful to get different perspectives:
http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/prep-school-admissions/2048353-the-truth-behind-prep-schools-from-an-exeter-17-grad-p1.html
I am the OP. In our town diversity isn’t there but the private schools we target are more socially diverse.
I’m also in the camp that believes that you shouldn’t consider HS with an eye to college admissions but on their own merits. Attending some of the top privates (especially the boarding schools) are like attending a top LAC (I felt that the magnet HS I went to was like one as well when I went though folks at other magnets, and possibly my alma mater now as well, saw it as highly competitive). I would not worry about the academics regardless of what you choose. At the public, worse comes to worst, you just pay for college classes or more academic challenge. The social aspect (bullying, good/bad influences, etc.) should matter more.
BTW, it was different in your home country (and a lot of other countries), but in the US, your decision won’t have a life-altering effect on your children’s lives. Lots of on and off ramps for any path and many paths to any potential destination.
@InfoQuestMom re pressure to donate, I think that varies significantly from school to school. The donation can be quite small as a percentage of total cost.
My D goes to a very good public HS and her best friend goes to a very good private school. At the private school there is so much more personal attention, nurturing, preparation for the SAT/ACT tests starting early, hand holding and college counselors who are more on the ball. Academically, I don’t know if there’s that much difference in terms of rigor, but the private school has tiny classes while the public school does not.
Since OP and his wife are not native English speakers, their children may not have had as much exposure as other children to a rich English-language environment at home. This could put them at a bit of a disadvantage in subjects where English is stressed, and on the verbal parts of standardized tests. I say this because my own daughter was raised in a largely non-English home environment, and by the time she was the age of OP’s twins, her performance in math and science was much better than her English. I realized that her English had been short-changed, somewhat, due to her home environment, and this was a consideration as we weighed whether she should attend the STEM-focused public high school or a private day school. We ultimately decided on the private school.
Nowadays a lot of private schools have many humanities teachers with Masters or doctorates in their area of teaching. It is really hard to get a university tenure track position in the humanities (search for “100 reasons not to go to grad school”), so private secondary schools have access to a much larger talent pool with advanced degrees in the humanities than in STEM fields (where the corporate sector beckons with more money). At my daughter’s high school, over four years, all of her English teachers had doctorates, as well as some of her other humanities teachers. These are people who had taught in universities and generally had very rigorous standards for writing and analysis, going well beyond the requirements of courses such as AP English and History. I don’t know whether my daughter’s math and science education was any better at the private school than it would have been at the public school, but I’m sure her humanities studies were better.
I don’t know how the humanities faculty and curricula at the local public school and private school match up in OP’s case, but cost aside, those are issues I would want to consider.
My kids went to private from K-12, except for a semester when we first moved out to NJ. The idea was to have them go to public so we could save a lot of money on education when we moved from NYC to NJ. The town we were in had very little racial diversity or social diversity. It was important for my kids to have racial diversity. D1 was made fun of by her classmates because she was bi-racial. When I offered to come to school to do some activities with the kids, the homeroom teacher said they didn’t have time because they were prepping for the state exams, and this was in second grade. When D1 was given writing assignments, she wouldn’t get them back until weeks later, by then she had forgotten what she wrote, so any corrections/improvements were outdated. I actually got to know her homeroom teacher pretty well. She told me that she was required to teach every course, from math to music. She had very little down time to read papers or grade tests in school, so she had to do most of that work at home. When she had to go to bathroom she would leave her 2nd graders unattended because there was no teacher’s aid. She was responsible for 25+ students by herself most of the days. In comparison, at some of those privates, the class size would be 15 with 2 teachers in the room, and specialized teachers for music, foreign language, gym, art.
It was a difficult decision for me to put my girls at a top private in NJ. Like OP, I had to look at our financial commitment for 15+ years (D2 was a lot younger than D1). My father was also an immigrant. He came to this country to give us better opportunities, and to have the best education possible. I knew by paying for 2 kids at a private would leave me with a lot less retirement money. I ultimately moved my kids to a private after D1’s experience at our local public (not as good as Chatham, but still very good). I didn’t do it for college admission. I did it for their overall education. I figured it was better to give them the best education possible rather than leaving them with a big inheritance.
My kid’s private didn’t offer IB because their honors were more rigorous than most IB courses. We knew that because D2 went to an international school that offered IB when she was junior (I was an expat for 2 years). The books she was reading in IB English senior year she had read already as a sophomore. IB courses were also taught in a very specific way and my kid’s school wanted more flexibility. My kids were very good students, but they were not brilliant. They had younger students (9th graders) in their high level math/science courses. Instead of having those young brilliant kids skip grades, the school just put them in appropriate level classes. The school’s facility was top notch. Its science labs could rival some university’s. It had state of the art performing arts building and Olympic level sports facility.
I remember one year, my kid’s grade had an interest about Egyptian pyramid after a teacher’s aids gave a talk about it (she was from Egypt). The teachers got together to re-design their whole curriculum around it, from English (writing), social studies, science, math, music, art, etc. They did a lot of show and tell through out the year. This is not something a public school would be able to do because they have very strict government mandated curriculum.
My kids are both out of college and into the next phase of their lives. In hindsight, I would still make the same decision. Both of my kids went to the same great college, but they still say the best education they got was at their secondary school. They said it built a great foundation for them. OP, if your concern is with college admission, your kids will do just as well at Chatham, but if you want them to get a better overall education, I think Pingry is a better bet.
I am glad that private worked for you Oldfort, but our experience in public school in NJ was not that way at all. Teachers work really hard, but second graders also go to “specials” every day and the classroom teacher certainly has time then to use the restroom and to do some prep work. They also had an hour for lunch every day when the kids were with lunch aides and had recess on the playground. There were specialized teachers for gym, art, music and foreign language (although the last was not very good in the elementary school). But yes, there were up to 25 kids (but usually around 19-20 per class) and teachers had to do some work at home’ most teachers do.
I am also surprised the teacher said she was working on state testing in 2nd grade, as the assessments do not start to count until 3rd grade. Our district did not do a lot of specific test prep, but the kids were well prepared.
Not trying to challenge you on your experience or decision, but my kids (and most kids) got a great education at public school. Certainly, a private school education at the top privates in NJ offers things that the public school does not and likely has better college placement. But it is not accurate to portray most 2nd grade classrooms in highly ranked NJ districts as one teacher with 25 students that never gets a break and has to also teach art, gym, music and spanish. I don’t know of any highly ranked districts that operate that way.
@mom2and, our experience (in Millburn/Short Hills) was that the elementary education was generally excellent, with a few clunker teachers that we tried to avoid (successfully absent one). The high school has a good reputation, and seems to serve the majority of students well. Inexplicably, the middle school is a goat rodeo.
Obviously extremely situational, but my husband and I really admired the polish and confidence of the local private high school students. Night and day to the local good not great upper middle class public.
Middle school is tough, although my kids had some excellent and a few not so good teachers. It is also true that every teacher does not work for every kid. The “favorite” 5th grade teacher was really terrible for one of my kids.
I live in the suburbs of Los Angeles and one private school near us charges $31,000k (up to 2nd grade) to $37,000 (through HS) per year. There are no multiple family member discounts. So if you have 2 kids in their school system for say 12 years you are paying approximately $900,000 (after taxes)!
I’m having a hard time believing that these kids are getting such a better education than their peers who also happen to live in the same, great public school system.
We moved to NJ when D1 was in 2nd grade and it was right before xmas. I remember D1 spent hours in school prepping for some state tests that spring.
There is so much variability involved here that there is no universal right answer. We sent our pups to an “average” rural/suburban (i.e…, no diversity) public high school, where they excelled. Given their natural inquisitive learning style, I am confident they would have excelled wherever they went. We would have needed scholarships to send our pups to private school, but locally, the privates do not offer nearly as many AP courses.
There are plenty of horror stories about the quality of public high schools in our state, but there are other publics in our state that are quite remarkable.
One of S’s college friends went to a private high school, while the publics were rated pretty high. She told us her younger brother was attending the public school, but her parents had decided to send her to the private because at that time, she was a follower, and some of her middle school friends were not the best influence on her. She told us that In hindsight, her parents were right, one of these girls was suspended for selling drugs at school, and another had her own kid during junior year. She freely admitted that she “straightened up” in her private high school. But her brother is a stronger person than she was at the time, so her parents accepted his wish to go to the public where he can play hockey and baseball, and be at the top of his class,
There are plenty of great kids who attend both types of schools. In my mind, the biggest difference is in the amount of time and type of issues the faculty and administration deal with for discipline, Some private schools are resource strapped and will look the other way when a kid from a tuition-paying family breaks a rule. But others have the hammer of expulsion and are free to use it. Public schools are compelled to provide an education, while it is easier for private schools to kick disruptive kids out.
Private schools generally do not have the same percentage of special needs kids. Being selective, the private schools generally don’t take in the problem kids nor the slow learners.
The public high school in question here doesn’t have any major discipline problems. Drugs are likely every bit as present at both schools.