<p>I’m not sure if this has already been said, but at the private school my kids attended there is a feeling that going to the school actually compromises one’s chances for admission at the “top” colleges. There are several reasons for this. First, the school is located in the area of one of these top colleges and many of the parents who choose to send their children to this school are professors at this college. There are therefore, many, many connected kids and that tends to crowd out those who don’t have the hook. It also tends to skew the numbers and persuade those looking at them without insight that the school is getting kids in. </p>
<p>Second, the school practices active grade deflation. When compared to the top flight public schools nearby, the gpa’s look anemic and the SATs pretty comparable. I mean there is a ceiling to these tests after all. The kids all seem to groan that the B they earn in any given class would be an A anywhere else. The administration believes that the colleges know this school and understand the grades in their proper context. Personally, I think their thinking is outdated and the practice of grade deflation demoralizing. I’m not advocating grade inflation but a happy medium would be welcomed.</p>
<p>We’ve also found that the relationships the school has had with certain colleges and universities is changing. Where 10+ kids were accepted to a particular Ivy in '05, only 2 were accepted in '06. The college counseling staff is trying to come to grips with changed priorities and greater emphasis on economic, ethnic, and racial diversity, but they seem to be as bewildered as the parents and students at the bizarre admissions results. Only now, years after things changed and admissions became so competitive, are they starting to change the way they interact with students and with colleges. When you have a student population of which more than half are academically qualified to be admitted to an elite school and couple that with changed priorities that disfavor private school applicants, fewer kids are admitted. Over the past year or so, I’ve seen our public schools getting more unhooked kids into elite schools than this private school.</p>
<p>I do find however, that the education at the private school is more intellectually rigorous than that of the public schools, even the most competitive and most demanding.</p>
<p>I heard a funny comment this weekend relevant to this thread. It came from a freshman at a highly regarded New England LAC (but not a single-initial one). She was in the top-student group, but was far from THE top student, at a famous, competitive suburban public high school. She was something of a conscientious objector in the college admissions competition at her school, due in part to the fact that her best friend was probably the most competitive person there. She is really liking college, and feels well-prepared for it.</p>
<p>Anyway, this is what she told her parents a few days ago: “Those private school kids! I have to respect their confidence in themselves, I guess, but they think they know everything and that every idea that passes through their head needs to be shared with everyone. And most of the time, they are morons, and maybe they know half of what’s important. It gets annoying.”</p>
<p>Soshi - I would wager it is probably much more of the first issue you noted than the second. I would not say we practice grade deflation at the indendent school I am at, but we do grade in such a manner that if you earn an A, you really earn it. We have no public school like grading and have never had any student with a 4.0. Top GPA is typically around 3.7 to 3.8 a year and the average is around a 3.1 or 3.2. I guess some would call that grade deflation, however we believe it is fair, accurate grading in a rigorous curriculum. And it has certainly not hurt our admissions to most competitive colleges where we do far better than the norm</p>
<p>OTOH, your first comment would appear to be a big issue if a large number of students from your school are already getting in, the college may not want as many from the same high school. I guess in that regard we are fortunate as we never have more than a small number of students (no more than 5) typically interested in the same college</p>
<p>You are fortunate to have a good public school. I am not so fortunate. For high achieving students in our district are able to get inot top colleges. The public students who do get in have difficulty keeping up.</p>
<p>My kids are in private. We get FA. Our issue right now is even with the aid can we afford to keep sending to private. I have one son in 9th. For him specifically we are concerned because he has outpaced our public in all subjects but science & 1 math course. For our youngest, we need to make the decision for next year soon before youngest begins to outpace the public.</p>
<p>That is the downside to some privates depending on your area.</p>
<p>I tend to agree with JHS on this one. I have lived in and experienced two major urban community public systems. Both have programs for highly capable or gifted kids. S1 began K in a one of those programs. He had three close friends all of whom went through the public system and a couple switching schools due to parent moves. The result of the 4: Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, Yale. If they had attended private schools, the results could not have been better.</p>
<p>The college placement of students from the public highly capable programs I know rival those of the privates and often exceed it. I have been tracking this for sometime. The main difference, as JHS has noted, is in counseling and in local counselors and principals fighting for a student’s admission. The public kids rely more on parents to find support outside of the school or wing it alone. The private kids’ experience tends to be more sculpted for top college admittance from day 1, but I can’t see the difference when it comes to outcome. </p>
<p>Many parents in our community opt for the public gifted programs rather than send their kids to privates for this reason. The $$ saved helps pay the college tab, and though many can afford it, they believe the public experience is valuable for their kids.</p>
<p>Idad, in my city the budget for special services has swamped whatever gifted and talented programs once existed. We have door-to-door taxi service for kids with asthma (many of whom play on sports teams); one-on-one “shadows” for kids whose behavioral and learning issues have made the classrooms practically unbearable for the rest of the class; parents who insist they don’t want their kids stigmatized by being in special ed so the routine is about 55 minutes being pulled out for one on one tutoring for every 5 minutes of regular class instruction.</p>
<p>Sadly this means that a smart or highly capable kid who is not a behavior problem is going to get lost in the shuffle. Are these kids being “Left Behind”? Not according to federal guidelines. But parents who don’t want to see their kids education hijacked by a vocal group of parents who hire lawyers and take their issues to the newspaper on a regular basis demanding more and more special services… swallow hard and pay for private school.</p>
<p>And wish they had the money saved for college.</p>
<p>blossom, your post 106 is totally accurate and I find it as heart-breaking as probably many parents do here. As a teacher (and parent of gifted!), I find the situation appalling and unsupportable. And it’s getting worse, in my region, every day. The supposed horror of the “stigma” wins the day. Well, you know, it might be a stigma to have a broken leg or cancer, too, but it’s immoral not to inform the person, “label” him, and treat him with full disclosure.</p>
<p>If you can get 55 minutes one-on-one instruction for every 5 minutes of class time, I highly recommend you become a special ed lawyer. You could make a fortune!</p>
<p>I have one of those cc kids, one mid-road kid who hated school, and a spec ed student. (I like to spread my pain around…)</p>
<p>My one-sample anecdote is that my S, coming from a rural, public, crappy school had very good acceptances, even by cc standards. I do not think he would have stood out the way he did had he been in a better school.</p>
<p>However, the flip side is his preparation for college was dismal. He spent the entire first year of college absolutely floored at what other students had actually done in high school. This is where I see the advantage of good privates or good public high schools–not in their acceptances per se, but in how prepared the graduates are to do the work at wherever they enroll.</p>
<p>In one area I lived parent activism and threats of law suits had a very real effect on providing services for highly capable kids. </p>
<p>Chicago appears to be doing some interesting things in providing for highly capable kids. They have selective public high schools, such as Whitney Young, Walter Payton, and Northside Prep, a regional gifted program a classical program etc. I’m sure its not a panacea, but it looks like it is serving some of these kids. I understand their college placement records are quite good.</p>
<p>This thread has focused on very high achieving students.</p>
<p>One area our private excels in is getting the 3.0 student a lot of merit. </p>
<p>From my perspective this is because the counselor excels at finding matches and safeties for the B student. Some of the schools are off the radar of our public.</p>
<p>I apologize, compmom, if my post you saw as mean-spirited (for supporting blossom’s). Let me assure you how dedicated I am to special ed kids. I have one of my own (diagnosed "too late’), who did not get sufficiently addressed in her private, and my own cadre of students now, professionally, is largely Special Ed. I fight every day to get help for them. I work with them every day personally in my office. But the mainstreamed classroom structure is not helping them, at least overwhelmingly, in my region. We need to bring back Special Ed schools and Special ed classrooms, and refining the differentiated needs of those many-spectrum Special Ed students. The way they are “treated” (ha!) now is both a sham to them and a disgrace to non-Special-Ed kids – average, above-average, and gifted. </p>
<p>Those of us who with a specialty in Gifted Education understand that the gifted child is not just a high performer, but is himself out-of-the-mainstream, and in that context, is also Special Needs. You cannot use the same approach with a patently Gifted child as with other children. Doesn’t work. They have a psychological profile that differs from the mainstream child, and often that profile is problematic for standard classroom teaching.</p>
<p>On that note, an example of poor mainstreaming is that of my friend’s child, who has Down’s Syndrome and is now 19. She fought like crazy to keep her daughter out of the special ed classroom, because she thought the kids in that group were so disabled that they were unaware of anything at all going on, and her daughter at least had the mental capacity of a 3 year old. She was successful at getting the child mainstreamed, for several years. Probably better for her child, but even she admitted that it was not in the best interest of the rest of the class to have the teacher so distracted trying to work with her child and manage the rest of the class too. I can’t even imagine the difficulty of being a teacher in such a challenging situation with inadequate classroom help.</p>
<p>I don’t feel like reading every post here but does the point that private schools are better than public really need to be argued? If they weren’t better, no one would send their kids there, and then their wouldn’t be any (atleast not secular private schools). </p>
<p>I went to a ‘typical’ good public high school, with what I imagine are typical rules, policies, and just ways about going about things. The only kid who should have been in special ed who was ever in one of my classes was much less of a distraction or annoyance than some of the other kids who constantly made the teacher stop to scold them. </p>
<p>How our school worked… Anything regular level, people would talk, not pay attention, cause distractions, and you wouldn’t learn anything. If you wanted to learn something, you took advanced and AP classes, and then you did learn something, people paid attention, people cared about the class.</p>
<p>I doubt anyone would argue that on the whole private high schools are superior to public, but there are circumstances where that may not necessarily be the case.</p>
<p>^I would argue that on the whole private high schools are superior to public… I think lots of people would argue that. (maybe I need to read through this thread???)</p>
<p>In the sense of more individualized attention, better counseling, more access to courses targeted at preparing one for college, and assistance in applying to college.</p>
<p>There are many different private schools. Around where we live we have very good public schools. One would think there wouldn’t be as much need for private schools. That is not the case. We have many private schools. There is one that caters to kids that are not thriving in public schools, kids that need more “nurturing.” There is one where most rich kids go because their parents do not want to them to socialize with the common people. Of course, then there are legitimate college prep schools.</p>
<p>My kids have always been in private schools, other than a semester when D1 was in our local public school in second grade. It was a tough and expensive decision for us to make, especially when we had good public schools, and it was the reason why we moved from NYC to a suburb. We didn’t do it for the college process (we were naive back then to think if our kids had a good education then they could just get into a good college). </p>
<p>We feel education at a top private school is better than public school, after D1’s 6 months experience at our local elementary school. Just based on a simple fact that at a top private school (where kids are admitted very similarly to college admission), teachers do not need to deal with disciplinary problems or pace the class to students with LD. Almost every student comes to class prepared. It makes class discussion a lot more interesting, and the class could move at a much faster pace. It then also allows teachers to slow down if and when students find a particular subject to be more interesting. They don’t have state’s mandated curriculum. When D1 entered college, she found she was a lot more prepared than most of kids from public schools. She also found many of those students do catch up eventually.</p>
<p>College process is a bonus as far as we are concerned. Every counselor at our school has 30-40 kids each year. Most of those kids are assigned a counselor by the time they are a Junior. D1 asked her teachers formally for recs, but the counselor followed up with teachers to make sure they were done on time, and they were good recs. A friend’s son(also goes to our school) right now is trying to decide between MIT and Williams for ED for sport. The counselor is speaking with both schools to see which one would give him a bigger push.</p>
<p>When there is good, there is also bad. Those private school counselors often behave like some outside private counselors. They want to manage their admittance record. They may work harder for some students than for others. I have seen them trying to low ball some students. Some of those counselors have such good relationship with adcoms, there are often deals made between them (send a few good students our way and we would look at your school more favorably in the future).</p>
<p>I am sure that one of the reasons that D has been accepted to very selective program at state school with 10 spots available for incoming freshman was the fact that she graduated from small Private HS (33 kids in senior class) that could be described as “colleges know our schools and know that our students will succeed in their program”.</p>