<p>The OP also asked about strong K-8 schools. Our daughter is an *alumna *of Meadowbrook in Weston, which has terrific academics and a very constructive social environment.</p>
<p>When she was going into 6th grade, she also applied to Nashoba Brooks, Shady Hill, Beaver Country Day, Belmont Day but Meadowbrook wound up being her first choice and we have no complaints whatever about the decision, even though we liked a lot about the others, too. Of those other schools, Beaver starts at 6th and Nashoba starts, I think, at 3rd. The others are K-8.</p>
<p>At the time, she’d also looked at Winsor (they start at 5th) and BB&N but chose not to apply to either for 6th, even though she later did for 9th. Excellent schools also-- for the right kid.</p>
<p>Beaver, BB&N, and Winsor probably don’t make much effort in high school placements, since kids can continue on where they are. The others tend to send their grads to a range of good private schools or the better suburban public high schools.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I’d be careful of looking only at percentages of kids that go to Ivies or other specific blocs of destination schools. While it does indicate to some degree the level of students and the help they get, it can also really mess up a school’s culture. What gets measured gets done, and a school that is frantic to keep its Ivy % up can distort a lot of what makes it valuable in the first place. Think of accepting Ivy-type students only, skewing support to the top third of the class (i.e., the kids who will make the school look good in the Forbes Magazine pieces), pushing those kids into Ivy schools instead of equally good ones that may be more appropriate, and so on. There’s some really sick stuff going on out there and it doesn’t help the life of our children (or that of their schoolmates) to buy into it uncritically.</p>