<p>^^ yep. Private schools also must differentiate themselves in the marketing game. Saying “we too offer AP” is not a good game plan if the free public in the 'hood has the same or more.</p>
<p>I can attest for private schools, especially boarding schools, preparing students exceptionally well for college.</p>
<p>AP courses are not important to colleges that know the schools and know that the curriculum is rigorous. A whole other story when it comes to schools off the radar, both universities and the high schools. The number of APs and how well the students do on those APs and where a given applicant stands in that situation can be very important.</p>
<p>My sons’ prep school did not bother to designate AP to a lot of the courses, but permitted kids to sign up for any AP exams they pleased. Some AP prep classes were held a few weeks before the exams for some courses. But the kids have an excellent record in getting 4s and 5s on the AP exams. </p>
<p>I think what is important is how well kid do on the AP exams at a school It doesn’t mean a thing to have 30 AP courses if the kids don’t tend to do well on them. Also, there are certain critical AP exams that colleges hold more important than others. AP Psychology or Computer Science, for instance is not going to have as much clout as AP BC Calc and the AP Englishes and the AP basic sciences, including the Physics C.</p>
<p>“I can attest for private schools, especially boarding schools, preparing students exceptionally well for college.”</p>
<p>You can attest to at most <em>one</em> private preparing students well. However, your lack of reasoning skills does not support your attestation.</p>
<p>CoTH:</p>
<p>I completely agree that AP scores should be looked at in trying to say something about a school’s teaching, not simply whether ‘AP’ classes are available. Our HS had a brilliant physics teacher who left two years before it was my kids turn to take the class. The teacher who took over had a terrible first year in terms of student AP test performance, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, this information was well known to the parents nosy about such things. </p>
<p>Parent night is <em>very</em> well attended at this HS – darn close to 100%. Through the four years of attending these orientations, I spoke twice, once to ask this physics teacher why he thought AP test performance was poor the year prior, and what remediation steps or parent interventions he recommended. His answer was very interesting, that the school had taken on a new political policy of increasing student participation in AP classes. This lowered the student quality, and forced him to teach slower to keep the weak students involved. He did not finish teaching the curriculum that year, and the AP test results suffered. He promised to keep pace for the current year, even if it meant some students were not grasping the material. I don’t know how successful overall his students did in later years. I was not willing to take chances though, so I gave my old freshman college physics text to my kid and asked him to work through the problem sets.</p>
<p>My other time speaking up occurred in Honors Spanish 4. A number of parents had mentioned that recent year ‘A’ students had received a ‘C’ at the hands of this teacher, and they were concerned that the Spanish class would tarnish an otherwise sterling HS transcript of their kids. One parent in particular intimated that the grading system of the Spanish teacher must be wrong, since her grades were at odds with other classes. I felt it necessary to defend the teacher and thank her for avoiding grade inflation.</p>
<p>Albuquerque Academy is my neighbor. It is certainly the best private school in my state, and I think it ranks around tenth in the country. I imagine parents from the east and west coasts will remark how inexpensive it is, but keep in mind it is a day school and New Mexico has few chauffeurs. Without a doubt it has enormous prestige locally, and like many a top 20 college LAC gets to select a promising student body based on admissions testing and interviews. Admission rates are 160/600.</p>
<p>The school has a pretty informative website at aa.edu, and perhaps most interesting, publishes detailed statistics of college matriculation that may be seen by hovering over the ‘admissions’ tab and clicking the ‘our students college choices 2007 - 2010’ link on the far right.
Parents can scan for Ivy admissions (or whatever interests), I’ll just add that over the 4 years and ~ 640 students that this list informs, 127 (1/5) went on to UNM or NMSU, our local tier 3 state Universities. I think it a fair guess that with few exceptions this group did not choose UNM or NMSU for money reasons. Coincidence you may say, but 1/5 went to a top 20 U or LAC by my count.</p>
<p>AP offerings are no longer a measure of how good a high school is. In fact some of the more “elite” schools (Fieldston, Choate, New Trier High School, my daughter’s high-school, and others) have gotten rid of the AP classes because AP classes teach to a rubric, hijack the curriculum, do not allow for intellectual digression, and do not result in durable learning (a 5 on the Spanish AP did not mean that my friends and I were ready for the class on Cervantes, into which I/we placed, not by a long shot). Admittedly, some parents were worried about the phasing out of APs, but then saw college acceptances were not eroded, not one bit, by the omission. In fact, the following encapsulates the advantages of not having APs:</p>
<p>These concerns are worth heeding. Fieldston tried to make new courses as rigorous and quite sweeping. A.P. European history became European Intellectual History. Students lost some of the “march to the sea” comprehensiveness of a survey course, but spent more time wrestling with the ideas of Luther, Montesquieu, Marx and Freud.</p>
<p>I can tell you that my daughter learned more (and had more time for expanded thinking and intellectual discovery), in her Honors classes, which had replaced the APs (2 AP classes remained and then, as of this year, have been reinvented as Honors classes) than I learned in my many AP classes in high school.</p>
<p>[Demoting</a> Advanced Placement - New York Times](<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/education/04EDUCATION.html]Demoting”>Demoting Advanced Placement - The New York Times)</p>
<p>And according to the instigator (Alfie Kohn) of AP eradication:
Published in New York Times
05/06/2009</p>
<p>To the editor</p>
<p>Re “Many Teachers in Advanced Placement Voice Concern at Its Rapid Growth” (news article, April 29): </p>
<p>Much of what’s wrong with what passes for the school “reform” movement is captured in the report on Advanced Placement courses released by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The worry, it seems, is that “a generally good program” may be “weakened by making it too accessible.” </p>
<p>Much could be said about the troubling notion that quality is necessarily diluted by “democratization” — or, to put it the other way around, that the best kind of teaching must be restricted to an elite. But the real problem here is the uncritical assumption that A.P. courses are good merely because they’re “rigorous” — that is, very difficult. </p>
<p>In fact, these courses often represent an accelerated version of the worst sort of teaching: lecture-based, textbook-oriented, focused more on covering (a prefabricated curriculum) than on discovering, and above all, driven not by a desire to help students think deeply and become excited by ideas but by the imperative of preparing them for a test. </p>
<p>Could this tendency to confuse harder with better, and high test scores with real learning, be at the root of what’s wrong with an approach to improving education based mostly on “raising the bar”? </p>
<p>— Alfie Kohn</p>
<p>Finally, it was an admissions person at Harvard who coined the term “teacup”–it was a characterization of the (mostly) private school and upper-middle class product who could do nothing, really, beyond academic performance–e.g. that a lot of the kids were fragile in ways that counted (life skills, common sense–writing a check, doing laundry, knowing not to put wet clothes away in a drawer!!), outside of the realm of high grades and exalted test scores. And know that I am product of private school, as are my children, and I see where the deficits are, ubiquitously, in my peers and in my children’s peers. </p>
<p>In many ways, the kids who graduate our incredibly diverse, local public high school (children of university academicians and children who are baby-mamas) have practical (read survival) skills no other. They have had to traverse a plane of an obstructive administration, (some) teachers who are too demoralized to teach effectively while other teachers are inspirational, and metal detectors. At the same time, this school produces one of the most intellectually risk-taking group of kids you could ever imagine (playwrights who have gotten things produced off-Broadway and students who not only engineered the “Cicero” club but also are dedicated to speaking, exclusively, Latin when they get together); as an aside, the top 15% in the graduating class of 700-800 students get their first-choice college. I would also venture to say that their Latin is on par with the top prep/boarding school in the country. Last year, everyone who took the National Exam won a gold medal.</p>
<p>It is the worst sort of snobbery or ignorance, take your pick, to make a blanket statement that private is better than public–there are a host of holistic components to take into account that may make one man’s public another man’s private and vice versa.</p>
<p>AP is a standardized class and test, with all the positives and negatives that entails. I will say this: a fancy shmancy labeled, too-good-for-AP course that produces students unable to get 4s and 5s on the AP science tests leaves me unimpressed.</p>
<p>Put another way, a HS science class that purports to teach flexible, creative thinking but fails in standardized problem solving fundamentals is BS’g. So it comes down to the same thing: start with AP test scores for learning evaluation. They are not the final word, but they are a very good first word.</p>
<p>The way I gauged my local public HS performance was to compare where the top 60 kids from the HS go to college compared to our top local private HS. When they are similar, you can say that your public HS is doing a good job. When I see graduates of some of these private high schools going to mid-level competitive state colleges, I ask why did their parents pay $35K per year for that? You can easily get into those schools from any public HS. However, when you look at some of the larger cities with lousy public schools, that would temper my commitment to public schools. We chose to live in an area with top schools so our kids could attend public high school and still get a good education. If you feel that your school is lacking in an area, it is much less expensive to send your kid to public high school and get your kid tutoring in specific areas. It will cost much less to get extra tutoring than pay for private HS tuition.</p>
<p>tqmon2000- Getting into a prestigious college isn’t the main benefit of private schools for most students. There is so much more. Also, not every student WANTS to attend a highly selective college. There are many reasons students choose state university- even mid-level ones. A private school education and the friendships made can still be of great benefit even if you don’t wind up at Harvard. Gasp. Of course there are excellent public schools and they have great football teams and real marching bands! You might have neighborhood friends who actually attend the same school you do.<br>
I assure you that tutoring in specific areas would not have made a dent in the issues our public schools have (where we lived when our kids were in school).</p>
<p>tqmom,</p>
<p>Why do you think the top 60 kids in each school are similar groups ? I don’t see a way to answer this question to my satisfaction.</p>
<p>Really, we are asking if a particular private school gives added value over a particular public school in general, to certain groups of students a bit more specifically (athletes, average kids, cream-of-the-crop kids etc; and more to the point, for any one student in particular. Moreover, we should ask if the added value is significant to that student’s happiness, success later in life etc.</p>
<p>Is a decile improvement in the SAT worth private tuition ? I’d argue no from 50 -> 60 percentile, but perhaps yes for a 90.9 -> 99.9 ranking. Is private tuition worth improving a mediocre communicator into a good but not great communicator ? I say arguably yes.</p>
<p>Statistics are not going to provide enlightenment here, even if they were not the cherry picked mishmash of private schools and their rationalizing customers. Parents have to hoof it down to the school, pay attention to what matters to them, and get to know representative kids and parents of interest.</p>
<p>Good discussion and just about everyone is right!</p>
<p>My kids went to both private (k-8) and then public (good one, similar to post #11)</p>
<p>I think of it this way- if you can afford a good private school (some are not special, so I really mean the good selective academic private schools) then you will do well to go there. If you cannot afford it, do the best you can at the best public school you can either transfer into or move to its area.
And if cannot afford to do that either, you are at a disadvantage.</p>
<p>SIMPLY PUT, IT IS A MATTER OF $.</p>
<p>But the merciful part is that even without the means, our public school students can still squeeze into the temples of excellence. Even in poor schools There is opportunity, there are superb teachers, and some without money can still do well.</p>
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<p>Hmm … I guess it’s simple for each us … but we each view the simple solution differently.</p>
<p>Never mind we would not switch our from their public HS to a private HS if given a full scholarship to the private high school … actually we would not switch them even if we were paid more than a full scholarship to switch sour kdis to private school (unless it was really big bucks).</p>
<p>So it’s not all about the money … so maybe it’s no so simple.</p>
<p>Public high schools are fine. If your smart, you will succeed and be prepared for college if you go to public hs(as long as your school district isnt horrendous). Most stats that say otherwise just reflect the fact that more rich kids with involved parents go to private high schools than public. </p>
<p>Dumb to pay money to go to high school, unless you live in a really dangerous/bad school district. Why pay for something thats free?</p>
<p>I guess TJHSST is an exception.</p>
<p>“Why pay for something thats free?”</p>
<p>I think you meant: why pay for something and then not use it ?</p>
<p>Not all private schools are created equal and it can also vary widely as you move across the country. For example, in some cities the parochial high schools are a better option (and often the ONLY option) to poor performing public school districts yet the education they provide is not comparable to more elite non denominational private day schools.</p>
<p>Here in Dallas, the top two schools are single sex schools that share a brother/sister relationship and are on a level that is all their own. There’s a third (very small) all boys Catholic school that is outstanding and is a very close peer but has a very rigid European curriculum and again has only about 35 boys per grade. The “second tier” of schools includes two co-ed schools, one non denominational and the other an Episcopal school as well as the two Catholic single sex schools. </p>
<p>The remainder of private schools fall in line below this and include the remainder of religiously affiliated schools and non denominational schools and even here, there’s a big difference from top to bottom. Many of these schools are surpassed educationally by the top public schools but meet other needs that their parents are looking for either religiously or in other cases, just a better overall alternative to the neighborhood public.</p>
<p>In short, the best private schools offer an unparalleled educational opportunity with the best teachers and facilities with tough admission standards, small class sizes, kids who really want to learn and a hefty price tag. Not all kids are good fits for these schools, even very bright ones, but the kids that are a good fit will be very well prepared for anything any college can throw at them.</p>
<p>From personal experience in college I can say private schools better prepared kids to be stuck up and arrogant in high school. But… that’s just what I’ve seen, and not every private school kid I met. Just most of them.</p>
<p>For me, the private school I attend allows me a lot of personal freedom and happiness and the opportunity to learn more and explore. I attended a public gifted magnet school through junior high and it was not a happy experience and I was not challenged intellectually/educationally. I was also bullied. It was a small environment. Had I attended the public high school, it would have been a school of 2000 and I would have been nothing more than another student. I have heard so many reports of bad teachers as well at the school, which is actually one of the top 100 public high schools. I would have “checked out” and not been prepared educationally or emotionally for the rigors of college. </p>
<p>Some of the other benefits of private high schools is their college counseling staff who work to match the students to the right colleges and who promote the high school to college admissions offices so that they know more about the school when a student applies from there.</p>
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<p>Indeed. We live in one of those districts an earlier poster categorized as “horrendous,” in our case a designation well earned. Nor, as I mentioned, did we qualify for an inter-district transfer, although we should have qualified on all three measures between my two daughters. But overcrowding overruled those options, and the children ended up at the best parochial available. Between their 12 combined years of schooling at the parochial elementary, seven of those elementary years were fine, five were less fine, but all in all the parochial elementary still beat the publics open to us.</p>
<p>High school was a rigorous Catholic private. Matriculating to a reach private and reach public, they were well prepared. For anecdotal purposes only (but possibly representative of just my own State), younger daughter reported that freshman year at the reach public was a real struggle for all of her classmates that went to mid-level suburban publics in the same state, while her own first trimester was shockingly “easy” compared to her private high school. (Not necessarily ‘easy’ after that, but transitionally so, it was.)</p>
<p>So one really has to take this on a case-by-case basis, not just by individual school but by individual state. For example, a friend of ours who went to a competitive public in our state, did fine at a private non-U.S. college and did not experience the struggle which I just mentioned. One of the opportunities she took advantage of at her public was a fine Public Speaking program which was enormously helpful in the writing process. This can be an important aspect of publics, especially those publics which are generally weak in in-class writing requirements and standards. Just understand that this public was most definitely in a wealthy area. They also, however, lacked both good academic counseling and good college counselling, and the student needed intervention to develop a better college list, which is why she ended up out of the country. The counselor was definitely not just overwhelmed in terms of student load, but had a significant personality problem (the Juniors that year never got placed in their AP classes because the counselor had yet another of her personal crises), and given public school hiring/firing policies, was enabled to stay in her position and continue her neglect of duties. This kind of situation would never have been allowed to occur in my children’s private high school: that counselor would have been shown the door yesterday.</p>