@ChoatieMom About your post #171. Choate like any private school chooses a homogeneous student body with kids coming from driven, involved parents. You can’t compare that to a kid coming from a public school which requires that subjects be taught to everyone, of all abilities coming from involved/not involved parents, poor families, families where English is not the first language. My kids have gone to private school their entire lives, with the exception of my son who moved to our local public last year. The difference isn’t so much the curriculum or the teaching but the fact that there is so much more going on in the school. Fights, drugs, hunger (some of his friends don’t have enough to eat), many more LD’s (which private schools are notoriously bad at dealing with.) So yes, Choate may teach “how to think” and “how to discern” and “how to write” but it’s easy for them to do so. The challenge for the public schools is to deliver a top notch education to all kids which I contend is a much bigger nut.