<p>One of the problems in asking for another interviewer is that you don’t know what you’ll get. Forewarned is forearmed - you can create a strategy to deal with this particular biased interviewer, to charm him or for your son to address the politics in your town directly (not “I’m afraid you won’t give me a fair shake”, but “I’ve noticed in our town that there seems to be this tension, and I’ve wondered about it. Do you know how it started, and how we as a community might be able to defuse it?” That lets the interviewer do a lot of the talking, and will make your son seem ever so intelligent). </p>
<p>But if you ask for another interviewer - how do you know you won’t get a mother whose child didn’t get into your son’s school? Or whose child had a lousy experience at your son’s school? Or who doesn’t work for the school system but is even more biased towards public education? You can’t Google that information and could be blindsided.</p>
<p>“But my son and I thought his chances were over at that point.”</p>
<p>If that’s what you thought – and you haven’t told us anything that suggests the interviewer showed any hostility at all – then you should have called Harvard and requested a second interview.</p>
<p>AnonyMom and hmom5, thanks for excellent suggestions about the possible conflict of interest for all applicants from S’s high school. I will bring the matter up with S’s school and leave it to the high school’s discretion whether to pursue it with the college. One of S’s classmates pulled an interviewer who was also an alum of this high school, obviously a much more comfortable situation for the student.</p>
<p>Danas, I’m delighted to have you as an ally. Thank you. “Unexamined beliefs” is what I was trying to get some of the responders to consider and that succinct phrase captures it much better. Thanks especially for the story about your S’s experience. I hope Hanna was not your S’s interviewer, but possibly she knows the interviewer’s identity and that accounts for her somewhat defensive response to your story. I have the impression you are both in the Chicago area.</p>
<p>Rereading all the thread responses today I am still stunned by the nasty tone and character aspersions of some of the (apparently very regular) posters in this forum. I am sorry if anyone felt insulted by anything I posted because I really am grateful for all who took the time to offer advice in this thread and the few others where I asked for advice. But calling a newcomer to a parent forum arrogant, paranoid, self-serving, a helicopter parent, etc. does tend to discourage further posting. Perhaps that was the intent.</p>
<p>Why did you ask for advice on this forum? You obviously are set on your opinion, and are not interested to listen to anyone who disagrees with you… What was the purpose of your original post then?</p>
I’m sorry but I’m having trouble understanding how this is going to work logically with the college. The HS is going to go to the college and say we’re worried your aluni interviewers are biased because they went to / work at a private HS? OK, given this cynical view of the world isn’t suggesting the college provide an interviwer from the HS asking for an interview implicitly asking for a biased interviewer in favor of the public school student. I can’t imagine a positive outcome for anyone to suggest a college’s interviewers are biased and we (some outside group) know better than you (the college) who should interview for your school. How do you think you would respond if you worked at the college? Me personally, I can’t imagine saying thanks for the suggestion (well I might say it but not mean it) … I can imagine thinking these folks have no idea what an inappropriate question this is … and I can only imagine it hurting the kids applying.</p>
<p>“Unexamined beliefs” is precisely what you and danas seem to have, wisedad. My beliefs here are based on a lot of experience and contact with people in the public education system, in private schools, and in Catholic schools, in the two cities where I have lived longest. And lest you think that I am a public-school enthusiast, I am not. My total experience of public education as a student consisted of one public university course I took as a private-school junior. Otherwise it was private school from pre-school through my law degree. My children have spent 26 kid-years in private schools, 6 in a public school.</p>
<p>I’ll grant that maybe things are different someplace else. I note that mammall believes they could be as you describe where she lives (and I note that, from my standpoint, I often scratch my head wondering what mammall could be talking about). So maybe my experience doesn’t apply. But you have been completely unconvincing in explaining why that might be so.</p>
<p>I live in a community where the public, independent and religious schools all co-exist quite harmoniously. It’s hard for me to imagine how overt hostility between public and non-public schools could be manifested, so I’m interested in hearing more from OP and Mammall on this subject. (I hope this doesn’t take the thread too far off-topic, but it seems we’ve exhausted the subject of OP’s original question.)</p>
<p>I’ve read of hostility between homeschoolers and their school district or teachers unions and it can get pretty bad but our experience with our district has always been fine. Public Schools and teachers groups have reason to be even more hostile to homeschoolers as private schools only take away educated parents and state aid dollars. Some public school officials and teachers union take the view that homeschoolers are basically saying that you do not need teachers for a child to learn which can come across as insulting.</p>
<p>That said, your attitude in dealing with people on the other side of an issue can really make the difference in how you’re treated. My approach is to give the other person the benefit of the doubt unless there’s hard evidence to the contrary. If I were in a similar position, I’d just tell my son to go, and be himself. He can defend his beliefs and actions without my help if it comes to that.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why so many don’t understand that there are certainly places where hostilities between schools exist. In those places it would make sense to think the principals could well have axes to grind. With NCLB, state testing and districts moving towards merit pay, it is easy to imagine a public high school principal having gut level resentment towards the families in town that she perceives to be dissing her school by choosing the local parochial or private. This may not at all be the case but it’s not at all far fetched. She should recuse herself if there is an acknowledged tension between the different schools.</p>
<p>BC, privates often do take away many of the top students meaning lower school performance which is often what’s at the center of the hostility along with funding.</p>
<p>But its assumption as being true for the individual, without knowing him, is such a disparaging of his integrity. Presumably, a person of integrity, if he/she resented private school students, would not put him/herself into the position of judging them. It would be pretty beyond the pale to do so. To assume that of someone else is really presumptious. That remains my problem with this scenario.</p>
<p>“Our intent” was not to intimidate or harass a new poster on this forum. Our intent was to answer your question. We were trying to explain to you what seems blazingly obvious to most people - that assuming someone is biased before you meet them is wrong, and that implying to the college that they are not properly screening their interviewers before you meet one is NOT going to give that college a good impression of your son and his family.</p>
<p>My area does have some hostility between public and private schools. At the same time, the former principal of our public hs attended 12 years of private school. You just CANNOT assume bias on someone’s part based on their employer or the political climate of their area. Unless you have met this person, or read something they have said that demonstrated bias, you are assuming facts not in evidence.</p>
<p>And to the OP, a little friendly advice. The next time you join a forum and ask a question, don’t belittle the responders who are trying to help you by telling them they failed your Rorshach test and revealed their biases. Don’t further compound your error that by telling them that they are trying to “discourage” you from further posting. If you think you already know the answer, why bother to post the question? So you could hear people confirm what you think you already know? If you aren’t ready to hear an answer you don’t like, don’t bother to ask.</p>
<p>“I can’t imagine a positive outcome for anyone to suggest a college’s interviewers are biased and we (some outside group) know better than you (the college) who should interview for your school.”</p>
<p>Yes – this situation is quite different from one where the interview took place and the student/parents feel that the interviewer’s behavior was unprofessional or inappropriate.</p>
<p>danas, I don’t understand the course of the interview you describe.</p>
<p>First you say it started out fine, then you describe a negative opinion of the Chicago public schools prevalent in your homeschooling group, then you say the interview was for all intents and purposes over.</p>
<p>You say you were at a funeral, not at the interview. Did your son actively insult the interviewing by telling him that “the Chicago Public Schools would have destroyed [me] if given half a chance”? This is puzzling.</p>
<p>BTW, my S had a great alumni interview at the school in question, and his stats were in line. The interviewer even pulled out an instrument and asked him to play an extremely demanding piece on the spot, which he did. When I stopped by to pick him up, the interviewer said to me that I had “done a great job.” </p>
<p>In my district, it is typically the mediocre student who is taken out of the public high school and sent to private or parochial school, usually because the parents fear the student will be overlooked, or the student needs more structure and more attention to succeed. I know a number of families where the brilliant, motivated student stays in public school, and the less successful student is sent to private.</p>
<p>One thing to keep in mind is that at least at the college I attended and the one DH did, the school has no idea who is doing the interviewing. A volunteer at the local level takes responsibility for recruiting interviewers and matching them with applicants. I think the schools assume their highly intelligent alum will not elect to interview if they could be perceived as biased in any way. So for me the real point here is that when there are interviewers that make a segment of the applicants uncomfortable, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to flag the college’s alumni office. Honestly, a HS principal should not be interviewing and will of course intimidate candidates from rival schools.</p>
<p>Schools have major rivalries! There are a slew of potential situations in any area. There are private and parochial schools for the highly gifted and those for the kids with severe disabilities. Big cities have a full range, small towns have what they have. There is a town in Westchester County where kids are sent to top privates sending 25% to ivies to get away from the extreme competition at the public school! Then there are many places were folks head to privates looking for more than their local schools offer.</p>
<p>The issue is that school cultures develop in each place and your school choice, like it or not, causes people to put you in a box. It’s no different than the fact that we have immediate stereotypes of who a person is when we hear he went to Harvard or Brigham Young or Chicago or Reed or Caltech. </p>
<p>We would all like a blank slate with no preconceived notions of who we are going into an interview.</p>
<p>“Not in my state. Funding is not done on a per-student basis.”</p>
<p>I could have said that a few years ago until we went to state funding.</p>
<p>It has been a very long-term project to get funding done at the state level to equalize funding burdens in many, many states. Lots of lawsuits, etc.</p>
<p>In my states, private schools are private and are not required to participate in state assessments.</p>
<p>In the city where I work, many parents have switched to private schools or moved to other districts due to safety issues. The demographics of the city changed quickly a few years ago. School crime statistics jumped over a very short period of time. A change in educational methodology (block-scheduling) contributed to parental dissatisfaction.</p>
<p>To the OP- sorry, but I am at least one data point that disproves your social science experiment. My kids both attended private schools from nursery through college; I pay my taxes and vote for every single budget increase for the public school system because I believe in citizenship, but I believe that the folks who run our local public school system are well intended but suffer from Stockholm syndrome at being held hostage by special interest groups- teacher’s unions, advocacy groups for the disabled, new immigrants, bi lingual ed, etc.</p>
<p>I am hardly an apologist for the public school system- either here, or anywhere else I’ve ever lived.</p>
<p>I still believe that your original post was either intentionally provocotive or just plain wrong at its core. So assuming that you posted to actually elicit information, you’ve had several people advise you that your assumptions were wrong- obnoxious, judgemental, incorrect, paranoid, etc. You have chosen to believe that we disagree with you out of our own PC beliefs about public schools and the people who work there.</p>
<p>I hope this is an isolated incident. Your son will find a lot of people in his life who will make assumptions about him… founded or otherwise, based on where he grew up, the zip code he lives in, the beer he drinks, the schools he’s attended, or the faith he practices or rejects. It’s up to him to be the best advocate for himself that he can be, and reinforcing your own paranoia about this particular interviewer appears to be a very poor way to set him along the path of adulthood and independence.</p>
<p>The principals two major HS in my region send their own kids to yeshiva high schools-- single sex, dress code, dual instruction in religious texts and secular subjects. Both appear to do a fine job of running large and diverse public HS, and are well liked and admired by both the educational establishment and the parent body. People here would be shocked to learn that you don’t believe that a professional can make choices for their own children while neither imposing those choices, or judging others for making different choices.</p>
<p>Hmmm. I’m a public school teacher. Someone googling me might find that out. Would they also know that I homeschooled (leaning heavily in the unschooling direction) for 10 years? Funny that an unschooler might dump me as an interviewer, even though I have a much better appreciation and understanding of unschooling and learner-led education than MOST other folks.</p>
<p>I agree that the OP is not helping his kid by validating prejudice.</p>
<p>Wisedad, I think you are missing the point. The advice is generally that asking for a different interviewer is much more likely to raise a negative red flag on your child’s application, than any negative feelings the interviewer may have. You are assuming this person can’t be objective because there is some negative feelings about those that choose private school. In the case of a religious high school, that would seem to be less of an issue than a prep school selected solely for educational reasons. The problem is by asking for a different interviewer, the question will be why. Have him go to the interview and do a great job. It may even make his application stronger.</p>