<p>My 8th grade son loves engineering type projects and is quite talented in science. Anyone out there have thoughts about what are good schools in Greater Boston with a science focus. We will probably end up in the public high school for a variety of reasons but feel we at least have to explore the options. He does well in school but homework is about an hour a night --if that – and I’m concerned that unless the bar is set high enough he’ll just do what he needs to do and no more for school work.</p>
<p>For privates, take a look at BU Academy, BB&N, Roxbury Latin</p>
<p>Greenwoodmom:</p>
<p>Welcome to CC! I sent you a PM.</p>
<p>CR&L is a lot different than the western suburb schools.</p>
<p>Come on over to the Boarding School forum. They do talk about day schools as well. Plenty of MA parents with knowledge of the local prep schools.</p>
<p>My D went to BB&N for middle school. Took her out (and she was part of the decision) to go the the local public HS. Best decision she and we ever made. She had a much more supportive and much more flexible environment. Most surprisingly to me, the teachers and administration were MUCH more responsive at the public school than at BB&N.</p>
<p>IMHO, prep schools are of greatest value during the elementary and middle school years, the years when american public ed believes one size fits all. In HS, with leveled courses, a kid can much more readily find what works best. And since good HS have multiple levels and multiple offerings in most subjects, they have a lot more flexibility than any prep school.</p>
<p>CRL definitely has some issues for the brighter students and it definitely seems possible to regress to the mean without a concerted effort not to. I personally don’t like block scheduling for things like Math or Physics, and I think kids should have to earn a place in AP or honors classes to keep the level high. Otherwise teachers are forced to teach to the bottom and the brighter kids are held back. Some kids do great though. </p>
<p>An alternative is to supplement the public school with some rigorous extras like EPGY, CTY, CTD or Harvard Extension. MIT also offers several programs like SPLASH, DELVE and HSSP.</p>
<p>Sorry to hijack the thread, CRD, but I think the block scheduling has been great for my son. He has gone from mostly C’s and D’s in middle school (performing way below where his testing says he should be) to mostly A’s and B’s in high school. Fewer course allows him to concentrate his efforts and longer class time gives him the extra time he needs to work. He is not at CRL, but a suburbun public school. My daughter went to a private school that switched to block scheduling midway through her time there and also felt it was a positive move.</p>
<p>Greenwoodmom, are you relocating to the Boston area? Newton North is very well known as an excellent though quite large public school system. I have several nieces/nephews that graduated from CLR. In discussion with my SIL, it seems that though she is a very strong advocate of public schools that she would likely not send her kids to CLR at this point in time. My take on it is that she feels the school has gotten too “rough” with some very tough kids attending.</p>
<p>I’m curious; what is CRL (or CLR)?</p>
<p>I was going to suggest the MIT programs (SPLASH and HSSP), but I see CRD beat me to it. SPLASH is held on a weekend in November every year, and my 9th-grade son has gone the past two years (and will probably go again this fall). It’s excellent. He wanted to do HSSP badly, since they are 10- or 12-week courses rather than 2-hour minicourses, but I could not manage to travel to Boston every weekend for 3 months to make it possible.</p>
<p>Oh, and I also second the recommendations for EPGY and CTY. My son has gone to CTY’s summer program for the past two summers, and he has taken EPGY’s math courses off an on since 1st grade.</p>
<p>CRL is actually CRLS (Cambridge Rindge and Latin School) formed from the fusion of the old Cambridge Latin School and the Rindge School for Vocational Training or some such.
CRLS is an urban school with many of the characteristics of urban schools. So it cannot be compared with suburban schools such as Brookline, Lexington, Newton North or Newton South and other (affluent) suburban districts with great schools.</p>
<p>newmassdad:</p>
<p>I respectfully disagree with you on prep school versus public school comparison. A lot thing depends on the student motivation and opportunities available at school. I realize that prep school is not for everyone.</p>
<p>Had my kid stayed home, she would have been attending a top high School in our state. However, her science and math curriculum would have been exhausted by 10th grade. Yes, there was a possibility to start college early as her mentor worked with her but she would have not explored her other passions besides music and volunteer activities. However at prep school gave her full scholarship (need based) they allowed her to flourish beyond math/science. As resources became available in other fields, she flourished from a of math/science geek going to top summer program to a political/history/economics junky. This transformation happened in four years. Her prep school spends lot of money and made unbelievable resources for her to pursue her science research. At home, she was heading to be a biochemistry or medicine career. They spend more money her to puruse her history research so she can explore. They brought best teachers from outside to tecah her. They paid money to travel, take provate lessons from best music techaers. The opportunities were tremendous.</p>
<p>Yet meeting politically influential people who gave talks and who shared their dreams with her that why they choose these career, influenced her, and allowed her to blossom her and think outside the box. </p>
<p>She can go back to her science career but at least it did allow her to explore the world and make a different choice. I think prep school has a value along with high school that can provide opportunities to challenge once mind. I am not saying that public school does not provide these opportunities, but kids with limited resources a prep school is a heaven that gives them boundless opportunities. </p>
<p>Any school is what a student make of it and uses it resources for self improvement while helping others. That is also reason kids flock to better colleges and wants to attend the best college so they can puruse their dreams. This is the reason why all of us come to CC.</p>
<p>one more thing without scholarship I would have kept her at home as we could not have been able to afford. It would have been a okay choice too. But with scholarship, prep school was a better choice as she applied on her own and got admissions to a prep school.</p>
<p>Newparent,</p>
<p>Glad to hear that those prep schools DO serve a positive role for some students!</p>
<p>Of course these comparisons are institutionally dependent, dependent on both the prep school and the local public school alternative. We were lucky to have one of the country’s better public schools in our back yard. I’m sure not everyone is so fortunate. </p>
<p>My bigger point is to make a decision carefully. Prep schools are not an unqualifiedly superior option in every case. Indeed, for many students they have real limitations. Don’t take my word for it, though. The WSJ had a series of articles a few years back debunking the myth of prep school college admissions success, just for one example.</p>
<p>Thanks All,</p>
<p>One word for the New York based - Columbia has a similar program to Splash called Columbia Science Honors on a weekend day- its exam based though(at least it was in the middle ages when I went to it)- it seems to be still around - but I was saddened to see a reference on College Confidential by a student that it was “a boring resume builder”. </p>
<p>Also what are EPGY, CTY, CTD.</p>
<p>GreenwoodMom,</p>
<p>EPGY is a well-established Stanford program that offers distance-learning courses in math, physics, computer science, writing, and music theory (epgy.stanford.edu). CTY is a Johns Hopkins program that offers 3-week residential summer programs on college campuses for highly capable 12-16 year-olds. I recommend both programs highly. Look for a number of CC threads on CTY. Actually, I found CC when I was searching for information on CTY. CTY also offers distance-learning courses. They offer at least some of the EPGY courses, and many others as well. My son hasn’t used them yet, but he is thinking of doing their Chinese course in the spring.</p>
<p>Not sure what CTD is .</p>
<p>I will have to look for the comment on the Columbia program. I am aware of it, but it is very different from SPLASH. SPLASH takes anyone who registers; the Columbia Saturday program is highly selective.</p>
<p>GreenwoodMom, can you tell me where you saw the comment about the Columbia program? I wasn’t able to find it.</p>
<p>EPGY courses are solid. My own D completed EPGY algebra over a summer in order to start at a higher math level when she started in our local public HS. She must have mastered the basics well as she got an A in her math courses that following year.</p>
<p>I trot out the example every so often of how a ninth grader, in a well known Boston area private school, told me that when asked to label states on a blank US map, a good percentage of kids could not find and label Massachusetts.</p>
<p>I wish I were kidding.</p>
<p>That said, we have done both public and private, and I see merits to both, depending upon the child.</p>
<p>BB&N … Is that the Boston Barnes and Noble?**</p>
<p>So, from a number of posts in this thread, one could conclude that public schools in Boston are better than the “college prep” schools. Are the local public schools really that good, or are the prep schools sleeping on past laurels? </p>
<p>Oh yes, outof curiosity, does anyone happen to have the graduation rates for the Boston Public School system. Aren’t they the highest in the country?</p>
<p>** I guess we won’t see NewMassDad lending his name to the new building.
</p>