<p>That was our story, too. We had moved to an “excellent” school district only to find that “excellent” was realtor-speak for not in the LAUSD. We pulled our kids out and sent them to private schools at great economic cost (plus the two hours a day on the road), but have never regretted giving them a great education. The motivation wasn’t Ivy, it was about giving really smart kids the opportunity to be in the most stimulating educational experience with great teachers and other smart kids.</p>
<p>Fortunately, we never had to consider moving. D1 attended pvt girls sch (w/ VERY generous finaid, but IQ test req for admission), D2 and D3 didn’t test into D1’s school, but were admitted to highly-regarded public sch (IQ test req for admiss here too). D2 and D3 then attended lesser pvt sch.</p>
<p>The level of teaching at gifted public and lesser pvt was fairly comparable - - slightly better teachers at pvt sch, but signif enhanced by small class size and more responsive faculty/admin. Top day sch, however, was in a totally diff league, as is its college plcmt record. </p>
<p>Still as wonderful as D1’s school was, I can’t see up-rooting the family, especially since it wasn’t an option (and wouldn’t have been a good match) for the other two girls.</p>
<p>“I am not trying to put down the private schools, just saying that they are really no guarantee of college “preparation”.”</p>
<p>Ain’t that the truth. My expensive private school had its merits, but producing a group of brilliant scholars was not among them.</p>
<p>(Of course, if you asked them, the school would brag that this is irrelevant, because they are educating the “whole child,” but that’s another thread.)</p>
<p>For crying out loud, why not just save the private school tuition and just send your kids to Boston Latin, if they can get in? Obviously the family isn’t THAT wealthy if they downgraded to a 2 BR apartment. I can see establishing residency in a state with a great flagship U, but Ivy admissions are a crapshoot even for the most qualified applicants.</p>
<p>I have known a bunch of Germantown Friends students through my daughter (who went to a different school) and the school does an amazing job with all different types of kids. If I were currently going through the private school selection process it would be at the top of my list. </p>
<p>Would I move my family across the country for my child to attend GFS? - No. </p>
<p>Would I make an effort to move regionally if I currently lived in a below average school district to be in a better one? - Yes.</p>
<p>I don’t get the WSJ but my local coffee bar always has one for their patrons to read. I will check it out later.</p>
Yes, but not an academic magnet. It was an arts magnet and she had to audition to get into it. If she had not gotten in she would have attended the public high school nearest to our home, where her brother attended. That local school is “ranked” lower academically (in terms of state API scores) but I think it was much better academically than the arts high school. My son had some awesome math & science teachers. </p>
<p>Obviously the arts school had amazing arts offerings, but it is extremely weak on math & sciences and full of kids and teachers willing to give short shrift to the academics in favor of the arts. That’s a mixed blessing, especially for some of the kids with exceptional artistic talent, who are aiming for professional careers, conservatories, or art colleges – but if your point is that somehow her school helped with college prep… you’re off base. So it doesn’t really make much of a difference – one way or another my kids would have been in public school; they would have ended up taking AP’s & honors courses.</p>
I think that any school system that offers choice, just by offering a CHOICE, helps with college prep. Kids who have magnet opportunities in their publics, whether that is arts, academics, or vocational, know from an early age that what they do matters, what their goals are matter, what they choose to focus on matters, how much effort they choose to put out matters. Even below-average kids in an arts h.s. are prepared to be goal-oriented. </p>
<p>If you aren’t lucky enough to have a public system that gives peer groups of motivated kids special opportunities to challenge themselves, the privates & parochials are a lifesaver. NJ has over 600 school districts. In my county, you go to school where you live. Zero choice, unless your child has the misfortune of a serious learning disability. So while we are dwarfed by CA, you can imagine the wide range in quality of schools here in the garden state. And there is often surprisingly little correlation between district wealth & school quality.</p>
<p>Your son had excellent math & science teachers and that’s wonderful. My town public is extremely weak in that area. Also in English. So that doesn’t leave a a heck of a lot for my kids.</p>
<p>We have no magnets, except in the inner cities. I wish we did, since it is possibly that one of those would have/would be suitable for one of my kids.</p>
<p>SS, I have heard all about the vagaries of public education in NJ. I can’t quite wrap my understanding around it. Your individual towns don’t support only your own individual school systems?</p>
<p>Nobody can quite grasp it, Allmusic. Including the politicians & the judges who have legislated from the bench with unfunded mandates for Abbott districts (poor performing districts.) With over 600 districts, variety is to be expected. But it is quite out of control here. The poorly performing districts are given state & county $$$. So the amount of local funding (property tax) for my town’s schools is about 90%, while Newark will fund virtually none of their school system locally. The per pupil cost for Newark students is twice what my town spends. Wealthy towns have their spending capped by the courts, so they can’t make the improvements that locals are willing to pay for. My middle class town, for example, has had drastic tax increases, yet we have schools from the early 1900s desperately in need of repairs. I’m talking about bricks falling off the building facades, an eight ton ceiling collapse in a classroom, serious stuff. In Newark, gorgeous new facilities are being built with olympic sized swimming pools, with state-of-the art everything. All paid for by the suburban taxpayer who, meanwhile, feels compelled to put his kids in privates & parochials because of declining quality and/or safety concerns. It’s a very complicated situation, fraught with tension, charges of racism, classism, and of course much corruption.</p>
<p>I should add that we all know that politics is the art of knowing how to rob Peter to pay Paul. Our town was recently the beneficiary of state funds for some kind of “Beautify the Downtown” project. The h.s., middle school, town hall, library, etc. are all grouped around the football field in the center of town. Pretty, Georgian style buildings. Very picturesque (when a brick isn’t falling off the facade, at least.) One of our crafty state Assemblyman secured funding to have the field redone with turf, new drainage, some paving & stair repair, to the tune of bout $800,000. Now, it was not $$ that could be used for school improvements. Simply “beautification.” But can you imagine the outrage from townsfolk when the bulldozers were prepping the field during the same week when an eight ton ceiling had fallen in a classroom? On the surface, it appeared that a fancy football field was a priority over and above safety. (And we do have a rabidly loyal football booster club for our pathetically bad team.) Over 2000 people showed up for that BOE meeting, as the board members scrambled to explain, cajole, placate an angry mob.</p>
<p>UGHhhhhhh, SS. These Abbott districts really make no sense.</p>
<p>Why then, does my friend in South Jersey complain about all the wealthy districts up in North Jersey, where she says the kids do so much better on SATs, in college admissions, etc.</p>
<p>If the funding and distribution is controlled, why still the disparity between richers and more middle class districts?</p>
<p>I went to school in an Abbot district in NJ and the only “new” thing that we got during my entire 12 years was a trailer for extra classrooms in the middle of the high school parking lot. Although, they did buy an office building and convert it into a middle school (we didn’t actually have one before that), but they apparently ran out of money part way through and it was left without a gym for a couple of years. Don’t know what they did for PE classes in the winter. So don’t go around assuming that the money’s used to build nice new marble entranceway fountains and such like so many of the other NJ schools seem to have. I kind of think my district took the “pay the teachers more in hopes of attracting the good ones” route, because once we were treated to a 20 minute rant by one of my teachers about how his salary was only 60k per year and how that was barely middle-class and how he just had to get a job in the summer just to afford to pay his (resort town beach house) mortgage! </p>
<p>My parents considered moving a few times, but never actually did and never out of the immediate area…they had obligations to look after stubborn grandparents. School quality never factored into those decisions - just wasn’t something that occurred to them to ever think about. I tried to get them to send me to the Catholic high school in the next town over once, for social reasons, but it was determined that since it had far less variety of classes and would have forced them to come up with a couple thousand per year from somewhere, it wasn’t worth it. I would think that if you have parents that would even consider moving out of the area because of school quality, that alone is worth more towards elite school admissions than whether you can get a ‘spectacular’ education instead of merely a ‘great’ one during high school.</p>
An excellent point. It would show that the parents are astute enough to recognize what constitutes a good education, that they care, and that they are trying to arrange a better situation. Often the move won’t work out, but they are then more likely to steer their kids onto the best possible path available in their district.</p>
<p>Allmusic, I think much of the answer is in Blah’s statement. It’s where the kids come from, not how much is spent per child. Educated & wealthy parents can make up for weaknesses in their public schools. As can educated, middle-class parents like H & me. Even if every school in the country was shut down tomorrow, most posters on CC could put together a solid curriculum for their kids just by gathering up books & materials from around their house.</p>
<p>While this is slightly off the main topic, and 26 does not equal 33, and Ivy+M+S > Ivy…
While I suspect your point may be correct in some cases, the private school in CA where my kids attended has sent 26% of the past two graduating classes to “Ivys+MIT+Stanford”. And I’m willing to bet that this included zero legacies or development admits, and at most a trivial number of athletes (tennis maybe?): roughly 85% of the student body is Asian or Indian and the children of first-generation immigrants, without academic ties to US universities. There is an annual assembly for parents of juniors and seniors, to teach them what the process is for their children to apply to colleges in the US, and how much it differs from what they’re used to seeing in their countries of origin. I’m not claiming this is the norm, just that it can happen at some private schools.</p>
<p>["There is an annual assembly for parents of juniors and seniors, to teach them what the process is for their children to apply to colleges in the US, and how much it differs from what they’re used to seeing in their countries of origin.]</p>
<p>This should be mandatory at all schools, public & private. It would save so much grief on the part of parents, students.</p>
<p>Good God Almighty, SS. What you’ve described is an absolute nightmare!</p>
<p>I’d go so far as to say that NJ policies seem to represent secondary-school hell. </p>
<p>The bitter irony, IMHO anyway, is that many if not all of these policies actually came about through good intentions. But that road was paved long ago, huh. :(</p>
You are right that it’s good to have some choice, but I didn’t mention that my son was only one of 3 kids from his 8th grade class that chose his high school, because its academic reputation was so poor. Most of the kids chose the more traditional, larger public high down the road - and by the time my daughter came through 8th grade, it seemed that most of the families were opting for private schools. About the only people who knew about the great math & science teachers at my son’s school were the students in those classes - and their parents. </p>
<p>My son ended up there because we looked beyond “reputation” and were considering fit and educational philosophy. A good deal of the poor “reputation” of my son’s school was simply demographics – the school was much more diverse racially, with many more low income families. They don’t test well; hence the overall numbers get brought down. </p>
<p>We didn’t have any high-end academic magnets (like Lowell) in our district – but if we had, I never would have wanted to send either of my kids there. I just wouldn’t have wanted them in a high-pressure, highly academic competitive environment in high school. I’m more of a believer in the value of a nurturing environment and a developmental education philosophy – so whatever choices I might have made, they would not have been based on the school’s test scores or the percentage of graduates going on to Ivies. </p>
<p>That’s just my own choice, of course – but I felt I should clarify that, because I’m not so sure that another parent would find our “choices” as appealing.</p>