Here's my somewhat jaded advice based on bitter experience with my kids and with education in general.
Public schools are bound by NCLB. Low test scores can mean they lose their funding or their charters. This means that they're legally mandated to look out for low-performing students first.
They can say that they have a lot of 8th graders doing 9th and 10th grade math, but what does this really mean when you probe into the curriculum?
I found a Nature Academy school in California. If this is the one you're looking at, my advice is that you dig deep into their curriculum. For example, they seem to claim that a lot of their 8th graders are doing geometry. Do they use
Holt California Geometry? If not, do they use another California textbook? My son's school uses the Holt book. It's a joke as far as real geometry is concerned. Doing proofs means filling in the blanks in a prefabricated proof. The textbook has minimal text, yet features distractions on
every page. The problems are simplistic. Etc.
Make sure you look at the textbooks before making any decisions.
IMO (and the Holt textbook and others like it are evidence supporting my O), our schools have watered down math and science classes in the name of "accessibility." This is especially bad in public schools, though some public schools teach good courses and some private schools don't. Either way, the kids get As in geometry, do fine on state tests, and then get to college and wonder why engineering is so hard.
Nature Academy's website says they do a lot of writing. Does the English teacher correct all this writing? Or do the kids just write stuff for its own sake, like at my son's school? It's great that some of their students have been published, but what percentage get published? Or was it just a couple kids a few years back and they're still talking about them in their PR copy?
What does the school mean by "rigorous?" Does it mean "lots of homework," or "we use textbooks with A-, B-, and C-level problems, where the A set gives you straightforward practice, B makes you think a bit, and the C ones are pretty tough?"
Remember also that your definition of a "good school" is very different than that of most other people. A school that's fantastically wonderful for students with IQs in the 110-125 range is very different from a school that's wonderful for students with IQs north of 140.
