What Daytripper and Val said.
We aren't in CA, but similar stats around here re: Waldorf. There is also pressure to be vegan and orthorexic with respect to lifestyle and diet-- but this may be a local thing.
I also feel that home environment is up to parents, not schools-- but then again, if you support the Waldorf philosophy of child development, then you're likely to be on-board with the other elements that tend to be sticking points for me personally.
(vaccinations, allopathic medical care, homeopathy, technology use, and strange beliefs re: child development--Google "Steiner" and all will become clear. Er, well, maybe it will, and maybe there will be more questions about other things. Who knows.)
There is a belief among some Waldorf families we've known that NO child is truly "ready" to read until at least 7-8 years of age, for example. Some acquaintances truly believe that DD reading as a freshly minted 5yo is evidence of bad parenting on our part, and no amount of detail about how that transpired, or the trajectory in the months after it, is sufficient to convince them otherwise.
They also believe that our highly atopic DD would be free of asthma if we'd only left her un-vaccinated, and that energy healing of some sort is the "solution" to her disability. There also seems to be a prevailing belief that DD's food allergies are the result of a diet exclusively based upon GMO foods that are highly processed and loaded with HFCS (not true, in any event, but probably irrelevant given her genetics, in any case).
BTW, dietary supplements are apparently the solution for a friend's trisomy daughter, too, so it's a diffuse and widespread sort of belief in magical thinking operating under the guise of naturalism.
I know of two different children whose very significant learning challenges* went entirely unnoticed in that setting-- for three and five years, respectively.
*later remediated rather aggressively by the local school district, which basically believes child-find to be a mere suggestion and prefers the gentleman's agreement model of accommodations, for reference-- once allowed a young child who was legally blind to languish in a mainstreamed classroom with ZERO supports for many weeks... so, NOT a district which is quick to intervene, by any stretch of the imagination.
The Waldorf school locally saw nothing amiss in an 11yo who could not read at all and had no decoding skills whatsoever, nor in a 7yo who lacked some very basic numeracy. (As in, could count to 25, and that was the extent of this child's math skills-- could not even reliably add two single-digit numbers, could not sequence values, could not tell time or order values by size, had no concept at all of fractions.) The attitude was very much "child-led" and "all in good time," rather than "labeling" either child. As you all probably know by now, I'm not someone who is about labeling children, and I'm inclined on the wait-and-see side of things usually, but this was very extreme. I found the local Waldorf approach appalling in both of these instances. The parents were patted on the head and told that they lacked faith in the pedagogical approach when they asked questions.
While such environs may be highly supportive of asynchrony, they are stunningly tone-deaf regarding the possibility of asynchrony representing a problem that might require mitigation or supports for amelioration/remediation. They can be a little too supportive of asynchrony, if you see my point.
As a play-based environment, it's probably okay for bright children who are definitely NOT 2e-- at least for a few years. I can't think how it could ever have worked for our DD, though.
My personal preference is for Montessori, (at least in some incarnations).
