The private school we're looking at is a Montessori-like school, and stresses the fact that each child is different. They have no problem accelerating material for one child while not for another -- that's actually part of their mission statement.
My son has gone to both public and private schools.
I say - go observe any classroom you think about putting your child in.
There are 3 basic issues I see -
1) Your daughter's 'readiness to learn' level is several grades higher than her agemates at the public school. If the school is willing, for example, to have her attend 3rd grade full time, then you don't have to worry about her not being pulled out for reading. If on the other hand, this particular school has a bunch of 1st graders reading at 3rd grade level, and she's full time in 1st grade - also fine.
2) pace - even if your daughter's readiness to learn level matches other kids in whatever public school classroom that put her in, one has to be prepared for this big leaps forward in readiness level, and willing to keep moving when things the mismatch gets to be too much.
3) self-directed learning - my son isn't consistiently a self-directed learner of academic subjects. Oh, occasionally he'll get interested in a topic and devour the wikipedia entries and any related tutorials he can find, but for the most part, he has well learned the lesson of traditional classrooms:
It's good to sit and be bored while your classmates catch up. You can't expect to be learning something all the time. You have to balance your need for material at your learning level with the whole classroom's need for learning material at the majority learning level. It isn't that every private school uses Montessori-style expectations that each child is a self-directed learner. It also isn't that every child will take advantage of this expectation. But I do sometimes wonder how different my son would be in this area if he had been in a Montessori-style classroom from the preschool years.
And it's possible that my son gained some important life experience by being 'part of a classroom' - who knows? Still, I wouldn't do it knowingly again.
Good luck! I feel confident that if you spend some seat time inside the public school classrooms of different grades, you will have what you need to know.
Love and More Love,
Grinty
