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Well, aeh, I wish I knew which school had your dream team teaching staff. DD's school is a private academic but historically great benefits and pays well. And because it is an HG school, teachers gravitate to it. And there are good and there are bad. And they invest in staff development. They have strong working relationship (offices in the same building) with the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education. So all the things available to optimize teaching staff. Some can only be optimized so much. It would be wonderful if you staff a whole school with your requirements, but alas, mostly you get a mixed bag.

Covid hybrid has really brought more differences. Some are absolutely amazing, organized with the online and in class synchronous challenges and some not so much. But because of the type of students in the school, they are supplementing with online Khan courses etc, on their own initiative.

I found peer group to be the big advantage in DD's school and the curriculum. A friend, whose daughter got in Stanford two years ago, told me that the admission officer came up to them at the welcome party and said that they like kids from the school because they know they are prepared for what they will find at Stanford. And the school admits about 3 each year from a class of 115.

In a perfect school, we would have a perfect staff. Challenging curriculum and all the extracurriculars to feed interests. This year, extracurriculars were trimmed almost to non-existence. And now societal pressures to even the playing field. In so many ways, the private school experience was not what people were expecting this past year.

Wren--that, of course, would be the challenge. It can work in theory, but rarely does it work perfectly, even with very good institutional support. I'm going to take the rest of my response over to the other thread, so as not to derail this one too much more...

Exceptionally well put.



These two points are precisely why many parents in Australia choose private school. Our university system works differently here, so media complaints about private schools are somewhat more directed more to "wealthy parents buying a place in the old boys network" than "gaming university entrance". Though buying university entrance does come up too, possibly more so in states with little to no select/exam entry schools. In some states the top performing schools academically are always selective schools. In states with few or no select entry schools the top 10 is often entirely private. And our university entrance is 100% final year academic outcomes (medicine has a specialist exam you do during yr12, and an interview if your results from yr12 & med-exam are high enough, some courses are audition/portfolio based like Visual Art or Music degrees).

You can get exceptional pastoral care at some public schools and appalling treatment at some private schools, but on balance, these quotes above tend to hold true.

We have just moved one child from a select entry school who very very clearly wanted to keep them (and we very much wanted them to stay in principle), but the child was not ok. They have moved, with a scholarship, to a very high end private And these two quotes summarize more concisely and with less personal information pretty much everything that needs to be said. With the caveat that the pastoral care at the public school in question was excellent and MANY children were, and could/would, thrive there, but it takes a certain personality and our child did not have that type. There was a flavour to the competitiveness that was not helpful for them.

Agreed. Union rules in my province prevent elementary public school teachers from offering extra-curricular activities to students after-hours. Can you imagine that?

The average wait time for psychoeducational assessment, depending on indication and specific locale, is between 15 and 24 months. I was speaking with a consulting pediatrician recently, who lamented that it is not uncommon for children to age out of eligibility for early assessment for several presenting issues. Her practice often triages cases that have been neglected through other standard channels.

To mithawk's point about explicit vs implicit contracts, I'd say there's also the challenge of explicit vs implicit payment under different school models. Despite the fact that average premia for housing in high-performing school neighbourhoods and private school tuition are roughly comparable (from my rough numbers upthread), the latter nets FAR more bargaining power at the school level simply because the payor is more easily discernible (or concentrated in its advocacy), and teachers are attuned to the fact that they have a responsibility to use the resources at their disposal effectively.

The funding is virtually the same, but the institutional attitude is light years apart.

This point regarding the difference in perception between high-performing public and privates is closely related to the question of choice that was raised much further upthread. (And, if one wanted to bring in public policy, also relates to the thorny -- and far more nuanced than discourse usually suggests -- topic of tax-payer-funded school choice in its various forms.) Gross generalizations: Private schools know families are customers, and feel some incentive to respond to market pressure. Public schools feel families are clients (in the therapeutic sense), and by and large know they will receive reimbursement whether or not their services are utilized (although this is not 100%; enrollment does still affect funding to some extent).

I'm also just a little horrified if the wait time aquinas reported for psychoeducational assessment is in the public schools. Federal law in the USA puts an upper limit of 60 school days on the process, from request to completion (shorter in some states). Even clinic/hospital-based evaluations typically run closer to the 6-9 month range in my region. And if it's the 0-3 population, they'll usually be seen much more quickly. Perhaps the wait time is just shorter here than in some other places. Although I will say that the typical hangup on clinic-based evals here is insurance problems. A familiar story is, child on waiting list for hospital eval, parent's job changes insurance. Child makes it to front of line, only to discover that new insurance is not accepted/doesn't authorize. Family has to start the whole process over at a new provider.

You are rightly horrified and would be justified being quite horrified. And yes, that includes public schools. Here's a news article covering a child who shamefully was delayed 2.5 YEARS for disability based testing for dyslexia. And what is the incremental cost of universal training in an OG reading system for elementary teachers? *crickets*

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hami...t-for-learning-disability-test-1.2918462

Here's another; a blog post from the former chief psychologist of a large school board, which reports 62 students delayed 3 or more years for psychoeducational evaluation. Here's the kicker: this gentleman has decided to remove himself from the public system to better service private clients, despite complaining about a shortage of school psychologists!! Perhaps he moved to private practice because he can process his case load faster out of the board, and is trying to alleviate demand pressure for lower-income families.

http://www.vbpsychology.com/waiting-lists-for-psychoeducational-assessments-in-ontario/

On speculation, I even placed DS on the waitlist for a private psychologist (school psychologist who moonlights by providing fee-for-service assessments...I'll leave the sticky ethics of that for another day). The initial wait time for a screening appointment was 9 months, which ballooned, as this psych was one of the handful whose results were accepted by the school board for giftedness. It's madness.

I could go into a long screed as to why this is the case from a supply management perspective. Feel free to PM me if you'd like to stare at the roadkill. Suffice it to say, this is what happens under unionized education. But speaking purely to psychoeducational evaluation and placement in school - avoiding this is another key value driver of private schools.

Back in kindergarten, when we first attempted to have DS placed appropriately in a public school, the process for identification and evaluation of giftedness, plus the wait time to run through the tiered system of experience-harm-before-admission to congregated gifted would have been at least three years. That was assuming everything went "to schedule" and DS suffered enough clinically detectable damage that he would merit gifted placement, what was left of him. I was unwilling to do that and would have sold my organs to ensure DS wasn't subjected to psychological damage. That was a large part of the reason why we homeschooled initially. And dare I say it, at that time, we were "just" looking at giftedness, no dual exceptionality.

If you'd really like to scrape your jaw off the floor, the IEP placement forms for our provincial education system include multiple spaces for referring indications (e.g. deafness + giftedness). Several school boards only accept intake in their forms - purely a paper pushing issue - for ONE, and require strenuous advocacy on the part of the referring principal for the full list to be included. I remember the advocacy group I was involved in saw a case of a deaf + PG boy whose PG was unacknowledged, despite tooth-and-nail fighting because he was only documented as being deaf.

Another family had four children with exceptionalities, a few with 2e, and their children were placed in THREE different schools at the extreme south, east, and west ends of the city. The parents complained to the district superintendent of special education, because their jobs were at risk due to the commute time. Resistance.

Sadly, the consulting pediatrician I spoke with was flagging even medical evaluations - like ASD early intervention, which happen under the public health system - as landing outside the standard timeframe for early evaluation. Can you imagine?! I will caveat that that isn't an average for ASD, but it's also not an insignificant minority. Now, any time the education and medical systems "speak", the delays are magnified due to administration.


Sadly not so here. The time limits in my province are up to 30 days from date of request to initiate a meeting with the school to discuss the presence of exceptionality to receiving a meeting date. A meeting date!

Suffice it to say, another part of the implicit enrolment contract with private schools is to expedite the IEP process and effective interventions for exceptional learners. The school which my DS attends is, not coincidentally, substantially over-represented for 2e students.

I should also add, these are wait times *after* being placed on a list for psychoeducational assessment. There is a long lead time before that, too - can be 6 months to a year within most schools.

Also, the school board listed in the first article is in a mid-sized city with shorter wait times than the major cities. Note again that the quote below is *after* placement on the waitlist.

"According to the Hamilton-Wentworth District School board, 405 students are currently on a wait list for psycho-educational testing. Wait times for testing can vary – 20 per cent are seen within six months, the board says, while over half of students get tested within six months to a year. But some wait considerably longer. Twelve per cent of students wait between a year and 15 months to get tested and 14 per cent — about one in seven — wait over 15 months."

I would encourage anyone interested to read the parent comments in the first article. Some are quite poignant.

The point of the original article is that at some private schools, parents are afraid to voice complaints to the administration, partly because their children could be asked to leave the much-desired school. It's true that public school administrators and teachers are well-entrenched, but so are the children. I have emailed the school superintendent several times, criticizing anti-racist programming and computer programming clubs that exclude boys. At least she reads and replies. She has no power to expel my children from the public schools. Public school parents can run for and lobby the school board, which hires superintendents.

That’s right, and that analysis I provided speaks to how much parents stand to gain or lose in their decision to leave a private school from rocking the boat: advocacy efforts lost, reduced fit for 2e and special education students, administrative willingness to cooperate, potential delays to identification of giftedness or other exceptionalities, the true financial opportunity costs, etc. This is obviously not including social and emotional disruption to the child from a change in environment. There’s a lot to consider, so thank you for following along.

As I said upthread, racial issues aside, I would not be satisfied in the general case if an organization I was paying to educate my children was doing so in a way that fundamentally misaligned with my values, particularly where I was actively discouraged from expressing concern, and I’d want to weigh the costs of staying vs leaving. Only individual families can determine for themselves when costs exceed benefits.

On the other side of the coin, I will also say this: the documentation from Harvard-Westlake’s anti-racist policies states that the changes in curriculum and activities were at the behest of the parent community. If those changes represent the wishes of the majority of the stakeholders of the school, the administration has a fiduciary responsibility to honour that. These kinds of schools generally have a well-established point of view on social issues, and aren’t shy about advertising that to appeal to their ideal customers. It is well within reason that some people will not be a good fit for the school, and will be asked to leave if their continued participation would substantially reduce value derived for the majority. It’s a fine balance to keep everyone reasonably satisfied. Those decisions should be made with a sensitive and full understanding of the implications for the child.

What response have you received from your superintendents?

I have duly upgraded my level of horror!
I had a sense of that from his website, too. At least, that's his sell to affluent parents, perhaps to assuage guilt about being able to cut the line.
This question comes up on every school psych licensing exam...and if they take clients from within their district, that's not the correct answer...
It's also reminiscent of the situation in certain Southeast Asian countries (Little Dragons) where public school teachers are underpaid, and working with class sizes of 60-70 students, where students learn pretty much what you would expect from the conditions. Then the same teachers run afterschool tutoring businesses where the same students pay them to get the education they were unable to receive during the school day.

FWIW, this is the same challenge that has been facing disabled children in public education since the first federal special education law was passed in the early 70s. "wait-to-fail". Long-standing frustration with it among educators is one of the principal motivations behind the movement toward response-to-instruction/intervention. (Which, I know, also has challenges for GT learners.)

And now that I have picked my jaw up and dusted it off...