In our final video clip from Sandra Tsing Loh's performance piece Mother on Fire, Sandra elaborates on her theory of private school tuition by taking a deeper look at religious schools — from Catholic to Quaker to Baptist — and how much they charge.
To see all of Sandra's video clips from the beginning, scroll down and start watching from the December 10th post.
In our fifth video clip from Sandra Tsing Loh's performance piece Mother on Fire, we watch and learn as Sandra explains her comical theory of private school tuition. In it, she decodes the various private school categories and their price tags.
To see all of Sandra's video clips from the beginning, scroll down and start watching from the December 10th post.
In this fourth video clip from the performance piece Mother on Fire, Sandra Tsing Loh shares with us the shock she experienced upon learning how much the elite Wonder Canyon School (a fictional composite of several L.A. schools) charges for kindergarten tuition.
Her hopes are finally and totally dashed, when she realizes that she's not the "right kind" of celebrity to be guaranteed admission anyway.
To see all of Sandra's video clips from the beginning, scroll down and start watching from the December 10th post.
Our Los Angeles mom, Sandra Tsing Loh, broadens her school search by looking at a private school.
In this clip from her performance piece, Mother on Fire, Sandra visits the heavenly Wonder Canyon School. At first, Sandra is very impressed. Then comes the sticker shock.
In my last post, I introduced you to Sandra Tsing Loh, our intrepid L.A. mom, who's looking for a school for her soon-to-be kindergartner.
As the first day of kindergarten is drawing slowly but surely closer, Sandra realizes how much work she still has to do. She's even considering uprooting her family and moving to a neighboring suburb, just for its lust-worthy test scores.
In this second video clip from her performance piece, Mother on Fire, Sandra does her homework into the relationship between test scores and home prices. Do home prices ÷ test scores = Pi (or API)? No, wait, just watch the video and find out.
When the anxiety over choosing a school for your child is too much, sometimes it helps to take a step back, pour yourself a cup of tea and laugh for a few minutes. Los Angeles-based writer and performance artist Sandra Tsing Loh knows all about the stress of the search. In fact, she shared her anxiety, fears and joys with parents in her performance piece, Mother on Fire.
If you are reading this blog, you are most likely a fellow school chooser, so we thought we would share a few selections from Sandra's entertaining piece with you.
I'll start with this video clip, where we join Sandra as she takes her first tentative steps into the world of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Here she finds out that she must decode the inner workings of the "terrific L.A. magnet school system."
Stay tuned for more video clips from Mother on Fire. Next up: Sandra's analysis of school districts, test scores and home prices.
Sixth-graders: On your mark, get set ... and, go! Alex is off and running at his middle school.
The first month of middle school has been a roller coaster for him. I'll share the good news first: He enjoys moving around between classes. He's excited about having a locker. For the first time in his school career, he has male teachers — all five of them are male, in fact. He seems to like this.
But the transition to middle school can be tough, especially for kids moving from a small school to a big feeder middle school such as Alex's. There are 1300 kids from all over the city at this school.
Last year, at his elementary school, he looked like a confident big kid. Now he looks small and vulnerable, like a little boy. I think he feels pretty much the way he looks.
Now for the bad news. One of his teachers is the very same teacher who nearly gave my daughter a nervous breakdown the first month of her sixth-grade year. After she told me that he was destroying her self-confidence and humiliating her classmates, I removed her from his class (Thankfully, she went on to have a fine year.)
Now the fates have decreed that Alex should also face the fearsome Mr. R.! And once again, I'm being told by the counseling office: "This man is a great teacher. All the parents and the kids love him once they get to know him. Just stick with him."
So far, Alex is not traumatized by Mr. R. However, Alex and I are wary. Mr R. has been out for medical reasons for several weeks and will return next week. My surveillance of the situation will resume at that time. For now, the jury is out: is Mr. R. truly as bad as my daughter says, and therefore bad for Alex, or will Mr. R. turn out to be the academic savior he's reputed to be? To be continued...
[GreatSchools has lots of expert advice on topics like this one.]
Finally, on top of everything else, Alex's best friend, the one that was going to accompany him to this school, unexpectedly moved away over the summer, leaving Alex with no close friends at the school. Although Alex makes friends easily, and I think he'll do fine socially, I do feel for him.
I spun the Wheel of Fortune and I hit the jackpot.
The Wheel of Fortune, in this case, is the San Francisco Unified School District's school choice lottery, and the jackpot is a seat at our first-choice school.
I have to say, it sure was a nice feeling to open that assignment letter from the district. All my research, touring and analyzing paid off, and the process is winding down. Until my older child applies to college, anyway. But that's two years off.
At least I don't have to negotiate with the district, write appeals or hold out for the 10-day count — all strategies that could be implemented if necessary. No, it's settled. But was I lucky? If so, how lucky?
I realize most people have absolutely no idea how the SFUSD assigns students to schools. Every community with school choice has its own unique way of doing things. But San Francisco's system is really quite interesting. That's because it's a lottery that tries to create diversity in the schools, and, at the same time, make as many parents happy as possible. How can this work, you might reasonably ask? Here's how (and don't think there isn't a lot of griping and tweaking of the system going on continually):
Whenever there are more applicants than openings at a school, the lottery kicks in. But it's not a pure lottery. Instead, the district uses a formula called the Diversity Index to determine if each applicant will add diversity to the school. The five "race neutral" factors used in the Diversity Index are:
1. "Extreme poverty" (for example: Does the student live in public housing or is the student homeless?)
2. Socioeconomic status — determined by participation in the free/reduced lunch program or other assistance programs
3. The student's home language
4. The academic performance of the sending school
5. The academic achievement of the student — determined by standardized test scores, or for an incoming kindergartner, by whether or not she attended preschool
This year, 84% of San Francisco schools received more requests than there were seats available. This may give the impression that the schools in San Francisco are incredibly popular, but it's simply that families can request up to seven schools. Therefore, there are up to seven times the number of requests for seats than actual students needing seats, giving the appearance of high demand.
The reality is that 81% of the 3,145 families looking for middle schools got their first-choice school this year.
Our first-choice school, His Sister's Old School, had five requests per seat, more than any of the other middle schools. "Wow," you might think, "She's so lucky." Sure, but 81% of all fifth-grade applicants got their first-choice school, so I'm not that lucky.
To tell the truth, this year I found that there were five middle schools that I would have been happy sending Alex to. That was rather a pleasant realization. I wasn't terribly stressed out about the process of picking the right public middle school. I'm more concerned that Alex might do better in a little, tiny private school, with small class sizes.
So, even though I spun the Wheel of Fortune and won the public school jackpot, I'm still not completely free of stress and concern. If I were, I wouldn't be a very modern parent, would I?
So I turned in the school district's application form the other day. I made the deadline with two hours to spare.
I was happy to hear that I wasn't the very last parent to make up her mind. No, there was a pack of us making the decision at the last minute this year. I don't know what excuses the others had, but mine was that I couldn't find a clear first choice.
I listed five public schools that I would be happy to send Alex to. I was supposed to list seven, but I could only come up with five. All five are great schools, though.
I put His Sister's Old School as our first choice because it's close to our house and his sister received a fine, if overly rigorous, education there.
I put The Hidden Gem in second place. I did this because, while it's a smaller school (a good thing), it's farther from our house (not a good thing). Proximity is always important, but especially so when kids are starting to venture from school to home on their own. I'd like Alex's first forays into solo city navigation to be simple and safe.
But, now...now I think I should have put that darn Hidden Gem in first place! For heaven's sake, Alex and I can deal with a longer commute if it means he'll have a school that better suits his learning style! And Alex learns much better in smaller groups, which The Hidden Gem offers. Dang! What was I thinking?
These second thoughts really intensified when a friend called me after reading my blog. "You raved about The Hidden Gem and then you didn't put it down as your first choice. What's that all about?" she asked silkily. And I didn't have a ready answer.
I comfort myself with the notion that if I'd left it up to Alex, he would have picked His Sister's Old School. But then I torture myself with the notion that he's a kid, his reasons are purely juvenile, I shouldn't leave it up to him anyway. He only wants to go to His Sister's Old School because that's where he thinks his friends are going to go.
Although his social life should not trump his academic needs, his social life is important to his overall success. (This reminds me of the day that we toured His Sister's Old School and one of the touring moms conducted an impromptu interview of the kids waiting for the morning bell. She asked them, "Why did you choose this school?" They answered, "Because our friends were going to go here!" This mom, a middle-school counselor, later told me, "Educators and parents often forget just how important it is that kids are happy socially.")
On one school tour this year I met a wise "parent ambassador" named Sue, who shared with me a lesson she had learned the year before. Sue told me that her daughter had come to her in sixth grade and asked to be transferred out of her school (which, ironically, is the school I've chosen for Alex, His Sister's Old School). Sue said she was surprised at how calm her daughter was about everything. Her daughter "just knew" she would do better in her new school and calmly awaited her reassignment in seventh grade. The moral: if the first choice doesn't turn out to be the best choice, kids can handle switching schools just fine. I've been thinking about this little tale a lot lately.
The time has come to make some decisions here.
I've done just about as much research as a normal parent can do. Granted, I've known some folks to visit the same school multiple times in one year, and I didn't do that. I've known some folks who didn't go on any tours at all, and I didn't do that. I'm somewhere in the middle. Although, because of my job as a writer at GreatSchools, I had greater leeway than most to visit a wider variety of schools, I still functioned within the normal range.
I think most people would, after touring several schools, know in their heart of hearts which is the best one for them. Even though I have a pretty good idea which one I'll put first, I'm going to make a chart and compare the top candidates, pros and cons, to see if I can gain any more clarity.
Here's my chart:
| School | ||
| Pros | Cons | |
| The Up and Comer |
|
|
| The Hidden Gem |
|
|
| His Sister's Old School |
|
|
| Top of the Heap |
|
|
| Number Two in the Test Score Wars |
|
|
Hmmm, let's see. If all things were equal, then The Up and Comer would win, just based upon the number of Pros. But all things are not equal, and I have to give greater weight to the fact that His Sister's Old School is so close to the house. Proximity makes life so much saner.
Plus, I'm familiar with His Sister's Old School. I know the teachers, the administrators and the procedures. I'm just nervous about the amount of homework they give there. It was tough on my daughter, and I'm concerned that Alex won't handle it as well as she did.
Well, for better or for worse, I decided to rank my choices on the district application this way:
1. His Sister's Old School
2. The Hidden Gem
3. Top of the Heap
4. Number Two in the Test Score Wars
5. The Up and Comer
There, I did it!
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