These days, deciding where to send your child or children to school has never been more important. That’s especially true if you’re looking for a private school.
You could easily search a list of private high schools online, but it may not tell you everything you want to know. Let’s say you want to send your child to a private French immersion school. You want to know everything: how much it might cost, what the curriculum entails, if there are any requirements to get in such as testing, and what the qualifications of the teaching staff are to name just a few things.
There are lots of advantages to sending your child or children to a private school. If you do so, you want to make sure you’re making the right choice. For whatever choice you make, you want to be sure that your children get the most out of their education.
Deciding whether or not to send your child to private school is not an easy decision for some parents. This is especially true for parents who never attended private school themselves, and thus don’t know what to expect. But private schools are becoming more and more popular among parents in America — and perhaps are going to be the eventual “norm”. This is because of the lowering standards of education in many public schools, among other things. In certain areas, some parents don’t even feel as if public schools are safe for their children, leaving them to seriously consider private schools. The main difference between a private school and a public school is that while a public school is federally funded and therefore subject to certain state-mandated criteria, private schools are funded via the tuition parents are required to pay, among other private sources. Therefore, private schools have much more freedom. Many people are under the impression that private schools are for older children only. However, private preschools have recently becoming popular, as have private academy middle schools and private high schools. Some parents begin their children with private preschool, which feeds into private elementary schools, and eventually private academy middle schools and high schools. Below, we’ll look into some of the advantages of sending your child to private school rather than public school.
1. Higher Educational Standards
Perhaps one of the most obvious benefits of sending your child to a private school is the better education they will receive. This isn’t to say that all public schools provide subpar educations — it’s just that they vary wildly, and parents also don’t have a choice about the public school to which they send their children. Kids are “zoned” into public schools; you may very well be within driving distance of a much better public school, but your child is forced to go to a poorer school anyway just because of the zone you live in. Private schools offer choice, and typically children benefit from this choice. 80% of parents who send their children to private schools are happy with the academic standards of their kids’ schools, and private schools often place a strong emphasis on things like college. This means that private school students grow up more with the idea that they will attend college, and are more prepared for a university education. In fact, while the national average SAT score were 497 in reading, 514 in math, and 489 in writing, private school students had average scores of 541, 570, and 550 respectively. The higher standards of education begin when kids are young — while the middle school years in public schools are often described as pointless, private academy middle schools place a greater emphasis on learning, typically.
2. Smaller Class Sizes
One of the reasons why children in public schools sometimes suffer academically is simply because they’re not able to get this individual attention they need. This is not the fault of the teachers — their class sizes are too large, and they can only stretch so far. Comparably, private schools are usually small, with 86% of them having fewer than 300 students. This means that on average, they are less than half the size of public schools. This means that students can get personal attention from teachers, and it also often means a better social climate for students as well. While middle school kids, for example, can often be a bit vicious, kids in private academy middle schools are more closely monitored by teachers, who can check up on them when they’re misbehaving socially — their academic behaviors are not the only things teachers keep an eye on.
3. Religious Options
Public schools are secular, that is, non-religious. Some parents want their kids to be educated religiously as well as academically at school, and many private schools are indeed religious. Religious private schools don’t skimp on their students’ academic educations, and often allow students of all different backgrounds to attend. They simply also provide that extra religious boost that some parents want for their kids.
