Marketing Yourself in Tough Times

How to Convince Your Child to Go to Private School

It is a scenario that plays out more often than you might think. You have been looking at your child's high school with much trepidation. A couple of concerns keep bubbling to the surface of your thinking. For one thing, the school is enormous. While the students get a relatively good education, according to the statistics you have seen, you still have that persistent, nagging feeling that your child deserves more. Her school offers about a dozen AP courses. There are still some clubs and other extracurricular activities available. The sports program seems to focus on the football and basketball teams. The other factor influencing you to decide that you both work. Frequent business travel has become a regular feature of your life, and it looks like it will continue for many years. The bottom line is that you want your child to attend private school because it will solve some of these problems and correct some of her current public education deficiencies. But how are you going to convince her to go along with you? Let's look at some strategies and approaches that work.

This short video illustrates some of the reasons why parents consider sending their children to private schools.

Don't dictate what is going to happen.

The quickest way to turn your child against any idea, no matter how rational and well-intentioned that

Progressive schools are different from so-called traditional schools. I am not being judgmental here. I am simply pointing out some differences between the two kinds of schools so that you can make an informed decision about which private schools to consider for your child.

Until the middle of the 20th-century, many schools simply taught their students facts and figures. You memorized and regurgitated information. Indeed I can remember being taught this way at Rosyln School and Westmount High School back in the '50s and '60s. That's just the way you were taught back then. All of your academic work was focused on what you could expect to be tested on in your final year-end exams. This all led inexorably to a forbidding set of examinations known as the Junior Matriculation. If you did well on that set of examinations administered at the end of Grade 11, you went off to university for more of the same.

Progressive schools by definition are schools that espouse the ideals and ideas of landmark educators and thinkers such as John Dewey and Francis Parker. At the beginning of the 20th-century, they were considered visionary by some, radical by others. The progressive curriculum was more varied and experiential. Students just didn't sit there passively listening to a teacher lecture about the material. They actually were encouraged to learn by discovery through a variety of hands-on activities. Teachers no longer had to get through a plethora of outdated materials simply to be able to say

We all have so many things on our minds and so much to do every day. So when it comes to undertaking a major project such as finding the right private school for your child, anything which will help you zero in on what needs to be done is helpful. I have always found mnemonics useful. With that in mind, you can use this simple mnemonic to help you organize your search for a private school for your child.

In this short clip, Jennifer Schroeder shares her experiences choosing a private school.

From start to finish you will probably invest up to 125 hours in this process if you are looking at boarding schools. About 50 hours if you are looking at day schools. Perhaps 25 hours if you are investigating primary and preschools. It's a lot of work with a lot of deadlines to fit into your busy schedule. But if you will scope out the various tasks you have to do and work through them step by step, you will get through it.

The most important caution that I or any private school consultant will give you is a very simple one: start the process as far in advance as you possibly can. At least 18 months before the fall of the year you plan for your child to attend her new school. If you are forced to find a school at the

Dr. Maria Montessori's first Casa de Bambini in Rome opened in 1906. That school and Dr. Montessori's methods were was so innovative and ahead of their time that word of Dr. Montessori and her methods spread quickly around Europe. By 1911 the first Montessori school opened in the United States. That school was located north of New York City in Tarrytown. When you consider that communications in the early twentieth century were slow, the fact that word about Dr. Montessori did spread so quickly was remarkable. One other fact worth noting is that Dr. Montessori began her work with disadvantaged children living in Rome's poorest neighborhoods. Yet when her approach found its way to the United States, it appealed strongly to middle-class parents who were looking for enlightened alternatives to the traditional educational methods found in American schools. The following video offers a brief history of Montessori.

Nowadays Montessori schools enjoy an enthusiastic following with approximately 4,000 certified schools in the U.S. Most of these are private schools offering the early or primary grades. Only about 200 public schools use the Montessori method or some version thereof. Because Dr. Maria Montessori did not trademark the name Montessori, any school can claim to be a Montessori school. Just because it says it is a Montessori school does not mean that it is the real thing. As a result you will have to be observant and aware