Private School Admissions - 2019 (Dallas, Plano: stats, roach, classroom)

[daltgrmum]

My son said his friend had been accepted at St. Mark's for 9th grade, but would be turning down his spot for another school, so there should be something open from that wait pool.

[Stringzs]

We picked Parish- loved their approach to education and social emotional focus. Also, before deciding, we managed to speak to one of the heads of schools that is leaving the school in the summer through a connection, and he gave us an inside look at what they are doing. He was very candid, and kinda blew us away with the school's perspective. I'm glad you got your first choice too.

[dallastexasresident]

Originally Posted by Stringzs

We picked Parish- loved their approach to education and social emotional focus. Also, before deciding, we managed to speak to one of the heads of schools that is leaving the school in the summer through a connection, and he gave us an inside look at what they are doing. He was very candid, and kinda blew us away with the school's perspective. I'm glad you got your first choice too.

Congrats! Would you mind providing some quick details on what blew you away?

[Stringzs]

Originally Posted by dallastexasresident

Congrats! Would you mind providing some quick details on what blew you away?

Sure thing. I sent this to another poster, and so I’ll just post this to the main board.
Parish is going to be moving to a competency-based education model, where they will make sure a child learns what they are supposed to before moving them to the next module. Basically, giving someone a “C” grade and assuming that they “get it” and trying to build on that subject for the future really short-changes a kid. Instead, the approach is going to be modular, when a kid only moves to the next module when they have mastered the prior one. So, a kid in the 5th grade may go to the 6th grade, but may still be mastering, say the algebra module in the 5th grade, and can potentially catch up by learning geometry faster. That same kid could also be ahead in English and be working on the English module in the 7th grade while in the 6th grade. As you may have heard Dave Monaco say, “currently in education, learning is a variable, and time is a constant”, and they are trying to make education a constant and time a variable. So, an advanced kid may be doing multivariate calculus in 12th grade, and another kid may just be doing the “average” course load, but they can accommodate both. This competency-based model was incorporated in 5th and 8th grade this year with good success and will continue to expand. There’ll be plenty of time to work out any kinks by the time younger kids get there (I’m sure there will be some kinks initially). They will also not use letter grades (I think in lower school) as the goal is to have every kid get to an A+, but just at their pace. This is part of their Re-imagine Initiative” and it is far from complete.

The other thing I really liked was that person’s support for Parish despite not coming back to Parish next year. Said that Parish is the place they’ll put their kids into if they got into every school in town. Also said that they hate to create 3 hours of homework every night just to make it seem the school is “rigorous”, which was code for “busy-work”. Instead, they are letting students lead their learning into spending time on things that are of interest to them rather than writing essays every night. They may be working a lot but have some choice in what they are doing. Given our connection, I’m pretty certain he was not “talking his own book” and was being very genuine.

He also mentioned that this year Duke got a bunch of applications from kids with a 1600 GMAT and a 4 GPA that did not get in. It really speaks to what the colleges are looking for these days- something more than a standardized test robot. Even though Parish places kids into those schools (I think I saw Harvard, MIT and Stanford recently), they do it their way where a kid truly learns as opposed to making a kid fit a set system (I’m sure we can all relate to being in a job that “sucked” vs. one that allowed us to thrive professionally). He (and some others) also mentioned that when kids go to college, they find their college classes easier than their Parish classes. Finally, the head also said that if something went wrong, Parish would be a school that would go above and beyond to help a kid, and not many schools do that.


Finally, the mandate of the school is to create happy learners, which I think is more than just a tag-line. If you are looking at students in upper schools today, there is increasing talk of depression and suicide. Sometimes it is due to parental pressure, and sometimes it is due to self-imposed pressure. And some kids handle it just fine. My colleague just pulled his son out of Cistercian as he is undergoing depression, so this hits home. An individualized approach that Parish is taking allows any kid to thrive without that issue. The key question to me is what makes a school good. To me, it is the delta in performance/achievement between when the school gets a kid and when the kid graduates- or maximizing potential. We set that criteria up front when we started to evaluate schools. A school that is selecting the top 10% of kids for admission and then translating it into great outcomes in testing/college for a large number of them is doing a fine job. But another school that is taking different types of kids and figuring out a way to maximize them all is exceptional. I say that because I do not know what my pre-K kids would be like in a few years. One of them has a 133 CATS and the other one is not far behind, but that means nothing right now. So, a school that can push them to grow into the best version of themselves while keeping them happy is important to me. I myself remember my childhood where I was in the bottom 10% of my class till the first quarter of the 11th grade (I specifically remember getting 7/100 on a math exam) because I was trying to follow “their” system. I stopped caring after that and just did it the way it made sense to me. Long story short, I ended up ranking in the 99.5 %ile of standardized tests in 2 years and was accepted to a school with an acceptance rate of below 2%. So perhaps my own personal experience, including my performance/advancement in jobs that did not fit me vs. those that did, is coloring some of this, but I could not find another school that made as much sense for “us”. I know everyone has their own calculus and what works best for them, but we felt Parish was the best choice for us.

[dallastexasresident]

Originally Posted by Stringzs

Sure thing. I sent this to another poster, and so I’ll just post this to the main board...

THANK YOU for the detailed response! Hope to see you at the new parent / family picnic in a few weeks.

[stan4]

Great detailed response.

+1

[applemd]

Thank you!

[Stringzs]

Thank you everyone. Everyone here was so kind and helpful to me me, and hopefully this helps others.
Also, just through my search this year, I would highly recommend Dallas International (with some caveats), Good Shepherd, and for those on a tighter budget (and even otherwise), Wesley Prep.

If anyone has questions on these, I'd be happy to answer those.

[Waterdragon8212]

Originally Posted by Stringzs

Thank you everyone. Everyone here was so kind and helpful to me me, and hopefully this helps others.
Also, just through my search this year, I would highly recommend Dallas International (with some caveats), Good Shepherd, and for those on a tighter budget (and even otherwise), Wesley Prep.

If anyone has questions on these, I'd be happy to answer those.

Stringzs ~ for a newer member on this forum, I think you have provided an invaluable resource via your experience that should provide excellent information and insight to private school applicants for years to come. Thank you for your candid approach to posting! I genuinely appreciate it (and clearly others do too!) I hope that other posters can use your honest disclosure as a model for their future postings so that we can continue to make this forum a source of accessible and instrumental information.

Congrats on Parish! I loved hearing about their new approach and think it is a brilliant and cutting-edge way to approach education - I could hope some of these other schools might take a page from them .

[numbersguy100]

Originally Posted by Waterdragon8212

Stringzs ~ for a newer member on this forum, I think you have provided an invaluable resource via your experience that should provide excellent information and insight to private school applicants for years to come. Thank you for your candid approach to posting! I genuinely appreciate it (and clearly others do too!) I hope that other posters can use your honest disclosure as a model for their future postings so that we can continue to make this forum a source of accessible and instrumental information.

Congrats on Parish! I loved hearing about their new approach and think it is a brilliant and cutting-edge way to approach education - I could hope some of these other schools might take a page from them .

I repped the Stringzs post and appreciate the insight as well. And kudos to Parish for taking this approach. But there's nothing cutting edge about it - frankly it sounds a lot like the Montessori approach (minus multi-year classrooms) to education which is older than old at this point. It's what we love about where we send our kids. What's new is its acceptance/adoption in schools that historically would have called themselves "traditional". Parish is also not the only school in its cadre moving to a focus on social/emotional learning. In fact, if it weren't moving that way, it would be an outlier. Again, this isn't to detract from what they are doing - it's certainly possible that they are implementing these programs in ways that distinguish them from their peers. Through talking my wife, I know about what each of these schools are doing at a high level but not from a day in day out perspective of the schools.



I say this because I believe in the value of private education, but so often on this board people act like the only schools worth paying for are SMS/Hock/GH. Beyond that, people would have you believe that there is no value and at that point might as well be in districts like Plano and HP and go public. But I think the personalization of education and focus on social/emotional learning has tremendous value, and I see it in my kids, especially when I compare them to many of their public school peers. Now, whether that value is worth the steep tuition $ is certainly a valid question. But to say that "you might as well do public" if your kid can't attend one of those top three schools seems incorrect to me.