Neighborhoods within 20 minutes of downtown

[HiFi]

Do yourself (and the kid) a favor, send them to a private school. The thought of my kid not being able to break into a career because his As and Bs learning watered down feel-good slop never equated to the practical and advanced skills needed to compete in a global market and him ending up living in my basement at age 30 is more than enough to make me swallow the added costs of private school.

[uptown_urbanist]

Originally Posted by HiFi

Do yourself (and the kid) a favor, send them to a private school. The thought of my kid not being able to break into a career because his As and Bs learning watered down feel-good slop never equated to the practical and advanced skills needed to compete in a global market and him ending up living in my basement at age 30 is more than enough to make me swallow the added costs of private school.

Unless your local school is REALLY bad, I doubt it's anything to worry about; I have friends who graduated from a range of local high schools (in Minneapolis and in surrounding suburbs, both some of the "best" as well as those that are just considered "average") and they are doing VERY well, career-wise. And, FWIW, a lot of my former classmates work in foreign countries, which suggests they're doing just fine in the global market. I also have friends who graduated from of the the big-name local private schools. Some them are also doing well. While sometimes a private school might be the best choice for an individual kid, there's no reason to believe that the Twin Cities don't offer plentiful excellent public school options for students. I wouldn't send my kid to all of the local schools (some have rather limited advanced course offerings, for example), but a blanket statement about the need for private schools is hardly warranted, no doubt part of the reason that there's not much of a private school culture in the Twin Cities compared to many large metro areas (although I assume that in some neighborhoods there's a larger percentage of kids who go private than in others).

If worried about a global perspective, send them to an IB program. There are many IB diploma programs in local high schools. And with open enrollment, you're not even limited to just the schools in your district (assuming there is room, which is necessarily the case).

[1stpontiac]

After looking up the MSP scores the other day, I went and looked at my own high school's data. Scores are somewhere in the "slightly functional" range. Somehow, though, my classmates and I have overcome and none of us are living in our parent's basements.

Guess we got lucky.