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If you are extremely sure that school quality +- some factor doesn't make a significant difference, go for the choices. But many people don't know that for sure, and certainly posters asking questions on this forum don't, which is why they are here. The mentality is just to place on your bets on the best choice affordable, and hope you are getting the best education and social environment for the kids. I worry all the time about transferring responsibility and good work ethics to my kids, how to raise them without a sense of entitlement. That is something I alone cannot do, it also comes from the company we keep.
Yes, but in my experience, in a holistic view, the pressure must be internal at some point. And a lot of that comes from the household.
If the kid really has no motivation to study, maybe his friends are all nerds at Millburn so he has some surficial motivation to study, ends up being a B student in AP courses and you send him to Tufts and then he proceeds to get mediocre grades. He's at the same point or maybe even worse off than if he went to Union high school, was a B student, got into Rutgers, and graduated with the same degree.
The elitist path of education no longer guarantees anything. At some point, the motivation must be genuinely internal.
I also do believe most schools, except the very worst, has a contingent of nerds and slackers anyway. Millburn certainly has slackers and students who don't study.
Of course every school is going to have nerds and slackers. The point was that the proportions are what matters. If a school has enough nerds, then nerds are the norm. The slackers are the aberration. In general, most kids don't want to be the aberration, they want to be the norm so they will conform to whatever environment they are in.
I want them to be in a place where slacking is looked down upon by their friends.
in holmdel, there are lots of asians. but i go to dinner the other night at texas roadhouse and you think i saw any chinese kids? nope. they are all at home working on math problems. i went to houlihans yesterday and the place was very busy. any asians? nope. they are studying!
Correct, and this is the elephant in the room. The search for better schools is really a search for better people with which to surround one's self and one's family. It's not about the instruction because the instruction is basically the same in all suburban schools. It's about the fact that people with higher incomes generally strongly value education, and transfer that to their children. Who then score well in a Millburn or Mountain Lakes. It's the parents and the culture that determine the fact that Millburn's schools score well, not the teachers, not the budget, not the buildings, not the football uniforms, not the school lunches.
And that is why inner city schools fail regardless of how much wealth is transferred and dumped into their school systems. It's not about the schools or the teachers, and it never was. It's about the culture behind the kids. It's about the attitude of the parents towards education, accomplishment, and excellence. If the parents don't value it, then neither will the children, or their children.
I see when people, specifically parents are choosing where to live, school choice is foremost. People are seemingly willing to spend perhaps $200K+ on a similar house to move to a place with a good school district.
I attended high school in NJ and it is a Top 20 school(which I think is a joke, but that is for another thread) and over the roughly 2 decades since then, I have met several people who graduated from several different high schools.
Care to share what school this is? I don't think another thread is really needed...
in holmdel, there are lots of asians. but i go to dinner the other night at texas roadhouse and you think i saw any chinese kids? nope. they are all at home working on math problems. i went to houlihans yesterday and the place was very busy. any asians? nope. they are studying!
I went to my CEO's house and he introduced me to his 2 HS boys and asked me to tutor them. When I tried to tutor them I could not get them to pay any attention nor do they care. Don't think they care about education when their father is a multi-millionaire. Wonder if they are doing well at school at all, maybe the rich simply pay off their educators to give them good grades. Most self made CEOs that I've met all come from poor educational backgrounds. Of course they want their offsprings to have top quality education and it's not easy when daddy is made of money.
I attended high school in NJ and it is a Top 20 school (which I think is a joke, but that is for another thread) and over the roughly 2 decades since then, I have met several people who graduated from several different high schools.
i think the OP is primarily immature and doesnt get it. like marc said, the schools are the same; its the students that are different. so to call it a joke probably means he hasnt figured that out.
my high school was actually the dumbest group of students that i attended school with. but that's because my high school was not selective like many public high schools. it is the school of my past with the lowest "success" rate compared to the schools i attended after it. id hate to send my kids to a high school with a crowd that is less likely to succeed than my high school class.
i have been to that houlihans so many times over the past 5 years and i still love it every time i go there. the texas roadhouse meal was awesome also. i got a ribeye steak smothered in onions, mushrooms & cheese.
in holmdel, there are lots of asians. but i go to dinner the other night at texas roadhouse and you think i saw any chinese kids? nope. they are all at home working on math problems. i went to houlihans yesterday and the place was very busy. any asians? nope. they are studying!
That's about right. I'm Asian and I never went to Houlihans. Though I did frequent a local Texas hot dog place (Clixes) in Midland Park/Wyckoff when I was a kid. I was the only Asian there. Guess I was a slacker.
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