Is a Specialized HS Right For Me?

As an SHSAT tutor, my job is to help students get the best score they can on the specialized high school entrance exam; it’s not to help them decide which school is the best fit for them. Nevertheless, parents often ask me what I think about Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and other specialized high schools. I have not done any in-depth investigations- my knowledge about these schools is limited to anecdotal feedback that I get from kids I know who attend them. But, for whatever it is worth, I have some thoughts which may be useful.

First, I think that all students and parents should know that the New York City specialized high schools are demanding and competitive. This may seem obvious, but I am often approached by parents who would like their child to take the SHSAT, even though their child is struggling with academics in middle school. This simply does not make sense. Parents, if your child is ready, willing, and able to take on a workload that is significantly heavier and harder than what most middle schools offer, a specialized public high school may be an excellent choice. Otherwise, it is not.

Second, I think that families should be aware that any large public high school is going to be significantly less personal than the average small private school (or small public school, for that matter). It’s simply a matter of scale. No matter how warm and caring an individual teacher may be, personal relationships will be more difficult to form in a school with thousands of students than in a school with two or three hundred students.

On the other hand, the very size of the larger specialized high schools means that they can offer a diversity of social opportunities and extra curriculars that smaller schools simply cannot match. For this reason, schools such as Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech can be especially good places for students who crave a broad array of social experiences or who feel like they have had trouble fitting in in the past.

As far as the actual quality of the education goes, I think the experience of a girl I know may be illustrative. Last year, I helped her prepare for the SHSAT and I was able to observe that she is not only smart, but also hardworking. To call her driven would not be an overstatement- she is ambitious to a degree that is unusual at any age. She got into Stuyvesant. In her freshman year, she got an excellent geometry teacher and is thriving in that class. She is also having a good experience in English (although her parents wish she did more writing), Spanish, and art. Unfortunately, her social studies class is appalling- the students are essentially asked to remember long lists of disjointed facts. Worse, her physics class has been almost nightmarish. The workload is intense, but it is not educational. Neither she nor any of her classmates are able to follow the teacher’s lessons. After a rough start, she is now getting excellent grades in physics and understanding the material, but only because she is receiving tutoring from another New York Academics tutor. Those of her classmates who can get private tutoring are doing well; unfortunately, the rest of the class is failing.

Based on my anecdotal observations, many students who attend New York City specialized public high schools have similar experiences to this girl. They get some fabulous classes, quite a few very good classes, and a smaller, but still significant, number of very bad classes. Taken as a whole, the quality of the education is still very good, but it is not without problems.

Homeschool Group Classes

The dominant image of homeschooling involves one child, or several siblings, studying with their mother in a socially isolated household. While those homeschoolers exist, they appear to be a definite minority, at least among New York City homeschoolers. One reason that most homeschoolers are far less isolated than many people assume is the popularity of small group classes.

Group classes take many forms. Some are taught by parents, others are taught by professionals; some are highly academic in nature, others are primarily intended to be social; some are traditional in their format, others are highly innovative. As a tutor who serves many homeschool families, I have come to strongly support group classes, since they provide an opportunity for a dynamic exchange of ideas among students and an affordable way for parents to ensure that their children are well educated, even in areas where the parents may not be comfortable teaching the material.

My primary personal experience with group homeschool classes is in the area of science. Science is particularly well suited to group classes, for two main reasons. First, it takes quite a bit of effort to get together the materials necessary for lab classes. As an illustration, I recently completed a unit on simple machines with a small group of upper elementary school age children. This relatively simple unit involved spring scales, three different kinds of pulley, two kinds of plastic tubing (to make Archimedes’ Screws), as well as copious amounts of odds and ends such as cardboard, rubber bands, and popsicle sticks. It took several hours of concentrated effort and about $45 to get all the requisite materials together. While this was hardly a heroic level of preparation, it is far more involved than the preparation that normally goes into preparing lessons in arithmetic. The cost/benefit analysis simply makes more sense when that effort is going into a lesson for several children rather than just one.

The more important reason why science is an ideal subject for group lessons is that many parents feel inadequately qualified to teach science. Even at the elementary school level, they may be intimidated by their lack of knowledge and their own perceived failures in the subject. Of course, as the material becomes more sophisticated, these perceived shortcomings only grow, and in fact often turn into real shortcomings. It is my belief that most educated adults could master enough science to teach their 4^th grader with the benefit of some good books, but the same can’t be said for a 10^th grader. It really does take specialized knowledge to effectively teach high school science classes well.

Just as a lack of real or perceived knowledge in science means that group classes are particularly valuable in science, other topics that many parents are uncomfortable with or lack knowledge in also make good candidates for homeschool group classes. Poetry, second languages, and more advanced mathematics are all fairly obvious candidates.

Since New York Academics has multiple teachers with different specialties, we are well-placed to offer group classes for homeschoolers in a variety of subjects including a wide range of topics and levels in science, most areas of math, Spanish, poetry, writing, and literature. We make it our policy to tailor the content of our small group homeschool classes to the needs and desires of each group that we work with (although all of our instruction is academically rigorous and secular).