|
|
 |
|
| Private Education |
The Pivotal Decision
Jill Rachlin Marbaix
05/03/2004
|
As if the tribulations of deciding what values and skills will prove most
crucial to our children in preparing them for life were not enough, we as
parents must confront the equal challenge of finding the ideal school to prepare
our children to achieve these goals—and then do everything we can to ensure
their acceptance. Many of us begin early, prepping our children (and ourselves)
to improve their odds of access to the elite nursery schools that we believe
will feed into the right elementary, middle and high schools, and ultimately,
into an elite college. We may look to a school’s reputation—or perhaps to our
family’s legacy associations with it—as an assurance that our hopes and goals
for our children will be achieved. But our confidence here may be misguided. Our
choice of a school must take into account not only our own goals and an
institution’s standing, but also our child’s specific needs and
idiosyncrasies.
Even the best schools do not suit all children; a mismatch
leads to unhappy students, and an unhappy childhood is by no means conducive to
inculcating family values and, therefore, to fulfilling the twin goals of
building our family’s human and intellectual capital. Many of us spend endless
hours in the search, often enlisting the expertise of specialists and drawing on
the logistical support of our family offices. “The level of scrutiny that
schools are put through—I subjected my spouse to less when I married him!” says
Jody Cukier Siegler, a remodeling contractor whose daughter is in second grade
at the Carlthrop School in Los Angeles.
Educational consultants, who
specialize in helping families emerge unscathed from this thicket, offer their
services in communities across the country. The best of them steer families
through the process from start to finish. And if we encounter difficulty in
choosing an educational consultant, firms such as Aston Pearl in New York City,
or the Independent Education Consultants Association, can assist us.
Considerations and Criteria
Advice from school counselors, consultants and
parents often diverges, but all agree on some points:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
