I started a school
My wife, our son and I decided to withdraw from a highly rated public school in the Bay area. Here is why and what we did afterwards...
The biggest surprise of my US move was my lack of understanding of how large public high schools work in the bay area. My plan was to move my son to the US after finishing his 10th grade in India and complete the last two years of his highschool in the Bay area.
Indian and Asian immigrants are wired to look for neighborhoods with the highest ranked schools. We did the same. However, we did not choose to live in ultra competitive high school neighborhoods of Cupertino and Fremont. We chose to live in the Evergreen valley area. The high schools here are rated high enough and I thought that that would be a good decision, all things considered.
This turned out to be a bad decision. Here is why:
Public schools work differently in the US
Principals are mostly managing logistics and not involved in teaching or academic advising
Assistant principals manage counselors and academic advising
Counselors run the school
Large high schools in the bay area are understaffed - they do not have enough counselors.
So, counselors do not have time to evaluate your child’s academic fit, especially if they are unfamiliar with your country or high school. Nor can they write a recommendation for you.
Schools also do not have enough seats in advanced classes for all students that want to take them. So, it is hard to study what you want.
Schools expect high school students to drive their education! This means that counselors would much rather talk to students than parents.
It is not clear to me that students do this well or are taken seriously by counselors
Most kids of the same age in India are much further along in science and math and much further behind in English and Social Sciences.
High schools courses have *strong* dependencies. If you haven’t done Math 3, you cannot do AP Calc AB, etc. This leads to rigidity and inability to get into the right courses.
High school teacher unions are really powerful. This is good and bad. This is good because it helps collective bargaining by teachers. This is bad because bad teachers are very hard to manage out.
Getting a bad teacher or two is par for the course.
Teachers have absolute control the grade in class.
You have to live with the grade they give you. Kids can argue with the teacher but best of luck with that.
Moving from a private school in India to a public school in the US will most likely be a bad decision because
Students wont get the support they get in India
Parents wont get the support they expect in India
So, you either shell out the money or homeschool
Private schools in the Bay area are very expensive and require a college app like process and planning to get admitted. Many of these schools are very selective and have weird requirements like honors courses. No Indian student has honors courses and yet they are much further ahead in some subjects.
You might know that I wrote Beyond IIT. I have strong convictions about what we should expect from school and college. I am not saying that all US public schools are bad. They fulfill a very important social function. They also have a hard job to do. They have better infrastructure than government funded schools in India and teachers do show up to teach there. All I am saying is that this system did not work for us. It will be hard for such a transition to work for most people who have a similar context to mine.
Based on our experience, we decided to start our own private school and homeschool own son. What does this mean?
This means that we decide our curriculum: what to study, and from whom.
The process of starting a homeschool is strangely easy. There are many resources online to help you do this properly. And, you can always go back to a public high school. They have to admit you and in many cases they will accept your grades if you follow the state guidelines.
Here what I would do differently:
Not move my son in the middle of his highschool
Trying to speak with local public school counselors BEFORE signing a rental lease
Plan early, apply early and move to a private highschool from a private school in India
Or, plan to homeschool. I dont think this is a bad thing. In fact, I think this might be the best way to plan your child’s education. Homeschool does not meaning schooling alone at home. There are many options to learn with others outside of school from Class X - Class XII
More on college admissions in my next post.