How to give your children the best education in the USA: our personal experience

Last year, our daughter was taken to Harvard Westlake, the best high school in California. In the 2019 ranking of the year, this school is in second place in the United States. We have come a long and difficult way before this entry. Since this was our first child, we made many mistakes, especially when it came to education.

Pupils of the Wise School. Photo courtesy of Wise School

I never rely on luck. I believe in hard work. Trying to correct our mistakes, we faced serious obstacles.

I hope that other parents will be able to benefit from our experience, and their children will have a chance to get an excellent education.

My husband and I met in Los Angeles. I am an immigrant, born in Chernivtsi (Ukraine). My husband was born and raised in the American Midwest. When we met, he was a director. And I was working for a state elected official at the time. When our daughter was one year old, we moved to a provincial but wealthy city in Colorado. My husband decided to join his business partner there to work on a long-term project.

We did not think about schools. We did not think about the future at all. Soon we had a son, and it was time to explore the elementary school for the daughter. Nothing could have prepared us for what happened over the next few years.

What we found in schools was shocking. As inexperienced parents, we made certain assumptions about raising children. In many cases, we were wrong.

I remember how, as an inexperienced mother, I was worried about trifles, I did not sleep at night: I studied pacifiers, brands of baby bottles into which I poured expressed milk, and later - articles about child behavior, rivalry between brothers and sisters and all the others useless worries that usually resolve themselves.

It turned out that none of these things was a priority. None of them would change the life of a child.

I should read about elementary schools in the United States. When our daughter was a preschool girl, I realized this through my own bitter experience.

In our rural area there were two primary schools. Of these two options, all rich and educated parents always chose one.

And this is exactly where we made a mistake. We assumed that these educated families preferred one of these schools for the same reasons that we did. My mother was a physicist, my father a doctor, and my husband and I had careers in the arts, politics, and business. We have always had very high expectations for the school in terms of teaching mathematics, reading and all core academic subjects. We assumed that other high-achieving parents shared our high standards.

So, we enrolled our daughter in the elementary school (Kindergarten) - the one that other parents chose for their children. But by the second semester of study I had the feeling that something was wrong.

Research was my specialty. So I started digging. I studied information about public and private primary schools throughout the US and was stunned by the result.

I wanted to see how much school students in various cities across the country have achieved in terms of mathematics and reading comprehension. I studied schools and students from different socio-economic sectors of society: with the lowest incomes and the highest. I was going to compare the performance of these students with the progress of students in my daughter's school.

Фото: Depositphotos

In the end, I wanted to understand how difficult it is for children from rich families with both working parents to better study in mathematics?

Is it not absurd that low-income students in rural Alabama, for whom English is not their first language, outperformed the richest children in our rich city in Colorado?

We were stunned by the results of my research. How is this possible?

We met with the administration of our daughter’s school and showed them the research. Everything was clear there, written in black and white, and it was impossible to argue with that. The school asked us not to share this information with the public and other parents. They promised to improve the situation, but they did not have a plan for how to do this. By that time, our son had already attended their preschool institutions twice a week. And we just had a third child. We had no choice. We did not enroll our children in this school for the next school year.

It was then that I began the long and difficult process of teaching children at home. Homeschooling was something I never thought of. But we just wanted to give a good education to our children and were ready to go to any lengths to achieve this. I had to understand the method of presentation of each academic subject by trial and error. I made a lot of mistakes, but in the end I was able to find a solution to most of the problems.

I wanted to find a Socratic method of teaching for young children. And they showed great success.

But soon they began to feel lonely. They needed to communicate with peers. As a result, we made a proposal to the local school district. We met with the superintendent, and the district allowed our children to participate in some of their programs while I continued to teach them at home.

The rumor about this approach spread quite quickly, and many other parents wanted to educate the children in the same way. This led to the failure of our plan.

In the school district, we were told that there were too many families willing to participate in the hybrid program that we created for our own children. And the district could not cope with this influx. This program, if it was attended by many children, was too confusing for teachers and staff. They allowed us to continue studying in this mode until the end of the school year, after which we had to choose home or school education and not mix them.

We packed our bags and moved back to Los Angeles, where there were many schools to choose from. In a way, I felt relieved. I had the opportunity to return to work, and the children had the opportunity to make friends and communicate with peers. Children will receive a good education, and this will not require reinventing the wheel.

The question was how to choose from such a large number of options a school that would be most suitable for our family, where the children would express themselves fully.

We had the freedom to choose, we could move anywhere. We could live in any city in the metropolitan area of ​​Greater Los Angeles, in any school district. After countless hours of research, we narrowed down to fourteen schools. Our search embraced the whole of Greater Los Angeles and even went beyond it. We visited schools in the San Fernando Valley all the way to Manhattan Beach. Public and private. We even went to school in Palos Verdes.

The main priority was to continue teaching children the Socratic type of thinking, the basics of which I laid them while studying at home.

В Wise school we found this and much more. Wise School has a long-standing partnership with USC. One of Wise's main goals is to provide a level of gifted education to all students, regardless of ability.

Wise School students are California champions of the Odyssey of the Mind international problem-solving competition. *

* The photo above was taken in the Project Studio at Wise School. This is the only STEAM-based educational institution in the Los Angeles area. Because of the unique resources of the competition team Odyssey of the Mindfrom Wise School is studying in Project Studio. Odyssey of the Mind is an international problem-solving competition. Thousands of school teams in 26 countries, including Russia, China and India, compete for a chance to be among the best teams in the world. Wise School Odyssey teams have been California state champions for several years and are ranked in the top three and top ten in the world.

Wise School is the only Jewish day school in California to receive 5 Star Award from California Gifted Association. This means that in all subjects schoolchildren are taught to think critically and ask deep questions.

Thanks to this unique combination, Wise School has an active international parent community consisting of immigrants in the first, second or third generation who came from almost all over the world: Russia, Ukraine, Iran, China, Korea, etc. Although the school is associated with By the synagogue Stephen S. Wise many non-Jewish families send their children to this school. One of the advantages of belonging to a synagogue is that the school can provide financial assistance to many families who need it. Weiss is also known for conducting one of the most impressive security operations in the city.

From the moment we walked onto campus, we knew that Wise School was the right place for our children. The gifted education for all approach is what we were looking for and could not find in any other school in Los Angeles.

About the author: Inna Rosenzweig, a former speech writer, immigrated from Ukraine to the United States while still a child. She lived in Boston, New York, London, Miami, Chicago and Aspen (Colorado). Now he is teaching a letter in Los Angeles.

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