Private School Is For Snobs!

My side is this: if education is one of the most important things you can give your children, why not give them the very best that you can afford? True, we have good schools in our town, but they've been plagued by budget troubles in recent years, so even though they're technically free, almost everything above and beyond the basics require fees anyway. So... if we're going to be paying, why not pay for a better education. I'm not trying to avoid exposing our children to the "real" world, and diversity is important to me. Most good private schools -- at least the ones that I'm interested in -- take pains to make their school populations diverse and to offer financial aid so that all income levels are represented. But this isn't just about money -- it seems to me that public school education is increasingly focused on standardized testing, which means that teachers are forced to teach towards the tests and students are forced to learn by rote, versus learning how to comprehend and analyze more complex ideas that might or might not fit into a standardized test format. Also -- one last reason why I'm increasingly drawn towards a private school education for our kids: in our town both our children will miss the Aug 31st kindergarten cutoff by only a few short weeks. This cutoff is non-negotiable, so even if we could prove them ready via testing they would be forced to wait a whole extra year to start school. This to me is unacceptable.