This is what I did before I enrolled my son in school: I visited six public schools, two private schools and a special lab school. I scoured the state education database and read as many books, articles and online reviews about those schools as I could find. And I spent several months consulting a countless number of people for advice, including The Orange County Register’s education reporters, neighbors, parents and school officials.
All so I could choose the right kindergarten for my 5-year-old son.
The steps I took and hours I spent may seem a bit ridiculous, but I’m a huge proponent of early education. Over the years, early education has been a polarizing issue in the academic world. How early is too early?
Some researchers are in favor of heavy academic preparedness, teaching 5- or 6-year-olds the basic fundamentals of reading, writing and math before they move on to elementary school.
Others subscribe to a play-and-learn model, citing foreign countries such as Finland and Estonia, where children don’t begin formal education training until age 7.
There are even some educators and parents who believe in academic redshirting or delaying a child’s kindergarten enrollment until the child is emotionally mature enough to handle the rigors of a daily academic schedule.
My wife and I decided to subscribe to the academic preparedness model, especially after reading about a study conducted by a group of Harvard economists and researchers that examined the life path of 12,000 children and their adult outcomes. The New York Times article about the study said: “Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.”
My wife and I grew up in the Philippines, a third-world country where education is a privilege and primarily reserved for those who can afford it. I went to school there briefly in the 1980s, and the system was as bleak then as it is now. A 2012 study from the Philippines Department of Labor and Employment reported that nearly 1 million children ages 5-9 had either dropped out or were not enrolled in school.
In Orange County, as I went about finding a school for my child, my mom recalled a story about my older brother. She didn’t really understand the importance of early schooling until John, four years my senior, failed an entrance exam to get into the Ateneo de Manila University’s kindergarten program, one of the top private schools in the Philippines.
It was a mistake she wouldn’t make again with the rest of her children. I had a tutor at age 3.
Hiring a tutor in the Philippines is much cheaper than it is here. In that country, a private tutor’s rate can range from 200 Philippine pesos ($5) to 500 pesos ($12) an hour. In Orange County, it starts at $15 to $25 an hour.
The tutor paid off for me, and I spent my kindergarten year at the Ateneo before my parents immigrated to Los Angeles. Once here, we lived in L.A.’s historic Filipinotown, where the schools weren’t so good, so I was bused with my sisters and brothers all the way to Encino in the San Fernando Valley.
Remembering all that, the first thing my wife and I did before deciding to enroll our oldest child in school was examine our finances.
Private school – especially in Orange County – is expensive, about $500-plus a month. Private schools can be great, especially if you want to establish a moral and spiritual foundation for a child.
But academically, private schools are harder to gauge because unlike public schools, there are no databases that allow parents to see a private school’s latest Academic Performance Index (the state’s old way of measuring a school’s academic performance through standardized test scores. The latest score is from 2013. The state has adopted Common Core and is trying to develop a new accounting system.)
We toured a few private schools and spoke to teachers, but we both knew money would be an issue.
We then explored a school within UCLA, where my wife works. The UCLA Lab School, a unique innovative school inside the college for children ages 4 to 12, is a living lab of sorts where teachers observe, study and apply different cutting-edge curriculum.
We liked the idea of our child being in a learning environment in one of the top research institutions in the world. But, tuition is $17,000 a year. No employee discount. We quickly nixed that idea.
With public school as our only option, I scoured the state’s education database. Living in Seal Beach within the Los Alamitos Unified School District, I quickly learned we were blessed.
The Rossmoor community is home to some of the best elementary schools in Orange County: Weaver, Rossmoor and Hopkinson, to name a few.
I looked through the schools’ API scores (www.cde.ca.gov/ds), visited each one during open houses and spoke to teachers and principals about their academic curriculum.
We ended up choosing Jack L. Weaver Elementary School in Los Alamitos. Aside from the school’s stellar academic reputation, we liked the year-round schedule and the academic curriculum – along with the foundation of reading, writing and math; computer coding is taught as early as kindergarten, piano in first grade.
For parents with young children, this is an important time, a critical stage of life during which we have to set the academic and social foundation for them. Our goal is to encourage them to be active and curious and develop social relationships with their peers and teachers. As a parent, I believe it’s important to place them in the best environment to do that.
Contact the writer: jpimentel@ocregister.com
