To Chinese parents, private high schools have always been a place exclusively for children of the elite families because of its prohibitively high tuition.
But things might be changing as more parents are turning to private high schools as an alternative, spurred by a surge on scholarships being awarded by exclusive private high schools.
The heat can be detected when TEAK, a nonprofit organization that aims to help middle-school students secure scholarships to get into private high schools, reached out to the community in November. TEAK was founded 10 years ago to provide free after-school and summer tutoring services to talented middle-school students with the condition that they have to include private schools in their high-school applications.
After holding their first press conference specifically for the Chinese media, TEAK officials received hundreds of phone calls from interested parents. The organization decided to offer an information session for the Chinese parents. “We are so excited with the turnout,” said Lynn Sorensen, the executive director at TEAK.
TEAK came to the community at a time when parents are increasingly frustrated by the oversized classes in public schools. The issue of overcrowded classrooms has long been a thorn in New York City’s public education system. The New York State Education Department approved the city’s class size plan in 2007, which aimed for 20 students per class in grades K-3, and 23 students per class in all other grades by 2011. But a report released by the Manhattan Borough President’s Office recently found the city has not met its goal.
The report found that approximately 38 percent of public school students are in overcrowded classrooms. For primary and high-school students, the situation is worse. Forty-seven percent of elementary school students and 51 percent of high school students are attending classes that are overcrowded. To fulfill its own plan, the city needs to add about 167,842 new seats, a number that is not in line with the city’s current capital plan. In comparison, the average classroom size for private schools is about 15 to 20 students.
“If we can afford it, we’d love our kids to get into a private high school where they can be focused on by teachers. It’s much better than staying at a public school when you are only one of the thousands kids the teachers have to take care of,” said Chaoping Wu, father of Kevin Wu, an 8th grader from P.S. 1 in Manhattan.
Kevin, a top student in his grade, and a participant of the TEAK program, will be graduating from middle school next summer. He took the entrance exam for Stuyvesant High
School but also applied for five private high schools. If he had to choose between Stuyvesant and a private school on his list, Kevin said he would have to make a hard decision.
“Stuyvesant is a good school, but it’s also a big one. It’s crowded and has many students. I don’t know whether my teacher will even be able to remember my name in the first semester,” Kevin said.
Tami Leung, a first year high school student, knows the differences first hand. Leung graduated from Robert F Wagner, a public junior high school in Queens, and enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a Catholic school, this summer. “When I was in middle school, there were 400 students in my grade, and now my whole grade has 50 students. Many times, I did get chance to ask the teacher questions before, but now the teachers often ask me whether I have any questions,” Leung said.
Classroom size was not a concern for many Chinese parents, who are more familiar with the classrooms in China, where an average class would have 50 to 60 students. But when their children enroll in a public school in the United States, things change. “The differences between the education style in China and in the United States make classroom size a big issue here,” said Pauline Chu, president of the Chinese-American Parents’ Association.
Chu explains, in China most likely students just sit in the class and are lectured by the teacher. They learn through memorization rather than through discussion and the exchange of ideas among students and teacher, as is common in the United States.
Sometimes desks are arranged in round circles rather than lined up in rows. “The American style of education is designed for a smaller class; otherwise, it won’t be able to get desirable results,” Chu said.
Of course, the costs of a private high school, which sometimes could reach $40,000 a year - almost the same as an Ivy League college – is still forbiddingly high for most Chinese families.
Sorensen said the opportunity for scholarships varies in different schools. But the overall number of scholarships from private schools has been increasing in order to attract talented students from low-income families. About half of the 225 students graduated from TEAK got into private high schools and all of them won scholarships that covered 95 percent of their tuition.
With a student population of more than 1 million, the Department of Education does not seem to worry that private schools will drain the pool of talented students away from the city schools.
Melody Meyer, spokesperson for the DOE, pointed out the portion of scholarships provided by the private schools is still a fraction of the growing number of New York middle schoolers. Also, children like Kevin and Tami don’t have to get into a private school to get the cozy and intimate learning environment they look for because the city’s new small high schools are catering to them.
Since 2002, the city has opened about 300 smaller high schools, with full capacity ranging from 500 to 600 students, one fourth of an average comprehensive high school. Their academic performances have shown size does matter. Last year, for the 47 small schools with graduating senior classes, the graduation rate was 76 percent on average, compared to 56 percent citywide.
But for many Chinese parents, graduation is not the ultimate goal. Their primary concern is whether a school can send their children to an Ivy League or other elite universities. “None of the small high schools is good enough to compete with Stuyvesant in this sense,” said Leo Lee, former president of the Chinese Outreach of the PTA of Stuyvesant High School.
Meyer admitted that it might be too early for the small high schools to become Ivy League incubators because the majority of them haven’t started to graduate students yet. But they do have the potential. “If the parents look for schools that screen students for high-academic performance, we have them,” she said.
Meyer said so far four of the small schools admit only students from the top of their classes, including two new ones that only opened in this summer. The difference between these four and the specialized high schools like Stuyvesant is that students don’t have to take an entrance exam; what matters is their average academic performance during their middle school years.
“I won’t say they would get the same reputation as Stuyvesant immediately, but all students in the four schools are academically comparable,” said Meyer said.
