Why did you leave your private East Bay elementary school?
There are many glowing reviews of private elementary schools in the Oakland/Berkeley area on BPN, and I’m sure each school has its strengths. I’m interested in hearing from parents who decided to take their kids out of a Berkeley/Oakland private school. What school did your child attend and why did you decide to switch? What didn’t feel like a great fit? Did you feel like there were certain personality or behavior traits of students who did well or didn’t do well there? How does your child’s experience at their prior school differ from their current one (pre-COVID)?
Jun 5, 2020
Parent Replies
Excellent question! We left Ecole Bilingue, but were sad to leave. The good part first: EB offers excellent French immersion. Our child's progress in French stunned us and we met families from all over the world. Also, the curriculum is very global in its coverage, and the school doesn't feel "ritzy". All this is hard to find here, so we were sad to leave. The decent: EB offers a good after-school program (which could be better supervised), and an acceptable, if bare-bones, social-emotional learning curriculum. For us, the big problem was math and science instruction. EB has revised its math and science curriculum, and brought in one strong science instructor. But EB does not compare in these domains with other top bay area private schools in terms of the amount of instruction, the level of instruction, the number of specialist teachers, student test scores, and extra-curricular teams and opportunities. EB is very focused on providing excellent opportunities for students who are weak in French to catch up; they succeed in this very challenging task but it comes at a cost. EB administrators compare themselves to other Francophone schools, whereas for us, the relevant benchmark was what other bay area private schools charging similar tuition offered.