‘Brearley Tops Survey of Private Schools’

Ranking schools, public or private, by how well they might have done on college admissions to a particular college, Harvard notwithstanding, or how wealthy a school happens to be, is an inadequate way to do justice to an interesting and complex question: Is a particular school successful or not in providing students with a quality education? [New York, “Brearley Tops Survey of Private Schools,” January 31, 2008].

As was widely reported two years ago, Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School was selected by a panel of educational experts and journalist who write widely on educational issues as the outstanding high school among New York City private schools for 2005 (see Blackboard Awards 2005). The panel used a wide range of appropriate criteria, from effectiveness of curriculum, to the quality of the faculty and the physical plant to college admissions as a whole.

RICHARD SOGHOIAN
Headmaster
Columbia Grammar & Prep
New York, N.Y.

I may be in a good position to comment because the private Quaker school I head does not report its assets to the IRS and hence was unranked and unmentioned in the article.

Letter grades are summative, and there’s no way to sum up a school by the two incredibly narrow criteria you chose. Indeed, I would question whether any amassing of statistics will present a satisfactory overall portrait of the qualities of any school, public or private.

Unfortunately, our society is very prone to use statistics in ways that go beyond their capacity to capture the real world, an issue I have my students grapple with in their International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class. I was very sorry to see The New York Sun go down this path also.

MICHAEL NILL
Head of School
Brooklyn Friends School
Brooklyn, N.Y.

As a parent of two sons who received private school educations from nursery school through high school, I am always interested in how the private schools deliver the goods, in spite of all the hype surrounding them.

While I am sure that Brearley is doing an excellent job by its students, I am surprised that one of the article’s main criteria is in relation to how many of its graduating seniors are accepted into Harvard.

Despite all the hype associated with Harvard, it is truly a cakewalk when compared to the rigorous standards of schools such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology and California Institute of Technology, where both of my sons recently graduated.

ADINA KUTNICKI
Ridgewood, N.J.

The schools on the top of your list are excellent institutions, but so are the rest of your entries. First, you choose two categories that are measures of wealth. Second, you focus exclusively on secondary education.

As an industry-wide policy, independent schools do not participate in any system of rankings because we understand that there is no standard measure for how well a school performs because we believe that there is no standard student.

We see our responsibility as providing the environments for each of our students to grow and learn from the moment they arrive in our schools at the ages of four and five to the day they graduate.

Our desired outcome is not admission to a single college. While no head of school would turn down large and generous gifts from alumnae(i) and parents that supported the educational mission of the learning community, we all know that our success as fundraisers is not the measure of our success as educators.

GEORGE DAVISON
President
Guild of Independent School
Head of School
Grace Church School
New York, N.Y.

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