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Choose a Dream School for Your Children

It used to be a simple decision: your parents sent you to the only school in the neighbourhood and the biggest   choice they had to make was whether to put you on a school bus or to carpool with the neighbours.  If only it were that simple now.

Beijing has one of the most diverse offerings of schools anywhere in the world, with international schools offering British, American, International Baccalaureate (IB), and even home grown programmes. In addition, schools also offer varying degrees of Chinese learning, extracurricular activities, and homework. The choices are bewildering. Added to the fact that your child’s education represents, potentially, a quarter-of-a-million US dollar investment, this involves big bucks and anything to do with the future of your own child has big consequences. So how do you select a dream school for your child?

At our kindergarten’s Ivy Academy and Ivy Bilingual we meet annually with parents of graduating students to introduce elementary schools in Beijing and recommend schools that are suitable for their children’s profiles and learning styles. It’s refreshing in these meetings to hear about how parents can be at complete opposite ends in terms of their expectations for their children. This alludes to the most important point of this article: A dream school is one that best reflects the parents’ own personal values and beliefs.

Too often we have seen situations where parents follow the advice of their friends and send their child to a supposedly “hot” school only to be disappointed because the school did not teach enough Chinese or gave too much/too little homework. In a study we conducted in 2004 where we asked Beijing parents what were the most important factors they considered when selecting schools, one thing was clear: There wasn’t one single overwhelming factor that parents considered. Instead, there were a wide variety of factors, with six main reasons that were mentioned by more than 40 percent of parents.

What Were Your Main Factors For Selecting An Elementary School?

This reinforced our belief that families look for different things in schools. Figuring out what your own priorities are for your child is the first thing you need to do before you make any other decision.

One of the surprises that came out of this study is that teacher quality is the least considered factor among the top six reasons. Part of this could be explained in that parents rely more on the system and the curriculum, rather than the skills of individual teachers to gauge the effectiveness of the school. However, most of us will agree that teachers have by far the greatest impact on a student, and we all remember that one special teacher who took us to that moment of Eureka! Differences in individual teachers also explain why families with similar goals can have wildly different opinions about the same school.

After you’ve written down a list of your priorities, how do you gauge which school best meets those criteria? Revisiting the top six reasons for selecting a school, we can place them into three categories: first, the “hardware” category, which includes Facilities and Location; second, the “software” category, which includes Curriculum and Teacher Quality; third, the “word of mouth” category, which includes Reputation and Friend Recommendations. 

Of the three categories, the “hardware” factors can be easily evaluated through a school visit and asking for a tour of the facilities. The “word of mouth” factors are subjective and should be used only to augment and add colour to your judgment, especially since these are opinions from other families who may have different needs. Of the “software” factors, curriculum can be clearly understood through the degree conferred (e.g., IB or British GCE curriculum) as well as the daily class schedule. This leaves us with teacher quality, which is not a simple criterion to assess through mere school visits, and which we think should be one of the single most important factors in your assessment.

I offer a simple way to assess the quality of teachers through simple economics. A proxy for teacher ability is compensation, and a school that invests in its teachers should be able to attract and retain the best of them. Several elementary schools in Beijing such as ISB and WAB publish their pay rates publicly on their Web sites. For those that don’t, you can search for their recruiting ads on the Internet, and a recent search turned up the compensation schemes of several schools. You may be surprised to find that there is a huge difference in how teachers are paid; and yes, you should be concerned if your child is attending a school where teachers are paid at a fraction of other schools while charging a similar level of tuition.

I share with you the 2006 budget at Ivy Academy as an illustration. By far the largest cost category at Ivy is teaching staff cost, making up 49.1 percent of total budget. Including support staff, people costs are 68 percent. Together with facilities, these three categories make up 95.8 percent of our total budget, with the remaining 4.2 percent allocated to marketing, operations, and other miscellaneous costs. Compare this chart with your reasons for choosing a school.

My point? You want a school that is spending money on your priorities. If a school is spending 30 percent of its budget on marketing, it is allocating precious resources to something that does not benefit your child.

2006 Ivy Academy Budget Breakdown by Category

You will probably not convince many schools to share their budgets with you, but even if you cannot find any information about pay scales of teachers, they can be easily estimated by asking for a list of teacher biographies. Teachers with Harvard training or teachers with 10 years of prior experience at an established school are both likely to be well compensated.

My recommended approach for selecting a dream school is this: Be truthful to yourself about what your values and goals for your child are. After which, evaluate the schools based on your priorities while using “word of mouth” factors cautiously. Most of the factors you evaluate can and should be assessed objectively, and I have also offered a method for how you can evaluate teacher quality. I believe that it is possible to choose a dream school for your child, but in the end, you may find that the hardest decision is reaching a common understanding between you and your spouse on the priorities.