NYC families are choosing the best kindergarten schools for their families this week after about 1.5 months of consideration. For those who are still on the fence, this framework on choosing the best kindergarten schools is meant to help you decide if a general education, dual language program, gifted and talented program, or international baccalaureate program is the way to go.
Step 1: Become a master framer
Reframing is a design thinking tool that is the Swiss Army knife of life. The process of choosing the best kindergarten schools for your family is about framing problems correctly, identifying your goals, and making the right decision.
It is NOT about simple solutions.
So, you absolutely have to understand that the question you are asking yourself isn’t which schools are best but rather:
What does a good education mean to me and how can I provide it to my child?
Once you have the frame set around quality education, you see that a perfect school is no longer the problem you are solving for, because you uncover a dysfunctional belief:
Just attending a school isn’t enough for long term success
School is only ~6.5 hours a day for less than half the year.
Repetition and constant exposure is what builds greatness. So what are you doing with the 86% of time that your child is out of school?
Step 2: Determine when it makes sense to maximize versus satisfy
Chasing after THE VERY BEST of everything is exhausting. The due diligence and mental gymnastics you need to undertake in order to reach this designation is time consuming.
Maximizers aspire to choose the best education programs. They spend a huge amount of time and effort on the search, attending Kindergarten school tours, checking out reviews, and talking to peers. Worse, after making a selection, they are nagged by the options they haven’t investigated. Ultimately, they are likely to be less satisfied with their choices than satisficers.
So this is where it becomes important for you to decide which education decisions in your life will you maximize and which ones will you be happy enough to choose the good enough option on?
Step 3: Improve your options
Because our starting point is how to deliver a good education, the education programming that you can now consider expands. This is where summer camp, after school programs, and supplementing school comes in.
😡😡😡 But Kim, you just gave me so much more work, I thought I was only thinking about schools!!!!!
Well, hold up cowboys and cowgirls.
Firstly, here’s a shortlist of school evaluation criteria you can use, and secondly, you can thank me later for ratcheting down the pressure on choosing the absolute best kindergarten schools 😇
Most people around the world attend the local default school option. Think about that!
It’s very rare to live in a city like NYC where school choice is the default.
More importantly, even if I haven’t convinced you just yet, it should become clearer now that choosing the good enough Kindergarten is a perfectly plausible decision.
Step 4: Define goals and objectives
An original sin I see in my workplace all the time is moving the goalposts when someone is behind or in the middle of a game.
Much of the wasted time around choosing schools stem from lack of clarity in two areas:
- What you mean when you say you want a quality education
- Objectives for your child’s education
For many NYC parents, the difficulty in choosing between the four different program types comes from the fact that we know we want our children to have a challenging, rigorous education (that’s also fun!), but we don’t actually have a good sense of the end goal for the education.
If we want our children to be global citizens, then DLP and IB programs should be the only schools we vet and choose from.
If we want our children to be exposed to a diverse set of peers, then G&T programs belong nowhere on your list of 12 (as of 2022, this was still true; perhaps things will change in the future).
If we want our children to be ahead of peers, district wide G&T programs are not the choice.
You get where I am headed.
Step 5: Choose the best kindergarten schools for your family
There are a number of decision tools you can choose to help arrive at a choice:
- Intuition
- Rules
- Decision weighting
- Values analysis
- Pros/cons
- Backcasting
- Find hidden future problems
It might also be the case that leveraging more than one tool helps you arrive at the answer you need with conviction.
Coda: After the decision
Once you’ve decided which kindergarten school makes sense for your family, treat yourself! You made an important decision and you deserve a break for the hard work.
But also, remember to learn from the experience because outcomes are feedback. You’re going to have to go through his process again on a near annual basis for summer camps and after school programs, and you’ll have to choose a school again at the middle school, high school, and college level.
This means it’s important to:
- Reframe yourself as a learner
- Perform a decision audit
- Know when to pull the plug (for example, you might need to move out of a DLP program into general education class; all is not lost because there are ways to support bilingual education even in monolingual homes)
- Set tripwires to instigate change
Congratulations! You made it!
I delve into all this in greater detail in my comprehensive course on decision making for preschool and beyond – get on the waitlist to be notified when it drops.
Having gone through this process multiple times since birth in the school choice mecca that is Brooklyn, NY, I have *just a few* thoughts on this process and have gathered the best behavior science research and practices, lessons from real-life implementation, and deep experience with school evaluation criteria into a one-of-a-find course.
The goal? To help parents bust through analysis paralysis and ward off regret.
In closing, let’s give thanks to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Friedrich Froebel for American kindergarten schools. Without these two luminaries, songs, blocks, snack time, and naps might not be a part of our kids’ magical childhood memories.
