Margaret Soltan asks some interesting questions about boarding schools. "Is it trust [that leads parents to send their children to boarding school] or a kind of benign indifference?" she asks. "The parents can get on with their busy lives without the bother of a kid at home." Soltan quotes a New York Times piece by Curtis Sittenfeld (whose Prep is a creepily poignant evocation of some of the nastier sides of boarding school culture):

For me, the question isn't why parents wouldn't send a child to boarding school as much as why they would. Unless there are either severe problems at home or flat-out terrible local schools, I don't see the point. Even in the case of terrible schools, I'm not convinced that parents can't significantly augment their children's education. Among the advantages of boarding school are opportunities for independence, academic stimulation, small classes, peer companionship and the aforementioned campus beauty - but every single one of these opportunities is available at dozens of liberal arts colleges, so why not just wait a few years until the student will better appreciate such gifts and save $140,000?

Some parents made the choice because they had exhausted all local public and private options; their kids were falling through the cracks despite their best efforts to prevent that, and they finally determined that the best thing they could do for their children was to get them out of their present environment and into another one with different people, different patterns, different norms, where they could start fresh. Sometimes this worked, and sometimes it didn't--when "falling through the cracks" meant that the child was disappearing into the anonymity and impersonality of huge public schools, becoming alienated and depressed by that, getting into trouble as a result of that, then the school could work miracles. Likewise for kids whose home circumstances were so crazy that they needed to live elsewhere in order to have a shot at growing up sane. Kids who had already been through a number of schools, who had strong recidivist patterns with truancy, drugs, and so on, however, tended to have the same problems at this school as they had elsewhere; this was especially true of kids who had done time in rehab facilities.

Some parents chose boarding school because their children were "at risk" at home. A number of kids at the school where I taught were from immigrant and/or impoverished homes, homes in bad neighborhoods with bad schools and a very bad local scene. Often these were homes where only a mother presided--and often this mother had limited resources and a limited education. Kids from these homes were being sent to boarding school because their parents believed it was their only chance for their kids to get out. Keep them home, and they'll drop out, or get pregnant, or get involved in a gang, or get addicted to drugs. Send them away to school (on, it goes without saying, a full scholarship), and they will be out of the inner city and into a setting where they can learn a different way of being--where they will be taken seriously as people, where their minds and talents will be valued, and from where they will almost certainly go on to college. By and large, these parents guessed right. Their kids did stay out of trouble, and they did graduate with better prospects than they would have had if they had stayed home.

For parents in both situations, sending their children to boarding school was a difficult, often bittersweet choice--especially when the school proved to be a place where their child could thrive. I think it must be extraordinarily tough for a parent to accept that the best thing he or she can do for a child is to arrange for him or her to live far away from home. Watching families grapple with this paradox, and helping mediate between parents and kids, was a real education in itself. Parents had to accept the possibility that their children could develop better--more happily, more fully, more independently--in their absence; they also had to accept that there would be adults at the school to whom their children were closer, in a day to day sense, than to them. Teachers, meanwhile, had to respect the delicacy of their ties to both students and parents.

The decision to send a child to boarding school is, for many parents, the opposite of a blithely indifferent decision to rid themselves of an annoying teenager. It's a gut-wrenchingly difficult choice, one that is at once a huge gamble and a profound act of love. So many parents I spoke with were ambivalent about their decision; so many were shocked to find themselves going the boarding school route. They were acutely aware of the risk they were taking, and movingly hopeful about the good that would come to their children at the school. They borrowed money and mortgaged their homes and in some cases sold their homes to finance that hope. They did so thinking that there was no point in saving for college if their kid wasn't going to get there. For a striking number of parents, boarding school was an emergency rescue mission. That's one reason I feel as strongly as I do about the academic failures of the school where I taught.

I can't speak for schools like Exeter and Andover. I suspect that things are quite different at well-heeled places like that. But there are far, far more boarding schools than there are Ivy-feeder boarding schools, and my hunch is that at these schools, elitism and parental indifference play a much smaller role in enrollment than elsewhere.

My first response to the quote you cite is why should one have to wait four years for "academic stimulation, small classes, [and] peer companionship"?

My junior high and high school was a fairly selective day and boarding school - but on the west coast, which I think is a far different environment than on the east coast. I was a day student, but about half my class boarded, which was typical. A good many students at the school came there as boarders because their families lived in very rural areas (think rural Alaska, Montana, etc) where the educational and cultural opportunities were pretty slim. This is somewhat similar to your "at risk" population, but from the other end of the spectrum.

We also had a fair number of students from overseas (Malaysia, Japan, etc) whose parents wanted them to spend some time in the US, but in a fairly structured environment.

And then there a few of those who might be seen as examples of "benignly indifferent" parents. Often at least one of their parents traveled heavily on business, and some of those had divorced parents. Several had parents who had been posted overseas for work (multinational corporations or government service) for a few years to places where they didn't feel comfortable raising their children - like Syria.

The saddest case, but most stereotypical of boarding schools, was one of my friends, who had been orphaned at age 8 or so. Her guardians (aunt and uncle) felt it was too much to have her at their home along with their two children and her younger brother. They did live in a well-to-do suburb of a major city, so they didn't have some of the other reasons as an excuse. She was sent away as soon as the school would accept her - 6th grade, which meant that she was only 10 when she started (she was very bright and had skipped at least one year of school).

These comments are a version of the comments I left at Margaret Soltan's.

I have both personal and professional interests, as I've been on the board of both boarding and day schools, and I have watched my children (and other relatives) make the decision as to whether or not to go to boarding school.

Saying "boarding school" or "private school" is like saying, "vehicle". Are you talking about a sports car, a sedan, a work truck, an SUV, or an economy car? Each has its own reason for being and should be judged on those reasons. It's silly to criticize a work truck for having poor handling, or a sports car because it can't haul a sheet of plywood.

As I said on your previous post, it sounds to me like the board of Not So Marvelous School in the Berkshires (NSMSB) fell down on their jobs. Badly. It also sounds a bit like NSMSB was positioning itself someplace between an academically rigorous school and the academics-lite "therapeutic school" so popular these days--without really being honest with itself as to its mission and role in the students' lives.

In the early 1980s, I was on the board of a boarding school, The Athenian School in Danville, California. Our application numbers for boarding students were dropping, while the day student applicant pool was expanding. Our identity was in question--were we a boarding school with a day program, or a day school with a boarding program?

Why were the boarding applications falling? I looked at my own family for part of the answer. In a cohort of five families (my parents and their collective siblings) there were twenty children, of whom sixteen (80%) elected to go to boarding school for all or part of their high school years. Of those five families, there were zero divorces (which implies zero alimony and zero shared custody). Those five families had an average of four children per family. The cohort of twenty attended seven different boarding schools.

Those twenty children grew up, married, and had children, 41 of them to date, of whom 39 are at least high school age. How many went to boarding school? Two (5%), for the whole four years. One (2.5%) tried it for one year and hated the experience, mostly because that child felt that it was one too many locales to live in, as that child's parents were divorced. Of the twenty, one never married and there were six divorces. The cost of alimony and the cost to the child of managing multiple homes is part of the reason the boarding population declined.

Another part of the answer had to do with delayed parenthood. Of the Athenian class of 1969 (who were born in 1951, approximately), if we'd started having kids in our mid-twenties, there would have been legacy children of high-school age in approximately 1988. When we surveyed the classes of 1968 and 1969 (when we could have expected at least 10 kids of high school age) there were exactly zero. Our cohort had delayed beginning parenthood into our mid- to late thirties, if we had considered parenthood at all.

Another aspect of the decline in boarding school enrollment was incisively discussed by David Hicks. Here's the introduction at the National Association of Independent School's site:

Forsaking Mission for Markets
How Independent Schools Lose Their Way

In the autumn of 1996, David Hicks, the recently departed rector of St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, published an essay in The American Scholar which made his former colleagues very uncomfortable to read. Understood properly, Hicks' message should make nearly every independent school leader -- and client -- uncomfortable. The essay was titled "The Strange Fate of the American Boarding School," and its thesis is that in their worries over their declining market appeal, even the most long-standing and substantial American boarding schools have, over the past quarter century, given up their reason for being.

http://www.nais.org/publications/ismagazinearticle.cfm?ItemNumber=144330

The Athenian School is an admirable institution, that has a strong mission and educates its students well--both in character and intellectually. I don't think there has to be a choice between being nurturing and academically challenging.

Hmm, my sister went to boarding school because my parents were in Saudia. I'd have liked to go, because I thought it was a better academic place, and that was the reason we had considered one for my oldest daughter before she died.

I've learned a lot reading this. I've a friend who went to Andover and whose son went to Kent as a prep school for his eventual college and med school days and was happy with it.

But, my oldest living daughter went to a normal school in Plano, TX, though I've had friends send their kids to Hockaday and St. Marks.

Almost everyone was trying to do better for their kids, though at Marymount (sp?), at Kingston on Thames, many of the parents wanted to break their kids out of isolation and expose them to a more middle class way of life. My sister had some interesting dorm mates that way.