I visited an upscale Montessori School yesterday located in Dallas, Texas. My daughter has always attended tradional private schools. I found their teaching methods to be very engaging in many ways. They fully believe in teaching the written concept of math and then use hands-on manipulitives to fully engage the students awareness of how mathmatics works. This way they see it not only in written form but, they see the actual shapes and forms in their head. They say that this is very valuable because later in life if they pursue engineering, biology, the medical field , etc. it will be a life long tool.

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I recently found this web site at www.greatschools.com . Parents write in to submit reviews about their children's schools. You may search any city in the United States. You can customize your search by public school listings or, private school listings. Great schools also has a wonderful newsletter that you may sign up to receive.Please let me know what you think about this web site. It is easy to post a comment on this blog.

Some interesting facts were written in the March issue of Newsweek about Arne Duncan our new secretary of education. He lead Chicago's public schools and grew up with a mother that taught after school tutoring in a rough south side Chicago neighborhood.
He says, " We have been lying to children and their parents because states have dumbed down their standards of proficiency. " Sometimes", he says"you have to call the baby ugly."
Mr. Duncan also is referring to the No Child Left Behind program.
He would like to see many of the older teachers replaced with newer more talented teachers. Mr. Duncan thinks finding talented teachers is more important than reducing pupil-teacher ratios---and he sees a silver lining on today's economic clouds: Bright young people who might have gone into investment banking can be lured into teaching by better pay and forgiveness of student loans. By making teaching more fun, his Chicago innovations helped increase the number of applicants from two for each teaching position to 10 and 43 percent of the new hires had master's degrees. Five years of such replacements can, he says, shape public education for 30 years. From his office at the foot of Capital Hill, Duncan hopes to use federal money as a lever to move local school systems toward creative improvisations.