Dwight-Englewood School

Not a good fit for my 6th grader – read why

Below is a description of the most significant issues my family experienced with DE.

1) Homework – both quantity and policies

Homework was assigned every night including weekends, sometimes in all subjects. They claimed it should take 1-2 hours. My child often could not complete the work in that timeframe. Furthermore, that amount of homework, even if completing were not an issue, left him with maybe 2 hours of free time in any given day – long school day, long bus ride were contributing factors. Can you imagine the backlash if we treated our employees this way?

DE requires homework to be done on holiday if the family leaves before the holiday starts. For a 6th grader? Too extreme.

Homework notes must be written home and to multiple authorities every time an assignment is not handed in on time. This caused my child severe anxiety.

DE refuses to quantify how much homework counts toward grades. In most school’s I interviewed poor homework performance led to a roughly 20% doc in that course’s grade. DE told us there was no policy and remaining inflexible that homework must be there. We were left with the opinion that our child would fail a course if all homework was not in on time. Note he did complete every assignment but was often a day or two late.

2) My child was constantly criticized for not speaking up in class. However they did admit that when called upon he knew the answers. My child is an introvert. I felt they wanted robots not children.

3) No grades are given in 6th grade. I found this to be a bigger problem than I had expected. Since we did not think to record his score on every quiz or assignment that was graded, at the end of the year we really had no idea how he did academically. When we complained about not knowing, the dean told us we should have kept track. Report card narratives are given a couple times, but are not particularly helpful and were often excessively negative – more negative that any performance review I ever gave to an employee.

4) One general note of caution: I should not have shared with the school any difficulties we were having at home. My child’s behavior in school was always socially correct, he only missed 4 days of school early in the year. He did have concentration problems early in the school year, due to lack of sleep, and difficulty with beginning Spanish. However, because I shared too much private information, my child was labeled as likely ADHD, as having school refusal problem, and having emotional problems. That over reaction by DE’s administration haunted all of us throughout the remainder of the year.

There are many wonderful academic and extra curricular activities at DE, as there are at every elite private school, but based on our experience I would strong recommend against choosing DE.