Welcome back to the Smart Dad podcast. Here we go. Another big topic. And I tell you what, this is a topic that applies as long as you have kids, you need to educate. We're talking about picking schools. You're going to educate your kids, but how do you pick the right school? And I got to tell you,

I've been doing this a long time picking schools, not just for my kids, but helping others pick the schools for their kids. And I like patterns. I like systems. Remember system is spelled S Y S T E And to me that's an acronym. It stands for save your self time, energy, money. So when I put a system together, I try it, I test it. It's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be better than having no system.

So when you have a preschooler or you have someone going to graduate school, professional school, anything in between, welding school, it doesn't matter if it's kindergarten, middle school, high school, all these factors, I wanna give you a framework you can use and you can analyze and just get a perspective that fits better. So there are, from my perspective, 12,

12 words to start with the letter P and each of these will encompass different factors that people weigh. Now the first one is prison. No, I'm kidding because a lot of schools do look like prisons and you got to wonder what are we keeping people out or keeping kids trapped in there? But no, and the next word also is not perfection or perfect. You're not going to find a perfect school. So maybe somewhere between a prison

perfection. So here are the 12 Ps and they're alphabetized. I only do that so I can remember them. The first the first word is pace. The second word is parents. The third is participation. The fourth is peers. The fifth is performance.


The sixth is personalization. The seventh is philosophy. The eighth is preparation.

The ninth is prestige. The tenth is price. The 11th is protection. And the 12th is proximity. Now these are not in any order other than alphabetical order. Let me go through and explain what these mean and then what I want you to do when you have to pick a school with your child or for your child, with your student or for your student, maybe even for yourself if you're going back to school.

is I want you to rank these one through 12. So let's explain them first and then we'll go through the exercise. And remember this is not just theory, right? I have 40 years of doing this with parents, with families in my neighborhood, all over the country. I have 30 years of parenting my own kids and picking schools for them.

We've done public school, we've done private school, we've done homeschool, we've done a homeschool blend, we've done online, we've done unschooling. We've done a plethora of things just in my family. Some students, some of my kids have been in one system their entire lives. Others have been in five systems in seven years. And I don't know what's right or wrong. I'm just telling you what we did. So let's go through these. And as you hear,

and you resonate connect, just think, okay, how important is this to me? Top half, bottom half. Top few, bottom few. And write them down, talk to your spouse, talk to your kids if you need to, and figure out what's most important, and that'll help you make your decisions. All right, so first let's talk about pace. The pace is the heartbeat of the school. There are kids...


Bouncing in and out of class full of stories full of energy and they want to tell you about their day And it's not just their personality. It's the way that the school is set up other kids They come home fried like they just ran a 5k with a backpack full of Some schools really cram eight subjects into six hours and then send you two hours of homework Others keep it lean

keep it lively, keep it age appropriate. So school is more like an adventure, not a grind. I have seen lots of students be moved from the long drawn out days to shorter, lighter days and more hands on experimental. I've seen students go from five day week campuses, eight hours a day, seven hours a day to two days a week on campus, three days a week of independent study.

The reality is 8 out of 10 students say from preschool to college that school stresses them out often. It's not just the academics. It's really the pace itself that can wear somebody down. So as a smart dad, think about pace. Does this school's tempo match our lifestyle? Match my kids lifestyle or does that hijack it?

Is it kicking you out of the pilot seat and saying, I got this, you have to keep up with me. It's a school burns you out. The pace is too much or burns your child out. It's not going to fit. It's not going to work. You need to keep that in mind. The next word, parents. Now there's a couple of angles here. First of all, the other grownups in the program are going to be in your life. If you're talking about sending a kid to college,

A lot of colleges have communities of parents. If you're talking about preschoolers, man, the way these parents raise their kids, it's going to affect how you raise your kids. Some folks, they find travel buddies, they find neighborhood front lawn friends, and the parents are the people who influence in your school. There's a dad I know, he made best friends.


at a dad's event. was like, I don't know, it like a gun event. They were shooting paintballs or whatever. He didn't know the guy. They're eating some burned hot dogs and now they're coaching little league together and they get to be friends. Other schools, you you show up, you drop your kid off, you go inside and it's either so big or so cold and callous that you never feel like you see the same person again. I don't know what stage of life you're in, but if the other parents matter to you,

You're going to keep that in mind. Also, some schools, the model makes you the teacher. If you're in a homeschooling or hybrid model, you are the teacher. That's a serious commitment. Is it worth it? Are you going to do it? Is your spouse going to do it? I don't know. It's up to you, but parental involvement will be something to consider. I are these people you're going to link arms with and you're going to be involved with? Are you going to have a role that you need to define? This is not just an academic decision.

It's relational in along those lines. The next word participation. Okay. Some parents just show up at back to school night, open house night and graduation. Others. You've got Halloweens, potlucks, picnics, fundraisers, field trips, decorating for holidays, hallways, carnivals. And there are schools that run on participation, older students, mentor, the younger students.

The cheerleaders decorate and banners go in the hallways. And colleges and universities, clubs are created and everyone's locked in. Some schools, football, Texas, where we are, right? Football is everything. Other places, it's fine arts. And so is there participation, school spirit? Do you want that? Do you care? Well, you need to know if that's something you need to do, you need to think about how much you measure that in your list.

Some folks just say, what's the minimum? Smart dads aren't going to do that. Smart dads are going to ask what kind of connection and contribution is possible here, whether I'm really busy at work or life is a little bit slower because participation, it's not just a task. It's an open door for you to walk through. The fourth P word is peers. Of course peers are so powerful in your child's life. Your children,


used to be around seventh grade to ninth grade, you could really see the direction of a child based on their peers. Now it's down to third and fourth grade. When students go off to college, when they go to medical school, dental school, law school, their peers can often guide them.

Students with driven peers around them are half as likely to drop out of the program half So if your student has some drive, you're gonna want to put that student around other students so peers If you go visit a campus Watch how they interact I turned down Rice University Which I love to go to Texas A University, which I love when I was an undergrad going to the campus It was night and day

The peers, the students I saw at Rice, I talked to, brilliant. And they loved their textbooks. They hugged their textbooks when they walked. Generically speaking, they were staring at concrete, hugging textbooks, walking around campus. Visited Texas A University, they had howdy week each semester, and the entire student body practices saying howdy across campus. Howdy, howdy, howdy. Longhorns, horns up, right? Texas Tech, guns up.

Your school, your college has their thing. A lot of school spirit at every level is determined by the peers or their peer mentors. This is the tribe you're joining. Okay dads, if you don't care about that, that's fine. But I can tell you it's going to affect your child. The next P is the word performance. So this is multi-layered. Okay, you've got academic performance, which shows up in test scores.

You also have teachers, right, who are integral to the academics and the test scores, but you also have extracurriculars. So are students thinking, are they doing their academics at a performance that you're comfortable with, at a level you're comfortable with? Test scores, are they hitting the scores? And test scores aren't everything, but the trajectory of the test scores tells you if a school is increasing, declining, or holding steady.


Teachers, how are the teachers? Are they staying around? Do they come and go? Are they getting fired? And then some of you are driven by fine arts, by sports, by STEM, by leadership, by models, robotics, all those extracurriculars.

Whatever you think about performance, you're going to have to rate that. And just know, the great teachers, the top 25%, will actually advance their average student one and a quarter academic years in just one school year. That means a few years of getting top teachers, and you can literally advance or recover an entire grade. The bottom 25%, they...

average about half a year of growth for the student. So the teachers who are the worst teachers will only move your kid half a school year in the same nine months. So if you have performance you want to make sure you're measuring, you need to know what you're looking at. Academics, teachers, test scores, extracurricular. Okay, personalization is so important. Some of us just tell our kids go to school, figure it out. It's life.

It's like a factory. Find your own way. Okay, that's your choice. That's fine. Others, I want to be able to have custom classes. I want to study not just English. I want to study Elizabethan English or whatever. I want just, I don't want writing. I want creative writing. I want this sort of writing. You think about colleges and universities and medical schools and dental schools and law schools and trade schools. There's personalization there. How early do you want to start that?

If you're homeschooling, in Texas, there's almost no state oversight. You've got a lot of room to innovate and it's on you, you're the parent. New York and California, you're certified, you're structured, you're reporting and the state is involved. whatever level of personalization that you value, you need to say, hey, this is number 10 or number two. It's in the middle, I don't care. When you see your child, do you want...

Kelly Moore (14:00.558)
everything modeled around what is best for your child or do want your child to figure it out in a one-size-fits-all system? Neither one is right or wrong. The seventh P is philosophy. Philosophy is interesting and I'm working on my PhD and I'm taking these philosophy classes. You've got Montessori. Montessori is program-driven where kids lead classical schools. They have Latin and logic, lab schools.

have this hands-on discovery and you have reverse classrooms where there's not a lot of teaching time. It's involved in class. Other schools are more structural. It's private, it's public, it's parochial, it's Catholic, right? It's Baptist. Some are all boys, some are all girls, some are co-ed, some are just K to five or pre-K to five. Others are pre-K to 12, private school.

Catholic school, public school, and you run through the whole system. you've got to figure out the structure. Others are very mission driven. They're faith based, Catholic school, Jewish school, like I said, Protestant school. Some are STEMs focused or STEAM, S-T-E-M, science, technology, engineering, math. Others are arts and others are medical. There's just a wide variety. So are you?

Bothered by the philosophy? Does the philosophy drive your decision? Again, I want you to rate this. It's not just a buzzword, what's the philosophy? But it's the lens your child will see and learn through, and the teachers will as well. So if it's important to you, you just ask yourself, smart dad, does this school's story, does this school's purpose support ours, or does it go against it? Does it contradict it? The eighth.

we cover is preparation. So this is the long game. From preschool to medical school, dental school, law school, veterinary school, welding school, I said, woodworking school, mechanics school. What are we preparing for? And that's going to really sway what you're doing. If it's academics, great. College prep. If it's I want real life robotics, great.


Those schools exist programming. If I want to have half my day set aside so I can go to work as a high school student. If I want to do night school in college, elementary school, I want to be on the playground. I know a school that's third grade to I think it's eighth grade here in Texas and it is outdoors. Kids get up and run. It's an all boys school and it's amazingly popular and it's got a very limited window. That's

That's what the school does. They're preparing them for life, for manhood. Here's another one you might be looking at prestige. This is our ninth. Now prestige can be real. It can be the elite magnet school of your district. It can be the prep school that you send your son to your daughter to and success there guarantees a path forward. Others it's keeping up with the Joneses. Some

It's legacy. well, my father and my grandfather attended this school. Therefore dot dot dot. And even honestly, some schools, it's just branding. It's just shiny. It's just, I made a magazine. So if prestige matters to you, you need to figure out, does it open doors or does it just inflate egos? Kind of like when I do business coaching, I tell CEOs and business owners,

Revenue feeds your ego. Profit feeds your family. Does prestige feed your ego or does prestige feed your child's education? It might be both. It might not matter to you. I'm just putting it out there for you to consider. A couple more here. The 10th is price. Of course, we have dollars, but you have time.

and you have energy. So what are you paying for your education, for your child, for your adult student, for yourself? If you're paying taxes, property taxes, those oftentimes pay for public school, but you still have a baseline supplies, uniforms, tech fees, field trips, lunches, fundraisers, cookie sales, chocolate sales, private schools. They have their own tuitions and you pay for other things.


What about like bus routes, transportation? know, the public schools, often will come, the kid gets picked up right by your house, boom, you're done, you go on about your work day. Private schools don't have the public school transportation. You might have to drive across town, drive across your state. So some folks will leave their neighborhood public school to go to a private school. That's fine. The price is not just time and money. It's also energy.

So smart dads are going to ask themselves, what is this school really costing us? Remember time, energy, money. If you have a system, you save yourself S Y S time, energy, T E couple more protection is our 11th P word. Protection is foundational. It's in this more than just locked doors and gates. You can't get through.

If you're going to a school where there's an age disparity, maybe it's three or four years, maybe it's eight or nine years. Are the younger kids physically safe around the older kids? Are they emotionally safe? Are they walking up the same hallways getting knocked down on purpose or on accident? Does your school have bullying policies? Now listen, you might say, they need to grow up. I'm not going to argue with you, but you might have to say one day my kid is either the bully or he or she got bullied.

I want to know what's going on there. What about emotional safety? What about teachers teaching things or saying things in ways that are intimidating to your kid? What about digital guardrails? Some schools locked down browsers, other schools, well, I didn't know kids knew a work around. So protection is going to be important. And I'm going to say on this one, smart dads, listen to your wife, the women.

for whatever reason, from my historical perspective, the moms I've dealt with, they notice these red flags first, not always, but usually. So if she's uneasy, pay attention, don't brush it off. Check it out. If it seems irrational and you say, I can't prove it right or wrong, say, Hey, I'm going to listen to you. We're going to put this in our list. We're going to number these one through 12. We're going to stack rank these. I hear you. And finally, not because it's least important, but just alphabetically,


The 12th is proximity. How close are you to the school? Are you five minutes away walking? Are you an hour and 45 minutes away and one way trip? Is it easy to access Monday to Friday? Cause that's when they go to school or do you have trouble getting there? Because even though it's close, there's a lot of traffic in the area. there lots of kids nearby where you can have

Relationships, familially, kids can have peers they connect with, parents you can connect with. So remember, these are gonna blend. But if proximity matters to you, keep it in mind. Remember, public schools have closer boundaries usually. So the kids who go to school, the students, are gonna be closer to one another. Private schools, they will draw from all over the place. And so it might be hard to have friends nearby.

Same with colleges and universities. Some students go to a lot of local schools. Some colleges and universities draw from all the way across the country or the world. Does that matter to you? So smart dads, does this school work for the lifestyle we're actually living? I've seen parents sign their kids up. They think it's gonna work. They say we're gonna do a whole year here and they don't even make it.

Christmas. They finished the first semester but they physically can't make it happen. It just became too much. Maybe they moved, maybe the job moved them, but sometimes things happen. So at least weigh that. Okay so we have our 12 P's. Here's what I want you to do. If you're taking notes, I want you to think about this and they're alphabetized but you write

You know, maybe low, medium, high and kind of next to them and kind of regroup them. So remember the first one was pace. Then we had parents and participation. Next was peers and performance and personalization. Then we had philosophy. We have preparation and prestige and price. Then we have protection and proximity. So those are the 12 areas I like to


analyze and then I force my parents and the students to stack rank them 1 to 12. If you say I've got all the money in the world, then number 12 is price. You don't care. If you say I am NOT traveling outside of this range, then proximity is number one. If you say I am going to a Catholic school, well then you know you're gonna pick a parochial, a Catholic school. That's your philosophy, right? Philosophy is number one. If I'm homeschooling,

Well then, right? Parent, you're number one. Philosophy's up there, participation. So as you weigh these, I have found it helps to have a system. So the takeaway from today is, well, I don't know if this works or not, Derek. Of course it works because any system is better than no system. So if you're picking schools for next year or in two years or colleges around the corner,

high schools around the corner for your student. Keep these in mind. It will challenge you. And then I do want you to check back with me because with our motivation code tools, we can personalize this. You might say, I don't care about personalization, but even within a one size fits all system, there can be personalization. You might say, my kid is emotionally not ready to be far away. Okay. Within proximity matters.

but maybe it's something you want to work on because I don't want to leave you emotionally weak. I want to grow you as a dad emotionally. That's a smart dad. If you're not on the same page with the mother of your kids, again, whether you're married or not, you can at least agree that some of these are my top and some of these are her top and some of these are my bottom two or three or four five. Some of these are her bottom two, three, four or five. So at least you can

negotiate and navigate. Nobody sees eye to eye on everything. If you were exactly the same as your spouse, one of you would be unnecessary. So this week, as you consider the future of your child, as you consider finances, or if you consider family and faith, all those different aspects that we weigh every decision. Now we have 12 different P's for picking schools. Remember,


No place is a prison. I mean, except prison. No place is perfect.

but the right place can help your students soar. It can fit your family rhythm and it can support the values that you elevate. Visit the campuses, talk to teachers and principals, find other parents whose students have gone there and do go there. Listen to your spouse and above all, trust that you do know

how to do this. You do know what's best for your child and then make the decision and move forward. You're not just choosing a school, no pressure here, but you're shaping a child's story, your child's story. And by doing that, you're thinking like a smart dad.