Los Gatos Is Well Known For Great Public Schools, But 1/3 of Kids In Town Attend Private Schools!

Amazingly, fully 1/3 of the children in the town of Los Gatos are attending private schools, according to Money Magazine. That is an incredibly high statistic! (In Saratoga, it's 11.2% who attend private schools.)

The article appeared in the "Best Places to Live" series (Los Gatos didn't make the top 100 and neither did Saratoga) and it states that 65.9% of the children in the town of Los Gatos attend public schools (which would include the Los Gatos, Moreland, and Union elementary districts) and 33.9% attend private schools. The average for the "top 100" for money magazine is 10.5% private and the rest public.

What's going on here? It would be interesting to delve deeper into this issue and I would welcome feedback on this from readers. Why go to all the effort, when the public schools range from good to great?

Part of it, I believe, is that for some people, a school affiliated with a religion will be highly important no matter how good the public schools are. That would be the case in my family.  Our kids attended the now defunct Casa Maria Montessori School (which was run by the Holy Names Sisters), St Mary's, then Bellarmine Prep and Notre Dame High School, both in San Jose.  For families like mine, the ethics and religous upbringing are central to the development of the whole person - so school is more than academics and sports, and for us, it's worth it to pay tuition and make other sacrifices to get the kids into these schools, even when the public schools are good or even excellent.

Here in town there are several religously affiliated elementary schools: St Mary of the Immaculate Conception (Catholic), Yavneh Day School (Jewish, Conservative), Los Gatos Christian School (Protestant). I've known locals to send their kids to Valley Christian, to Yavneh, and to other schools that offered a strong religious background and support for the family's values. But there are other excellent private schools that are not religiously affiliated, too, such as Hillbrook Elementary and Mulberry School, and they also draw from the town's populace.

At the high school level, kids drive much farther to get to private schools. Again, many are religious (Mitty, Bellarmine, Valley Christian, and more)  but some are secular, such as Harker and Castilleja (all girls).

It's not all about who's "in the schools" either. It would be an easy answer to say that those not in the Los Gatos School District (which has the highest scores in the town) are those who are paying tuition, but it just isn't so. Plenty of families who could send their kids to Los Gatos High don't. And it's a very high percentage. It would be interesting to see the numbers on this.

Perhaps it's the money, and the fact that folks here can afford to pay tuition and make that choice.

But whatever the cause, I'm glad to see this statistic, especially in an election year here in town. So many of the townsfolk equate the Los Gatos public schools (often neglecting Union and Moreland areas) with townlife but they forget that many of us who love living in Los Gatos are not affiliated with the local public schools directly. We want the public schools in all districts to succeed, of course, but our kids may be elsewhere, by choice and with some sacrifice. Los Gatos schools are a great part of why people love calling Los Gatos home, but clearly, for many, it's not "the" reason. 

RE: Los Gatos Is Well Known For Great Public Schools, But 1/3 of Kids In Town Attend Private Schools!

Religion is the least likely explanation. A more likely one is the appallingly low academic standards in the California public schools, which, even for those at the top, are a joke compared to similar grade-level standards in Europe and East Asia.

It's typical for a student transferring here from those parts of the world to be at least one grade ahead of his or her US peers. For Russians and most East Europeans, the norm is two grades ahead.

My child attends a Blue Ribbon school with an API average north of 900. He's in first grade and is still given assignments to spell three-letter words, add 2 and 2, etc. We're essentially homeschooling him, ie, we do the real teaching (advanced addition of numbers up to 100, spelling of multi-syllabic words, reading chapter books, foreign languages) and his teacher does the 8-to-3 babysitting. Aka "socialization."

The public schools are a disgrace. We infantilize our children. For what policy objective no one can say.

RE: Los Gatos Is Well Known For Great Public Schools, But 1/3 of Kids In Town Attend Private Schools!

Hi Thibaud,

Thanks for your input. Our kids went to St. Mary's in Los Gatos, and then on to private, Catholic high schools. For many of the families we know, religion was the main reason for the costly choice of paying tuition.

That said, I understand that standards are higher in some places, and that could also be a compelling reason for private schools. What is intriguing, though, is the question of why it's so different between Los Gatos and Saratoga?