Duke School

coming up on our 3rd year with Duke School. PRO's: challenging curriculum. lots of extracurricular activities, real life projects. However, seems like we see a few kids go in the lower school classes each yr. Not a school really geared towards "individual" child. If you don't fit the Duke School Learner mold...you suddenly feel like u are under the microscope. Close monitoring of student progress is a plus but it often feels more political, financial, weed out based than on the actual growth of the student. Campus is sterile looking and less community feel compared to previous campus. Can seem elitist but we have still met some very nice individuals. not much room for informal talks with teachers unless pre arranged face to face or you are there volunteering for lunch coverage. Director seems aloof and with chain of communication instructions, you might have little to no interaction with her. Overall good school but does not value uniqueness.
—Submitted by a parent

Education/communication practices are outdated and inflexible, and decisions are made about individual children without engaging parents. Groupthink resulted in poor decisions for our child, who was labeled in ways shown to be incorrect after evaluation. Badly managed project-based learning fosters cliques. I questioned whether the children on the inside of the cliques were gaining valuable life skills as we watched our child react to being excluded. We asked an administrator for help, but her only response was to ask us what our plans were for next year. Our child received less attention after we did not renew our contract. We heard through several educator/psychologist/parent sources that DS is less flexible with meeting the needs of individual children than many other private schools in the area. Our child's behavior and overall progress improved immediately and dramatically at a new school with a better social environment and more diverse student body.
—Submitted by a parent

Duke School has a unique ability to engage children in learning unlike any school I have seen. The curriculum is demanding yet made exciting and engaging by the caring and exceptional teachers. This is a revolutionary school and the way it should be everywhere. My children have learned to love learning.
—Submitted by a parent

Our kids have learned to be leaders, work with others and most importantly to love learning . A great school, with enivornmentally friendly facilities and an amazing faculty.
—Submitted by a parent

My nieces have gone through Duke School from preschool into the Middle School. They always wake up wanting to go to school. They are inspired to love learning and have a fascination with the world here. The project-oriented learning allows them to study interesting topics in depth. They have been doing this with increasing skill from preschool on up. They become experts on a multitude of topics like aerodynamics, African tribes, Colonial healing, native plants, and so much more. In addition to reading and writing about topics, they directly observe things, experiment with them, act them out, build models to scale, collect data to graph and analyze the data mathematically. They learn to solve complex problems, and to work collaboratively with peers. As they gain expertise on a topic, the students learn to share their knowledge with others through factual and fictional writing, to represent their learning through 3D models, varied types of art work, museum-style displays, drama, computer simulation, and multi-media presentations. I ve learned almost as much from them as they have.
—Submitted by a parent