(I just sent a humongous e-mail to an online friend about choosing schools here in Shanghai. It's a shame to let it go to waste, so I'm going to put it on the weblog in chunks. First, the final section on how Jodi and I are going about "planning", as best we can, Charlotte and Maryann's education.)

Here's the decision process that Jodi and I are going through, maybe it will help. We have a baby (Maryann) and a toddler (Charlotte), no plans for more. We plan to be in Shanghai at least through middle school for Charlotte. We're not rich, we save a little, and our current savings are going towards an MEd program for me and another BA for Jodi, so we need something we can work into our month-to-month budget, at least in the short term. I would like our girls to have the option of going to college in the US when they graduate. Jodi and I are both teachers by profession, so we know the importance of a good teacher, but also plan to emphasize education over schooling (I anticipate friction with school administrators over that one, but oh well) so the quality of the school at the lower grades is not the highest priority for us. We live in Zhangjiang High-Tech Park in Pudong, but would like to move to Puxi ASAP (see "education over schooling"), budget-permitting. For both of us, it's a very high priority that our girls be not just bilingual but bi-literate/bi-social in Chinese and English, that they grow up to respect themselves and respect others, and that they be comfortable with their own identities. The last one is super-important, though I've found that mixed kids are usually pretty cool about it.

So... the current plan is to send them to the best local preschool within our budget, maybe even Jodi's own preschool when she starts working again in 2010 (Charlotte=3, Maryann=2); then send them to a good local elementary school, which means visiting Zhangjiang Experimental and a couple others, if we still live in Zhangjiang at that point. When Charlotte nears middle school, the current plan is to switch to whatever int'l school I'm working at, though that depends on what Charlotte and Maryann want, where we live, how their Chinese is, what schools are available, etc. By high school, we do plan to send them to an international school. I am also keeping in mind public/private Chinese schools that have a track record of sending graduate overseas though, because if money is still an issue at that point we may be able to get a better value for our buck at, say, the Fudan High School or Xiwai Foreign Language School, or Yali School in Changsha. (This process somewhat mirrors my own education; my parents were missionaries in Spain when I was young, sent me to public school through middle school, switched to an int'l school in 8th grade, then came back to the US for 10th grade.)