8 ms·

Public Montessori programs strengthen learning outcomes at lower costs: study

• lschueller 11mo ago
  Sounds good. The school systems are messed up, everybody agrees on that. But the article is missing out the underlying cause for the results. What exactly caused the beneficial outcome? Montessori itself is quite a vast term nowadays.
  • fhsm 11mo ago
    The article is clear — lottery offer of a seat in a school which met inclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria are clearly outlined in the supplemental materials which are a single URL away which also include details on the allocation. https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2Fpnas.2506130122&file=pnas.2506130122.sapp.pdf https://www.pnas.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1073%2... Talk of causation anywhere other than the unit of randomization is speculation.
    • novia 11mo ago
      the definition in your linked paper is quite self referential
    • scythe 11mo ago
      The definition is holistic: >As shown in Figure S1, we began with a list of 588 public Montessori schools in the United States supplied by the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector >[procedural stuff, possibly introducing bias but not definitional] >Finally, because “Montessori” is not a trademarked term, we checked whether schools met our minimum standards for Montessori inclusion >- At least 66% of the lead Primary classroom teachers are trained by one of the two most prominent Montessori teacher training organizations, the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) or the American Montessori Society (AMS). One school was excluded on this basis. >- No more than two adults, the trained teacher and a non-teaching assistant, in the classroom on a regular basis. No school was excluded on this basis >- Classrooms are mixed-age, with at least 18 children ranging from 3 to 6 years old. Five schools did not mix ages so were excluded. >- At least a 2-hour uninterrupted free choice period every day. Five schools were excluded on this basis. >- Each classroom has at least 80% of the complete set of roughly 150 Montessori Primary materials, and fewer than 5% of the materials available to children in the classroom are not Montessori materials. No school was excluded for failing to meet this criterion. [italics mine, furthermore, holy crap!] I think one thing that is particularly noticeable is that, while there is definitely some particular form of education being put forward here which is interesting, there is obviously a very "aesthetic" trend as well, because plenty of schools are failing on the practices and the teachers while somehow none are failing the materials. But maybe this is actually just path-dependence in measuring the exclusion per criterion?
  • silisili 11mo ago
    The underlying cause is that only well to do parents choose Montessori. None of the pesky low income folks to throw off the test score.
    • mcv 11mo ago
      These were randomised. It sounds like they eliminated this selection bias. Also, this is just about preschool. For regular school, I've grown more skeptical, because it didn't work well for either of my kids. They struggled with the independence and planning, and didn't get much done. One switched to special education during primary school and is doing excellent there (but that has much more guidance and costs more, though I wish it was available for everybody), the other switched to a regular school during secondary school after almost failing to pass year after year despite his extraordinary intelligence. He's doing somewhat better now. It's a good option to have, but it's quite likely the advantage is bigger for preschool than school.
      • themaninthedark 11mo ago
        So while it is randomized in the terms of who they chose to participate, the students did attend already existing schools. This could lead to selection bias from the participates, as the schools themselves are located in wealthier areas as that is where their clientèle are. Lower income families may not have been able to take advantage of the lottery due to distance constrains thus self-opting out. I have not read the study methodology details, the schools may have been chosen to avoid this problem but just wanted to point out that just because something say "random lottery" it may not be.
        • dmurray 11mo ago
          But the control group was families who did opt in and who lost the lottery.
          • cma 11mo ago
            Still the ones who got in would be with more other students who opted in, the ones who didn't get in would be with more students who didn't opt-in to the lottery. You would need to have a second group of those who lost the lottery and were all put into the same non-Montessori school with no others who didn't opt-in maybe.
• lotsofpulp 11mo ago
  Is “Montessori” sufficiently defined? I compared Montessori and non Montessori labeled daycares/preschools for my 3 and 4 year olds, and was unable to discern a meaningful difference in the course of the day. Edit: I ended up going with the daycare that had cameras (so that at least management could audit employees), and a livestream for the parents, which was at a non Montessori daycare. Staff turnover also seemed lower. Was more expensive, but have been happy with results.
  • schainks 11mo ago
    There are two actual standards around this (AMI and AMS), but therm "Montessori" is mainly fungible in the day care market. The difference between these two, from my experience, is HUGE. Certified AMI schools, while a little more rigid in terms of teaching fine motor skills, generally have been better at making my kid more independent at doing things he likes to do. AMS schools are kind of wishy washy by comparison, and my kid was bored and under-engaged.
    • dfxm12 11mo ago
      How many schools of each standard has your kid been to? For how many years?
      • schainks 11mo ago
        One of each.
  • germinalphrase 11mo ago
    Additionally, even schools that label themselves Montessori will have significant differences in how the educational concepts are applied and to what degree. It’s not a regimented approach/program. I only say this to suggest that any parent interested in Montessori schools should definitely visit and ask questions before enrolling your student. Make sure that the experience will align with your expectations.
  • f1shy 11mo ago
    In my experience, I would say no. Same as similar approaches (e.g. Waldorfschule) Once I asked some advocate of the method, what was it exactly; the reply was very good and detailed, but then I pointed out institutes that “follow” the method, which were nothing as what he described. From that point, it was a mess. “Well, you must not absolutely do it that way” “there are variations” etc. I was pretty dissatisfied with the description, and was clear that is not very well defined.
• solumos 11mo ago
  As a product of public montessori, I couldn't agree more
• avs733 11mo ago
  As someone who has worked in education for about a decade now, I use this quote a lot: You can’t understand Google unless you know that both Larry and Sergey were Montessori kids. — Marissa Mayer
  • beng-nl 11mo ago
    Sorry, I have no idea what to conclude from this. Can you explain?
  • elzbardico 11mo ago
    There's a lot of luck in Larry and Sergey history. It is not like they were Abel and Gauss as impressionable tech workers seem to think.
• nerdsniper 11mo ago
  Any alternative school system is lower-cost than public schools if they don't have to support the needs of students with severe disabilities.
  • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
    That's taken care of in the study design. The population was all kids who applied to the lottery. And the treatment group wasn't those who actually attended the Montessori school, but those who were offered a place due to the lottery. So I don't see how special needs would bias the results. If the lottery excludes those with special needs (either by design or due to self-selection) then there's no bias between control group and treatment group. If the lottery doesn't exclude but the enrollment decision is biased by special needs, then it doesn't matter because they use ITT and not enrolment.
    • gizmo686 11mo ago
      Schools are not designed to calculate the actual cost on a per student basis. Big ticket items like a dedicated SPED department, or a professional working 1:1 with a student can be accounted for. But if a special needs child participates in a standard class (which they do) and the standard teacher needs to do more than average work to accommodate them; that cost is not earmarked for that specific student. Once the bean counters see it, it is just "teacher salary", which gets averaged out across all the students.
      • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
        You are correct. I only read up on the 'impact' part of the study's claim, not the 'lower cost' part. I thought you were talking about the impact part. The cost part is obviously suspect, for the reason you stated. It is so obviously suspect that I had subconsciously 'tuned it out'!
    • stdbrouw 11mo ago
      Yeah, the intention to treat design is a particularly nice touch, not so common outside of biostatistics. They also compare the full cost of Montessori vs. plain ol', not the cost to the state, which could otherwise have given the Montessori schools (which are in wealthier neighborhoods on average) an unfair advantage if they have a lot of parents chipping in with donations and help. I've skimmed through the methods section and it does seem like they've gone to great lengths to allow for a fair comparison. That doesn't necessarily mean the result will extrapolate, though. It seems plausible that teachers in Montessori schools are more motivated and knowledgeable than the average teacher and have made a conscious decision to teach in such a school. If every public school were to become a Montessori school, you would still get the cost savings (student-to-teacher ratios are higher in Montessori!) but you might lose that above-average enthusiasm and expertise and so the learning gains might not carry over. It's just really hard to know whether something might generalize in the educational sciences.
• terespuwash 11mo ago
  Only one-fifth of parents gave permission to participate in the study, the schools differed in how “authentic” their Montessori approach was, and the measurements only go up to the end of kindergarten. So we do not know whether the differences persist.
  • emckay 11mo ago
    Low participation rate shouldn't matter too much for an RCT right? Just makes the sample smaller so finding statistically significant results is harder. Different levels of Montessori authenticity make the results even more impressive. They do have some inclusion criteria, like 2/3 of the teachers must be AMI/AMS certified but even so I'd expect a lot of these public school montessori programs to be less "true montessori" than what you'd get at a fully certified AMI/AMS school.
    • cool_dude85 11mo ago
      I think the risk is that there is some systematic difference between those who chose to participate and the overall population of public Montessori kids. For instance, maybe those with high incomes disproportionately chose to participate, and Montessori strengthens learning for this group, but if we could measure the whole population the result is more mixed. It can't be a fully RCT if there's some kind of opt-in provision (which is not to say that an opt-in provision is bad, or a study that is not fully RCT is irrelevant).
      • mmooss 11mo ago
        This is a speculative criticism about a hypothetical problem. How random was the study?
        • notahacker 11mo ago
          https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2506130122 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2506130122 You could have answered your own question by reading the abstract, which makes it clear that the OP's conjecture was correct: the lotteries were random or somewhat random, but the groups which consented to the study were notably different, with the treatment group being richer, more educated and whiter. They did of course attempt to control for this, whether the controls were adequate or omitted other underlying differences is another question.
• rahimnathwani 11mo ago
  Table S34 shows that over 20% of the control group either stayed home or didn't provide info on what they did. (Compared with ~4% of the intent-to-treat group) So, sadly, they weren't able to directly compare 'public Montessori PK3' with 'public non-Montessori PK3'.
  • kqr 11mo ago
    That lowers the statistical power of the experiment. It does not bias it. That's the beauty of intention-to-treat designs: they trade away bias for lower power -- a worthwhile trade every day of the week.
    • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
      It's a worthwhile trade for sure. That doesn't change the fact that the title and article (which is all that most people will read) paints that as comparing public Montessori preschool vs public non-Montessori preschool. But that's not what it's doing! The baseline condition was NOT one where everyone had access to a public PK3 as a fallback if they didn't win the lottery.
• PiRho3141 11mo ago
  I send my child to a private Montessori school. With that said, there's no denying that sending your child to a private Montessori school is similar to parents who buy books in learning to parent are typically better parents not because they read the books but because they care enough to buy the books. If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school, the parent is invested in the child's success and I think that's way more important.
  • jedimastert 11mo ago
    > If you care enough to send your child to a Montessori school Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.
    • whateveracct 11mo ago
      It's both.
    • JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      > if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots. It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
    • trenchpilgrim 11mo ago
      I have friends who have a kid in one of those schools on financial aid
    • gedy 11mo ago
      My kids went to a free charter school, with similar setup and care from parents. The outcomes were notable and it wasn't really about privilege imho. (Though some activist type folks I know who count "parents who care" as a form a privilege.)
• WillAdams 11mo ago
  My children attended Montessori schools, and it really is a wonderful system. I would really like to see an extension of this learning method up through high school --- the closest thing I'm aware of was a school I attended in Mississippi for a couple of years --- classes were divided between academic and social, social classes (homeroom, phys ed, social studies, &c.) were attended at one's age, while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability (with a limit on no more than 4 grades ahead up to 8th grade) --- after 8th grade that was removed and students were allowed to take any classes. Some of the faculty were accredited as faculty at a local college, and where warranted, either professors travelled from there to the school, or students travelled to the college for classes --- it wasn't uncommon for students to graduate high school and simultaneously be awarded a college degree. Apparently, the system was deemed unfair because it accorded a benefit to the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no commensurate compensation for those who were not, so the Miss. State Supreme Court dismantled it.
  • Zigurd 11mo ago
    It's hard to do self paced learning when there's no follow up. I got put into a self-paced learning experiment where we polished off the curriculum in three weeks and played chess the rest of the semester. There was nothing else for us to do. Nobody was ready to fill the remaining months. The whole school has to commit in that direction for that to succeed.
    • WillAdams 11mo ago
      Yeah, as one worked forward, one would arrive in the new class and be handed a stack of work required to catch up to where the class was at (moving forward at the end of a school year was strongly discouraged, but some kids would do it --- if need be, one could take the unfinished assignments home at the end of the year and work on them over the summer, turning them in at the beginning of the year).
  • sushp 11mo ago
    I had a good impression of "Montessori" from hearing that Larry/Sergey/Bezos went to one. When I put my kid in it at 3 years old, he hated it. As I looked into it more, it seems to me that it is actually very rigid, with kids being able to play with just a small set of toys that don't really exercise their creativity, and with little opportunity for group play. We switched him to a Reggio Emilia school where the kids are constantly doing group projects and art and he enjoys it a lot more. I recommend parents observe what's actually happening in classrooms and think about what's best for their kid in the early years instead of assuming "Montessori" is the best path.
• jrh3 11mo ago
  I went to a Montessori school from pre-K through 6th grade. I totally agree with this article. It is not easy to make this work on a public school-sized scale. The problem in education is not funding. We were a private school, but we made it work on a shoestring.
  • mmooss 11mo ago
    > It is not easy to make this work on a public school-sized scale. Why not? Costs are lower, etc.
    • adolph 11mo ago
      Costs aren't exactly lower. The study noted that the cost savings came from higher student to teacher ratios in 1st-3rd offsetting higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials over a hypothetical amortization period. This is rational but not indicative of flipping a switch to save x%. The upfront costs of teacher training and Montessori materials were amortized over their expected lifespan of 25 y. Total costs for Montessori and traditional programs were divided by the average number of children in each type of classroom at the PK3, PK4, and kindergarten years, then summed to yield the cost difference of Montessori and traditional programming over three years of public preschool. 0. https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2506130122 https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2506130122
      • em-bee 11mo ago
        higher costs of teacher training and classroom materials the current cost of montessori teacher training and materials is a matter of scale. the training only takes one year. the cost comes from it being done on top of the traditional teacher education that most teachers likely went through. if montessori training would be included into traditional teacher education, the cost would be absorbed (you could skip a few other redundant classes). likewise, the material produced at scale would be cheaper.
      • mmooss 11mo ago
        > not indicative of flipping a switch to save x% If that's our standard, then nothing is worth doing. Lower costs seem like a good possibility.
• bonoboTP 11mo ago
  Might be due to many other things than the Montessori methodology. Such as peer quality and teacher quality, potentially better and more expensive/healthy lunches or a million other things.
  • em-bee 11mo ago
    montessori methodology and training (at least as certified by AMI) is a strong selector for teacher quality. trainees have to spend 90 hours in class just observing children and writing reports about their observations as part of their training. they learn to understand what the kids need and how to teach them. i am not aware that traditional teacher education does any of that. likewise peer quality should not be even a factor because of the way how montessori education works. children are not given the opportunity to disrupt others. the methodology is all-encompassing. it affects the children from the moment they enter the school, until they leave to go home. most of the potential other factors in the school are eliminated by the methodology itself. it's hard to envision. you have to observe a class in action to understand why.
    • bonoboTP 11mo ago
      You aren't contradicting me. Teachers who pass the tests required for this probably are from the top of their teacher cohort regarding intelligence, consciousness, empathy, motivation etc and they are likely better paid, so less stressed from life stuff like bills or whatever. The peers all come from non-random families who generally have good life outcomes either way. These kids will model good behavioral norms. If kids can interact, they will influence each other. It's not only disruption or no disruption, but likely more subtle. The effects were only shown here up to end of kindergarten. It likely disappears later. My default assumption remains that these fashionable methodologies do very little actually. The correction is probable almost entirely due to who the people involved are. I know that the study participants were randomized to Montessori or not, but the rest of peers and the teachers are not random. The real test would be for a Montessori kindergarten to drop the methodology while keeping the same people.
      • 11mo ago
• obscurette 11mo ago
  Most of public schools over the world struggle with much more basic problems than methods or programs. The most important thing IMHO is a stable environment. You can use the very best methods and programs, but if teachers change frequently, like it become more and more a norm in public schools, all these don't matter much really.
  • spicyusername 11mo ago
    Or even more basic, if the parents don't have the time or temperament to properly participate in parenting, then the teachers or the school aren't really going to matter either.
    • em-bee 11mo ago
      i believe some countries have a different experience. in a report about participating on online classes from home during covid in germany it was observed that kids with worse conditions at home were disadvantaged the most, which leads to the reverse conclusion that for these kids going to school did matter.
      • spicyusername 11mo ago
        I think that anecdote leads to the same conclusion, no? Children with worse parents have worse outcomes? All the kids with engaged parents who participated in online classes from home probably did just fine. I'm not saying going to school doesn't matter, I'm saying that what kind of school you go to is going to matter a lot less if your parents can't do a good job. Or put another way, what kind of parents you have is the dominant influence in your educational outcome. This matters because when thinking about what kind of policies are needed to influence educational outcomes, they may not need to directly have to do with school.
        • em-bee 11mo ago
          that anecdote leads to the same conclusion not quite. your claim was that with a bad situation at home, school does not make a difference. while i understand the opposite. the worse the situation at home, the more of a difference school makes for them. i see it like this: good home + good school = good outcome good home + no school = good outcome bad home + good school = ok outcome bad home + no school = bad outcome so for a good home school does not matter. for a bad home it does. (i am ignoring bad schools, they probably make things worse in either case)
• msteffen 11mo ago
  Given all the money spent on trying different educational models to achieve better outcomes, it's really gratifying to see a result suggesting that improvement is actually possible. I have a lot of teachers in my family and they tend to take the perspective that education is an engineering problem rather than a research problem. That is, any apparent progress is due to extra funding or filtering students or the like. > "Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data." That seems like some kind of supportive evidence as well. Teachers should logically be happier when working inside a system optimized for teaching efficacy! Personally: we put our child in a Montessori preschool because we liked its emphasis on self-directed learning (I kind of think all learning has to be self-directed on some level. Even a lecture requires you to listen to and think about the lecture, instead of something else). We later moved him to a Reggio Emilia program for non-pedagogical reasons (there were problems with the building that the Montessori school was in). They're definitely different—in Montessori, he mostly played on his own, and in Reggio we now see him in pairs and groups all the time. I have no idea which is better, but his teachers at the Reggio school seem to like it.
• desireco42 11mo ago
  My kids went to Montessori school, first private which was good, they learned a lot of life skills, not so much academics tbh, which is why I switched them to public Montessori, which was in name only. What worked for us better is competence grading which is Summit system that originated in California. But principles are system are great, if you can make it work. It requires effort from teachers and parents and all. It is not trivial to make it work everywhere.
• grendelt 11mo ago
  So long as it's a true Montessori and not just in name only. The number of programs I see touting Montessori, Classical, and other models is wild. Usually it's charter and private schools that say one thing but do another.
• shermantanktop 11mo ago
  My children could read at 4 and we were told that the Montessori school would not let them read because it was age-inappropriate. We did not enroll.
  • edmundsauto 11mo ago
    My Montessori school enabled and encouraged me to read Judy Bloom books (age 8-10 appropriate) when I was 5. yMMV.
    • danpalmer 11mo ago
      My regular public school enabled and encouraged me to read books beyond my age for my entire school career.
      • edmundsauto 11mo ago
        That's great! I did Montessori through 2nd grade, it was formative and important for me because I suspect I'm a little on the spectrum. Montessori helped me thrive in a way that was critical for my development at the time. I also suspect that switching to public school was equally important to toughen me up.
• anonu 11mo ago
  The article doesn't really address why Montessori programs performed better at lower costs: these classrooms emphasize self-directed, hands-on learning where children choose activities based on their interests, driving independence and curiosity. Traditional classrooms follow a rigid teacher-led curriculum with structured lessons and uniform pacing for all students.
• lz400 11mo ago
  I want to offer a different data point. I took my daughter to a Montessori-adjacent school for 3 years. It's not Montessori exactly and they didn't advertise as such but they had a different European name attached to it that is downstream from Montessori. They had multi-age education, stressed in children directed learning and individual growth, they didn't have exams, etc. I changed my daughter this year and overall I'm disappointed in that school. There were many issues but the most important ones to me where: - No exams, only individual growth meant there's no guarantee the kid is learning at a good pace. When I worked with her at home I could easily identify many gaps and deficiencies. She's now struggling a bit in her new school because of this but I think it will resolve soon. - Because they didn't like comparing kids to standards or among each other the feedback I received was useless. It was always "she's doing excellent, we see strong growth" but it wasn't true. - The school rejected most parent feedback and issues raised with something "maybe this style of education is not for you". For example, I know of a few other kids that had to leave because the school didn't take action against bullying because they didn't believe in punishments, etc. I have to say there were good things too, in particular my daughter really enjoyed it there and formed strong bonds with other kids. I think in general it was ok for elementary education but I strongly think it's not after that and I now have a perhaps unjust bias against Montessori and derivatives.
  • goalieca 11mo ago
    There is definitely a survivor bias. It probably works well for those kids who make it through. The kids who it isn’t working for, leave and there are so many of them.
  • foobarian 11mo ago
    I wonder sometimes if that kind of school is only good for the high-strung go-getter child prodigy types because they are so hands off. But the very lack of metrics and standardization that purports to help with that kind of mission unfortunately certainly makes the shopping a lot harder for prospective parents. Similar with other private schools later on. Is it a good academically strong place where kids get pushed and excel later? Or is it a party den where rich kids joke around and snort coke all day? Hard to tell. It also depends on the student and parent body itself. Good luck :-) Another thing that kind of tempers my opinion of this kind of school is anecdotal, some friends were lamenting that in their otherwise excellent public elementary school in an affluent district, some parents are pulling their kids out of _first grade_ and moving to private school because "there is not enough homework." What a sad image.
• antasvara 11mo ago
  Having been through Montessori, I think it's fantastic for kids that are naturally self-driven. I had a great time when it came to learning science and English (the two subjects I cared the most about). Howrver, I was also pretty far behind in math for reasons unrelated to ability (standardized testing and secondary educational success indicate that I'm actually pretty good at math). I also left with very underdeveloped time management and study skills. Could these downsides have been mitigated? Definitely, and my parents largely made sure they were. But in talking to my peers at the time, my parents after the fact, and parents of to hers that went to Montessori schools, I think the general idea holds. Point being that self driven education is fantastic for a lot of reasons. But it will also let a lot of kids stay far behind their ability if not carefully monitored.
  • ip26 11mo ago
    Intervening when they are merely far behind their ability!? Sounds like imposing adult anxieties onto the natural development path of a child!
    • antasvara 11mo ago
      Sure, there's an element of that. But I think it's fair to say that life involves doing things you don't want to do sometimes and Montessori struggles with that.
  • em-bee 11mo ago
    I was also pretty far behind in math for reasons unrelated to ability. I also left with very underdeveloped time management and study skills. if that is the case you didn't experience a good montessori program, because that should have taken care of that.
    • rkomorn 11mo ago
      Sounds like a no true Scotsman: "If it didn't work, it wasn't good Montessori."
• spoon404 11mo ago
  I went to a Montessori school in the Netherlands and feel like it failed me. Just one data point and maybe it was just a bad school. I have autism and nobody noticed or did anything about it until it was time to start preparing for high school in seventh grade. I had read all the books in the school library but was not able to spell and write. It was just way to easy for me to escape work I did not want to do. We moved after I started high school and my sisters had to change school because of it. One of the first things they noticed at their new school is how incredibly lazy they where. I am very happy working as a mailman but I do wonder what I would be doing now if I had learned how to study and learn at a younger age.
  • bonoboTP 11mo ago
    The study is about preschool (ages 3-6).
  • em-bee 11mo ago
    you definitely had a bad school. a trained montessori teacher would have noticed your challenges.
• aussieguy1234 11mo ago
  There's a nonprofit Montessori school running in the biggest slum in Bangkok, Thailand which provides free schooling to the slums kids. It seems to work well. They're always looking for foreign tourists to help teach English, even if it's just for a few days or a week.
• jcalvinowens 11mo ago
  Most of my fondest childhood memories are from a short time I attended a Montessori preschool.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
• jgalt212 11mo ago
  In Manhattan, all the preschools we looked at were either Montessori style or Reggio Emilia approach. I could not detect any meaningful difference between them.