MarylandNed

It's 17 years since I left London but my brother still lives there (he's been there about 20 years now). In my brother's opinion, things have gone downhill quite a bit over the past 10 years in particular and London is now creaking under the strain of high immigration. This affects quality of life in many ways e.g. NHS access, education, housing, jobs/wages, transportation, public & social services, etc. House prices are rising fast in London, which is good for him as he is a home owner, and so he has decided to sell up and move (he's already bought a place in Spain and is looking for another in Ireland).

retzie

The US has a much bigger range and number of colleges/universities. If you can't get a job at a top-flight research school, you can probably pick up something more teaching-oriented further down the foodchain. Even in NYC, the whole spectrum is covered: from the top (Columbia) down to very weak (various CUNY community colleges, which are obliged to accept any NYC resident with a high school diploma, ie. people who can barely read). I have never worked in the UK, but my impression is that it is more like home: tertiary education doesn't cater to the bottom end, so the institutions/jobs are fewer, and more skewed towards research.

Perhaps some BE academics with UK experience can comment? Dunroving and Sally Redux's OH are academics who have worked in both countries. You should also put the feelers out in your own field. In mine (maths), the overwhelming critical mass is in the US, so that's where the jobs are.

If your OH is on an L-1/E-3, you will go for a dependent L-2/E-3D. Either of these dependent categories entitles you to an EAD (Employment Authorization Document), which takes ~90 days to process, but bears no restriction on the hours/type of work. A dependent visa is by far the easiest option; you should be fine completing your studies on either, then can transition to work with an EAD when you're ready.

If you were to go for your own visa, you would need you employer to sponsor you and you would be restricted to positions in your 'specialty occupation' E-3 will be easiest/quickest/cheapest here. There's not much advantage to this route over a dependent visa - some people prefer it as insurance in case their OH loses/leaves their job.

The 20 hour restriction sounds like a student visa (F-1). Unless you are studying at a US institution, this will not apply to you.

Check out idealist.org, if you're interested in the non-profit angle.

As has been said, the 'best' schools are going to be in the wealthy, not-very-diverse areas. But keep in mind that 'best' is generally measured against standards that are notoriously culturally-biased.

Honestly, your kids are at an age where 'very good' and 'excellent' is not going to make or break their education. My usual advice to incoming arrivals is: don't expect to get everything right on your first try. Make the most informed choice you can, but be prepared to adjust as you settle in and get the lie of the land. If you start out in one area and discover your needs would be better met somewhere else, you can always move!

Also, Brooklyn may not be as spacious as the 'burbs, but it will still have much more room than where you are now. Park Slope is popular with expats and is right by the large (and lovely) Prospect Park. On the other hand, all that space in Greenwich means you will need cars to get around - so there is a trade-off.

I second the idea of a visit - I think a lot will be revealed to you just having a nose around.

I have never lived in the UK, so I'll leave it to others to talk about London. Let me know if you have more questions about here, though!

retzie

One more thing: you mentioned you won't be returning to Oz. Is there a specific reason you don't want to go back? If it's just the small-town factor, then obviously either London or NYC will be fine. If there are more idealogical reasons, though, they may actually push you more towards the UK or US. I think in a lot of ways, Australia treads a line between the two, so you don't want to make a move that lands you with a more extreme version of what you were hoping to escape!

SuperScienceGrl

I teach US college (university) students. They are very different from UK uni students! It probably depends on which state you're in, but at least here in Illinois, I think many public school students have been utterly failed by the education system. I've heard horrific stories from HS teachers on how desperately little funding they get - the problem is nothing like this magnitude in the UK. On the other hand, I've also had students whose schools have fostered and captivated their interests and really built them up. I didn't think to ask whether their schools were public or private.

I don't have kids or plan to have kids, but seeing this I've always thought there's no way I'd have my kids grow up in the US education system. Sometimes it's upsetting to teach because I think they should have had so much better.

KateSH

Thank you everyone for your very helpful contributions. I was particularly interested to read those regarding the possibility of my gaining work in academia.
SuperScienceGrl your comments make me worry for the public education our children would receive in the US, though that said we are looking at towns where schools are receiving A ratings, so I would like to think that was a 'good enough' standard. We could always consider private for secondary, though seeing the fees makes me cringe.
Thanks again everyone....

Redwing

Having lived in 10 different states, I can assure you that education varies not only from state to state, but from district to district. My kids went to school in more than one state, went to college, obtained degrees, and are all professionals in their field. 3 of them did start their early education in the UK, although that was nearly 40 years ago. I don't think you can generalize with experience in just one state.

MarylandNed

Totally agree. It can also vary from school to school in the same school district and even within the same school. So much depends on the individual teachers. The elementary school my 4 kids went to was excellent up until about the time the 3rd kid was finishing up there. By then there had been so much staff turnover that the school went from being an excellent school to being a very mediocre one. So the first 2 kids had mostly excellent teachers, the 3rd kid had a mixed bag and the 4th kid had mostly mediocre teachers.

Pulaski

The politics of the US public school systems can be severely disfunctional. For example the largest school system in NC appointed a superintendent of schools with a mandate to improve the poorest performing schools - you can imagine what the demographic of those schools was.

The superintendent's strategy was to move all the best teachers at the top schools to the poorest performing schools (teachers' contracts are with the school district, not the school, so the superintendent could make that decision unilaterally). Within two years 30% of all teachers in the district had resigned! ..... I am not a professional educator, but you'd have to be a ****ing idiot not to foresee that being the inevitable outcome of moving all the good teachers to the bad schools.

Unsurprisingly the performance of the poorly performing schools didn't improve much, if at all, meanwhile the performance of the good schools declined, and there was a tidal shift of families concerned about their children's education out of that school district into neighbouring school districts with fewer problem schools and fewer problem children.

kodokan

Definitely this. We live in a typically affluent neighborhood with low diversity, high educational achievement, lots of professional career parents, etc. The schools are excellent by any measure.

However, my daughter's teacher this year (5th grade) is useless. She's newly qualified, and seems to especially struggle with teaching math in a way the kids can understand - daughter's gone from the typical mostly As and a few Bs grades she'd been getting for the last few years, to mostly Ds and a few Cs. Other parents have reported the same. It's not the material or that she's become suddenly dim, because if I tutor her at home, she gets how to do long division/ multiplication of fractions/ etc.

But her teacher is passionate and enthusiastic, and daughter loves going to school. Which is all that counts in elementary, really. Who cares if she doesn't learn to divide fractions until next year? I can mop up skills gaps easily; fixing a child who hates school is a far greater problem.

Meanwhile, at his (nationally rated) high school, my son has a Social Studies teacher who's openly been given the honors set to teach as an easy win, because he's actually a sports coach who 'has' to do an academic subject, and the feeling was that this set wouldn't cause him any behavioral or educational problems. He babysits them for 50 mins a day whilst they teach themselves from videos and books. But all his other teachers are superb, especially his math teacher.

So yeah, an excelling school doesn't guarantee a stellar educational experience for every kid, in every subject, every year. You just have to be big picture about it, and let the small things go.

Steve_

Out of those three I'd pick Zuerich any day of the week, especially with kids. The only slight snag being the cost of living but London and NYC aren't exactly cheap either. I suppose also there's more of a language barrier but if that isn't a major issue, definitely Zuerich. Also, Pepsi is really hard to find in Switzerland. I have no idea why. I just mention that in case you like Pepsi because I know no-one else will. If on the other hand you like chocolate...

MarylandNed

I don't care how good the teachers are - if they don't get support from the parents of low achieving children, it doesn't work. The teachers will be fighting a lost cause. When you have kids who come from broken homes where there is no good role model, no guidance, no discipline etc. then no amount of teaching is going to fix that. Kids need parents who will make sure they understand the value of education and who will make sure that they do their homework.

Pulaski

Indeed, and with that remarkable insight you have demonstrated that you are better qualified to be the Superintendent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School district than the now-ex superintendent!

That said, the majority of the school board members don't want to hear that poor education results and a high drop-out rate are as much a problem of poor parenting as anything else. ...... And of course that is because the school board is elected by the parents and community.

rbackhouse

When you said the largest School System in NC I thought you meant mine (Wake County). Seems its the same everywhere. We have the same sort of dumbasses on our school board.

Mark Twain got it right :

"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

Pulaski

You may be right on size, now that I think about it. ..... I seem to recall hearing that Wake has more pupils than Charlotte-Mecklenburg, but for some mysterious reason Charlotte-Mecklenburg has 50% more school buses than Wake!