Public schools, private schools, vouchers....

The BBQ Pit
1

Started in the Jolita Berry/Teacher attacked in Baltimore/students posted video on the internet

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=463682&page=2

If you know of a private school that works, there are two factors I’d consider:

  1. They can pick and choose whom they admit. As posted, they’d be foolish to take special education or ESL kids because they require a lot of time and money per student and do nothing for your test scores. Hell, here in Texas if a kid speaks zero English when they arrive, we’re supposed to have them ready to test in one year.

If public schools could pick, we’d be a lot more successful.

  1. The parents who enroll their kids in private school A) have the money to do it, hence a better home environment, and B) take a keen interest in education, because they’re putting their money where their mouth is. When that kid brings home a report card, I bet the parents scrutinize their investment carefully. Let public schools select those students and we’d be a lot more successful as well.

And btw, I don’t know if people are aware of this or not, but traditionally private schools pay teachers less than public schools. Sure, parents pay money (sometimes big money) to put their kids in private schools. But private schools can’t compete with tax dollars. If the argument is that higher salary draws better teachers, you’d look for them in public schools.

Requirements like degrees, certification, etc. generally are not in place in private schools, nor are reasonable safeguards for teachers. At my first teaching job, I was working with a guy whose wife taught business at a private school. She liked it a lot, said she avoided a lot of hassles we encounter in public schools. IIRC she had won some awards and recognition and had been there 20 years or something.

One day the principal called her in and told her she wouldn’t have a job the following year. She hadn’t done anything wrong; there weren’t any complaints. They were hiring a new teacher for her position. “He probably can’t teach worth a damn,” the principal admitted, “but the parents are pressuring me for a good football coach.”

Many public districts already have variations on this theme. It gets some results for some kids. But it’s always going to be limited by how much the parents are involved and expect from their kids, whether the school is private or public.

To criticize public schools based on test scores, then give the money to private schools without requiring the same tests is just ludicrous. You say testing shouldn’t dominate the focus…I agree. But that’s one very big thing dragging public schools into mediocrity. Rather than giving us a break from it, they use it to declare us unable to educate. Then they want to give the money to private schools, claiming they do a better job, but they’re unwilling to verify that claim with the same test? This deck is stacked.

Again, absent an apples-to-apples comparison of tests, I’m not sure how we’d know if the experiment worked. And, without the state lording any expectations over the private school, what’s their motivation to provide a good education instead of just collecting the money? Giving money with no expectation for results is bound to go bad.

Suppose a Catholic school has a great science program and a Muslim student aspires to be a doctor. How about overtly homosexual students? They won’t let the Bible guide them on issues like these?

And there must have been a lot of people, black and white, against integration when the idea was introduced. What people are inclined to do and what’s good for society aren’t necessarily the same thing. It wasn’t easy at first but with time we’ve achieved some tolerance…so we ran that gauntlet for nothing and now we’ll let the clock roll back?

Tests? What tests? Not state tests, right? As I posted in the other thread:

Conclusion: the state test isn’t all that great. But what would you test the private school kids with to know how they were doing? I mean, if we turn the school over to market forces then we need some means of comparing them so that the consumer can make an intelligent choice. What test would you use? SAT? That’s college bound and as you know, many aren’t planning on college. ITBS? Some critics say that test favors white America. Supposing there is a good test out there, how about telling the state to let US use it?

You presume that private schools wouldn’t allow overcrowding if it meant they would make more money.

But ok, imagine a school in the inner-city. If the voucher thing goes through, we would expect those students to be the first to flee. If half of them leave, the remaining half still require education. Staffing the building, heating it, and so on may not be cost-effective…they’ll be squeezed into other existing public schools, resulting in overcrowding.

Hell, here in Texas I’ve seen schools that were designed for X students and by the time it opened, it was already too small. I think this is largely due to illegal aliens…we can’t count them ahead of time. I can imagine a logistical nightmare for public schools trying to shuffle students around.

This sort of consolidation has happened in rural America for some time, I think. There isn’t enough tax base in a small community so they bus their kids to another town. At one school where I taught, kids spent 90 min on the bus each way…a total of 3 hours. How successful do we expect them to be?

Unteachable and non-standard subjects=Anti-NCLB. In public schools we don’t have that luxury. We have to put them in the LRE (least restrictive environment) and mainstream them where we can. I don’t know many hardscrabble kids who are going to volunteer for a bootcamp type of school, either.

I don’t fantasize that all of my students are going to college. But honestly, I know many of them don’t want to go in the first place.

2

One of the issues I have with vouchers is that they don’t provide enough money to be useful to everyone. It’s as if the government provided tax money to subsidize $6.00 a pound for $15.00 filet mignon. If you can afford a net $9.00 a pound for filet it’s a great deal. If all you can afford is those $0.99 a pound hotdogs made of slaughterhouse sweepings and sawdust you’re fucked.

For example, the closest private school to me is a Catholic high school that charges $9500.00. Most vouchers I’ve seen proposed have been in the neighborhood of $2500.00 to $3000.00. For the guy who can afford it, great, but if you can’t your tax dollars go to subsidize someone who can.

3

I don’t really have a dog in this fight, as I grew up without private school as a real option (the only one locally was Christian–and as I’ve heard, provides terrible education), but vouchers worry me for one reason–they take money away from the public schools, worsening the issues there. The French Immersion program at my high school, for example, was very restrictive in the classes you could pick–there were three french classes per year in grades 10-12, and you either took all of them or dropped out of the program. I know a girl who had to take a choice between finishing the program, and taking the class she wanted for what she wanted to study after. In larger schools, that wouldn’t be an issue because there’d be more options for available classes and time slots.

With schools, once the basic needs of the students are met, any extra money can go towards making the school better. Smaller schools don’t have that luxury–they struggle to maintain the minimum, and asking for anything more is like asking a homeless guy for a sandwich. That’s where the voucher program falls through, IMO–it helps a small number of kids, but makes things worse for the ones left behind.

4

I think it’s unfair that poor/minority children are not allowed to use voucher to attend private schools just because some people have a hard-on over separation of church and state. What about real opportunities for minorities? It’s not fair.

5

Why don’t you go back and actually read post #1 of this thread and get back to us, o.k.?

6

AFAICT, lobotomyboy63 is Pitting neither Weirddave nor private schools. Why is this GD-material thread in the Pit?

7

Mods can move it if they see fit…the original thread about the teacher being beaten in Baltimore was in the Pit. I just expected Pit-like results.

8

I think that this is the key to the whole public vs. private school debate, regardless of vouchers (which I think are a crappy solution as typically proposed). In fact, the DOE agrees with you. It’s not that private schools are so much better, it’s that they have a different class of students.

9

I work in public education, and my kids are in a private school. I am against vouchers. CA public schools are most righteously broken, and no one can come up with a fix.

10

Shit- missed window to finish thought. Our private school does take ESL and spec ed kids, and so do most of the others around here. We pay half of what the really big private school near us gets in tuition, but it’s sure as hell more than anyone would get for a voucher.

CA public education is WAY underfunded. Even if we get $8000 per year per kid (and not all districts do), states like NJ get nearly double that. Couple that to a teachers union that could teach the Teamsters a thing or two, and you have a titanic (heh) ship that cannot or will not get righted.

11

There’s too many words.

:eek:

12

Here’s the thing for* me.* With my Tax dollars and public schools I have input. I can vote in the school board or the Supervisor (depending), I can write letters to public officials and I *have *served on the County Civil Grand Jury, which investigates “waste, fraud and mismanagment” in the public schools (and others, too, of course). It’s my Tax dollars, sure- but I have Input.

Private schools can teach that Evolution is heresy and with vouchers do it with my Tax Dollars. No way, dudes.

If you want my Tax Dollars, I get to vote for ArchBishop (or whatever). I get to be able to remove you from Office due to malfeasance. I get input on what you teach.

Otherwise; get your fucking fingers out of my wallet. :mad:

13

you mean you’d rather have poor underprivileged kids miss a better educational opportunity just because of various teachings of evolution? That’s kind of ridiculous, don’t you think?

I mean, if that’s the only obstacle, than these private schools should just skip the topic altogether. Or just teach evolution as the theory it is. Who cares, really.

14

No, the obstacle is lack of public supervision and voter input. Evolution was just an example. However “skipping it” is almost as bad. :rolleyes:

15

Do you even know what the word “theory” means when it comes to science?

16

I’ve got some concerns about a voucher system, but fundamentally it just makes too much sense not to be preferable to the current system, I’m afraid. At the end of the day we, as a society, are going to invest a certain amount of resources in education, and we can do so mostly though the market, or mostly by fiat. If it’s the latter, than for most schools there’s no natural incentive to innovate and improve, nor is there any mechanism by which more than a token number of the worst run schools will wither and die, to be replaced by newer, presumably better schools. Whatever arguments there are against vouchers, I think that’s an impossibly high hurdle for the current system to overcome.

Yeah, in the current environment most private schools cost more than vouchers would likely provide. If such a sweeping change were implemented, however, the environment would change. There’d be millions of of kids with $5K in their pockets who couldn’t afford to spend more than the voucher provides. Of course cheaper alternatives would spring up.

That’s part of what makes them better. Of course public schools are handicapped by having to take all comers. So let’s remove the handicap. In a class of 30 students, we shouldn’t have to tailor the instruction to fit the slowest and most disruptive 5. Better to remove those 5 for the benefit of the remaining 25, at which point the expel-ees can find a school specifically tailored to their needs. In a voucher system, these students might actually be worse off – or they might not, I hardly think it’s a given – but letting them be a drag on the education of the majority is a serious inefficiency, one that (unsurprisingly) rarely occurs in the free market.

Your definition of “reasonable” might not be the optimal one. The specific example you gave sucks, obviously, but in general schools will be better off if they can contract more or less freely with employees – the more elasticity in the budget, the better able you’ll be allocate resources efficiently. Having to deal with “a teacher’s union that could teach the Teamsters a thing or two” (post #10) can’t possibly be good for a school, or, ultimately, its students.

They can if they want, though most Catholic schools are happy to accept non-Christians. I went to Catholic schools through high school that had a good number of Jews and atheists. I don’t think we had any openly gay students at my high school, but the administration wouldn’t have minded if they came out.

That’s sort of besides the point, though. Why would a student have a right to go to a private school that doesn’t want him? Vouchers wouldn’t give him that option, but it’s not an option he currently enjoys, either, and they certainly do give him more options.

17

*I think we’re rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. E.g. in the “teacher was attacked” thread, it was noted that maybe the teacher provoked it (possibly inadvertantly) and teachers should receive training in how to defuse situations. Not a totally bad idea, but it still redirects responsibility from the student. Maybe the kid was higher than a kite and no amount of training was going to safeguard the teacher.

I posted this in a thread about all these teens getting STD’s. A lot of it seems appropriate here because it describes the teen population and how much it has changed since many of us were in school. I imagine a lot of people consider options of public/private schools from the “If I were a student today…” mindset, but if you’re 30+ years old your attitudes and experiences probably don’t mirror those among today’s teens. The conclusion to the post quoted here—if you want to fix the problem, fix the nuclear family—applies. Training teachers is like taking an aspirin for a brain tumor: it might alleviate some symptoms, but the root problem will remain.

In a later post on the same thread, I opined that the solution to a lot of this may be to start educating parents on how to be parents. And then…the thread fell completely silent.*

I’ve been teaching in public schools for about 20 years now. I have no kids of my own but I’ve worked with hundreds of them.

Overall, I have to say that parents sure don’t raise their children the way mine raised me and the status quo seems to slide backward a little more every year.

My parents were married 60+ years, right up until my father’s death. The divorce rate these days is no secret. Sure, kids are going to be disillusioned and have a host of issues about the breakup of a marriage. Above and beyond that, divorce means a single parent (usually the mother) is trying to raise the child alone. She may be working overtime or two jobs to make ends meet—how many “latch key kids” do we have now? If a parent isn’t there, how can they transmit norms and values? Kids have to be told over and over and over before the message gets through, and a lot of parents simply aren’t there to do it.

That assumes that the parent knows what to tell the kid in the first place, i.e. that the parent completed childhood with sufficient guidance and support and can now transmit what they learned to their own kids. Quoting from a NY Times religion column:

It is a well-known, little-mentioned fact that children who have children tend to be those who were themselves products of teen-age parents.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...75BC0A967958260

Children raising children…raising children. Isn’t the effect on parenting skills becoming like a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy? Sure, back in the day people like my folks got married in their teens. However, that was the norm and it was more like the Waltons on TV, where they had help from the extended family and moms stayed home…hard for the kids to get much past her. They had to behave and contribute to the family for survival. Then as a society post-WWII we hit on some prosperity, and we started giving kids more and more while expecting less and less from them. Enter the sexual revolution, women going out to work, the “me” generation and the slide has been continuous ever since.

Go to your local high school and compare the cars in the student parking lot to those in the teacher parking lot. Shit, I graduated HS and college…I have a B.A. with honors, and all I got for graduation was a VCR! How is it that these kids have cars nicer than mine when they haven’t finished anything yet?

I have seen this phenomenon—parents buying their child’s love—in various forms. The parents work work work and aren’t there, so they throw money at the issue. I hate to quote Jesse Jackson but: “Children need your presence more than your presents.”

I saw something similar even in some poor families. In one school, if I needed to contact a parent, I found that a surprising number of them had no telephone. You might guess that these students had shabby, threadbare clothes, but it was just the opposite: they wore Tommy Hilfiger and the like. A fellow teacher told me, “Their parents don’t want anybody to know they’re poor so they buy them nice clothes to create the illusion. But then there’s no money left for a phone.” I wonder what the plan is when they need to call a fire truck or ambulance.

Throw into the mix the cultural differences—inner city, welfare system, ethnic group norms. Add that some children have been sexually abused and acting out. And some girls think they can “trap” a boyfriend who’s threatening to leave or simply hoping a baby is her ticket out of her parents’ home. Some think a child will provide unconditional love (which they didn’t get from their parents) and be a sort of human pet. They bring the babies to school like trophies. They’re not thinking long-term: the father is primarily a sperm donor and they plan to find someone they actually want to marry later.

And it’s a huge understatement to say that pop culture contributes. Movies lead a naive person to believe that you see each other across a crowded room, fall in love, and it all works out without any arguments, compromises, etc. Censorship on TV…not like I remember it. Kids listen to gangsta rap and such, posture like hoods and girls dress like whores.

If all parents were on the ball, there would be no gangs: these are unparented/underparented kids with nothing to do looking for other kids to lead them and teach them, for a place to belong, etc. The single most important thing to adolescents is peer approval—that’s just baked into the deal and always has been—but parents aren’t stopping them from emulating some very questionable role models.

We’ve become so mobile that we don’t live anywhere near an extended family, we don’t even have two parents on the job in the first place, church attendance ain’t what it used to be, networks will air anything for the almighty buck, the internet is a free-for-all (MySpace, anyone?), and families aren’t coping well with all this.

I’d like to know about raves. How do kids get away with staying out all night at parties? Do the parents not know or not care? Throw in booze, drugs like Ecstasy (or rohypnol) and the rave is just a recipe for disaster. In another thread people were asking when Hooter’s because a family restaurant: exactly. The line between adult and child has blurred terribly. I get a lot of students who think I’m their peer because they’ve never been taught basic respect for authority. Parents want to be the “friend” of the child.

Sex ed isn’t the solution, nor is handing out condoms…we can do those things, and they will help. But if you really want to fix the problem, fix the nuclear family.

18

Do you propose that all student attend private schools? Because I can’t help but think that vouchers only hurt public schools. In many places, the amount of money a school receives is based on the number of students. Taking out students=taking away money. And like many things, the cost per student isn’t fixed. The more students, the more money there is to go towards more than the baseline requirements for said students. When students leave, it becomes harder to provide the rest with adequate education.

In theory what you say makes a bit of sense. In practice, I think that the answer lies in working on the issues of public schools, so that there’s less incentive for students looking for a better education to leave, rather than passing the buck (in this case literally) to a free market system.

19

Here in the U.K. we briefly had a voucher system for nursery schools, and both the parents and teachers loved it. Leastwise, those to whom I spoke about it. Are private schools in the U.S. charities? Because perhaps vouchers might be more acceptable if private schools that accepted vouchers and charged more than the voucher had to offer scholarships for those who couldn’t afford the extra?

20

Sure they’d spring up, and you’d have a lot of fly-by-night clowns collecting tax money for spurious schools, and parents who are not experienced at making decisions in these matters in effect deciding how to spend billions of tax dollars. Eventually it would all shake out, but in the meantime you’d leave a lot of students uneducated. What do you plan to do with them, throw them out like the first waffle? “Oh, that first generation was just to season the grill”.