Good responses everyone. I’m really learning.
Really? Wouldn’t the result be that many students simply wouldn’t have a school to go to?
More with less? As was said, private schools don’t have to educate anyone they don’t want to.
This year in my daughter’s class she has three kids with special needs - 28 kids in class. One child was raised by deaf parents and is in second grade without being able to speak well enough to be understood! (The child hears just fine, but the house was silent) Imagine the funding that is going to help this child. A private schools average per student cost is lower - but average per student cost is pretty meaningless when you have some kids who have full time aids in public school - something a low cost private school isn’t including in tuition. And that is where a lot of that money we are “throwing” at schools is going.
By the way, Minnesota’s per pupil expenditure is around $8k a year. A GOOD non-religious private Twin Cities elementary school will cost about $12k in tuition, plus those “volunteer” and “fundraising” commitments. You can go to a religious elementary for cheaper - a lot of parents in my area send their kids to St. Ambrose in Woodbury - about $4500 per year. Bargain of $3,500 - but not quite so fast. You have high school which is more expensive. Hill-Murrary is the high school that St. Ambrose kids generally end up at - $9,200. Middle School is $8,050. Add in the “volunteer” hours and the “volunteer” fundraising (which isn’t volunteer) plus the alumni contributions (my dad graduated from Hill 45 years ago and they still hit him up from money). Now, when you consider the private schools don’t have to accept a kid who never learned to talk, it seems public schools are doing (at least where you live) a decent job with about the same amount of money.
(Ah, but those contributions are spent on financial aid - I don’t doubt some of them are, but three cousins went to Hill without wealthy parents - barely middle class parents - and no tuition breaks).
The Market had the chance to supply eduction in the US. The push for public education developed in the 19th century as a result of education for other than the children of the wealthy being nearly nonexistant. A distrressingly high number of parents send their kids to school only because we require them to do so.
Public school systems in the US can be huge, as is the case in Chicago. The bureaucracy, the purchasing departments, the area-wide coordinators, the language arts developments initiative heads, the office of test development, district arts councils, etc., etc., etc. are a real issue.
People who dontate money to the CPS tend to give for particular programs–art class, uniforms, school supplies–because the hole that sucks down any donation not earmarked for a particular school and project has its own gravity.
The hell you say!
But but but…competition!
Cite please.
Am I the only one here who went to a crappy private school? I went to Catholic schools for most of my elementary years and all of my high school years. The classes were overcrowded (granted, this was back in the baby boom era when all schools were overcrowded, but some years I had more than 40 kids in my classes), a lot of the teachers were either young and inexperienced or old and unqualified, elective courses were nearly non-existant and the instruction model was “shut up and read the book.”
Special education? Non-existant. Gifted classes? Shut up and read the book. True, the school got rid of the worst or most disruptive students, but we still had our share of drugs, pregnancies and other problems.
And suggestions by parents were met with “if you’re child isn’t happy here, perhaps you should find another school.”
I’m not saying I didn’t learn anything there, but simply waving a magic wand and saying “private school” doesn’t automatically cure all the problems.
No, you aren’t. I attended a private Catholic school for grades 1-5. The nuns were crazy and sadistic. The lay teachers weren’t good teachers. The main lessons I learned were conformity, submission to authority, and fear of physical punishment. The only difference from your school is that they didn’t throw out troublesome kids. They just doubled and redoubled their crazy, sadistic discipline on the kid until he either conformed or snapped.
I’m working entirely from memory here, and a somewhat foggy one at that:
In 1982 someone released a report titled “Crisis in Education.” It asserted that American school children were less educated than most of the rest of the world. The report was based on test scores from around the world and ignited what is commonly called a firestorm of controversy over the quality of education in the U.S.
Subsequently, we were told, the original test survey on which “Crisis in Education” was based was faulty at best; other nations had been allowed to “cherry pick” the test results they submitted for the survey, while in the U.S. all test scores across the board were used. In short, the original “Crisis in Education” report was based on false information.
But it was too late – by then the United States had embarked on a fix-it program that managed, according to a TIME magazine article in about 1996 or 1997, to so screw up the public education system that it would take decades to figure out how to truly fix things.
I’ve researched until I’m blue in the face, but I cannot find any on-line reference to the original 1982 report (there are lots of “Crisis in Education” reports out there, just not the one I’m looking for) or its subsequent debunking. If anyone can find those two documents, it would go a long way in advancing the debate here.
Sorry, we must have misunderstood each other. I meant a cite for this.
*All * children? Really? So you truly believe that the children who currently go to crappy underfunded inner city schools because they live in crappy underfunded inner city public housing because their parents can’t afford market rent will be better off if their parents have to PAY for them to go to school? Just checking.
Look at these drop out rates. Remember that for a student under 18, the parents must sign off on their child dropping out of school. Also consider the truancy problems.
It has been my experience as a teacher for the last 22 years that children who are habitually tardy or habitually truant and/or who eventually drop out generally come from families that do not value education. I’ve seen the parents come in for conferences with our administrators and appearances in front of the magistrate over truancy and their typical reaction was anger at the system for making them force their child to go to school.
Scumpup, not all states require schooling until 18. Scroll down to the bottom of this link and you’ll see some that do. I was unaware that parents needed to sign their kids out as a drop out. Does this mean that all the drop out statistics only include children whose parents have signed off on? Because I highly doubt that. At what point does one become a drop out, after too many absences? So if 5-10% of children are high school drop outs, what percentage of those are signed out by parents?
I’ve been to (way too many) school meetings to fight for my kids, and let’s face it, often teachers aren’t skilled at being diplomatic, because they haven’t had much experience massaging the various egos in a corporate environment. They can come across as condescending and inflammatory, hopefully without meaning to. They often don’t realize or won’t recognize the effort you do put in, until you beat them over the head with it.
I can see how a frustrated parent of an out of control adolescent could come across as angry, because what’s going through their heads while their parental abilities are being questioned is probably “You want me to MAKE him go to school. HOW?”
Nope - I spent one year at a private school with an excellent reputation and tuition to match. The reality was that the instruction was far worse than the surrounding public schools. They taught to the lowest denominator (which in my year were girls who were dumb as rocks with loaded parents) and used books and materials a couple of years below grade level.
Same here. Luckily, my parents did. It was public. Taught by people who weren’t horrible at their jobs.
Of course. If parents were forced to pay directly out of pocket for their kids’ schooling, the schools would rocket in quality. Children of parents who decide that ultimately schooling isn’t worth their money would be filtered out of the student body, and the ones who remain would be held especially accountable to folks who are expecting a greater return-on-investment on their direct fees.
So… *those * children don’t count when we’re considering *all * the children? Did they go and change the meaning of the word “all” while I was distracted?
And then what happens to those children? Why should they be deprived of an education because they have lousy parents? They deserve to grow up illiterate and uneducated because of who their parents are?
Public schools have their flaws, I won’t argue that. But I haven’t heard of a better system for making sure that all kids in the US receive at least a basic education.
If it’s that important to you you could sponsor a child whose parents wouldn’t pay.
Well, the ones not in school would enjoy their childhoods a bit more. That’s better off than wasting everyone’s time and money on a compulsory education that won’t even benefit them in the end.