You are right. I can really only speak of my immediate area (Arkansas, more specifically northern suburbs of Little Rock).
I can never recall seeing any non-religious schools at all. In a search through my friendly local phone book, there is 1 possible non-religious academy in the Little Rock area. And I’m not even sure of that one- it’s just the only one with a non-religious name (Patrick Academy).
As for the de-seg thing, the best that I can do right now is the testimony of people that did not think that I’d take offense at it (I’m Indian, so people are free with anti-black rhetoric around me). Pulaski County Schools (the Little Rock area) are under a lot of scrutiny to maintain ‘racial balance’ and quite a few parents (some of my aquaintance) send their children to schools that ring the Pulaski County district to avoid having them ‘put in’ with those kids.
As for Debaser’s point- we’re not just talking about troubled kids- kids with disabilities, both physical and mental, also cost a bit more to teach than your ‘normal’ kid. what happens to them? no amount of ‘proper raising’ will offset that.
“Public dole” moeny is funded out of the idea that we, as a civilized society, won’t let anyone starve or die of exposure- if throw some money at it will stop it. Note that it is based upon NEED not want. And, some programs don’t just give you the cash and let you spend it as you like, foodstamps & Section 8 housing for examples. You don’t get the choice of taking your Sect 8 housing money and living in a tent, or on the Riveria- you must live in a variety of inspected & approved (usually) apartments. true, some small amout of “dole” $$ is given out to “spend as you choose”- but we, as electors have chosen representatives that approved that. And, in fact, we have also “chosen” to cut this dole cash off after a short period, also. You may “want” to send your kids to a private school that teachs Darwin is the Antichrist- but you do not “need” to, as us taxpayers have provided you with a perfectly fine alternative.
In effect, out of my wages, I pay for your kids to go to school. When I “do the payin’, I get the choosin’…” and we have chosen the public school system- with elected officials, state mandated programs, and local “watchdog” agencies.
Private schools have all sorts of unfair advantages over public schools. 1. They don’t have to try & teach those with behavior or learning problems. 2. They don’t have to try & teach those who are migrants, who move every 4 months or every year. 3. They don’t have to try & teach those who don’t speak english. 4. Largely, they get kids whose parents care about their education, rather than parents who don’t give a shit “as long as little Johnny is gone during my soaps”. 5. To a much greater extent, they don’t have to try & teach kids who are suffering from hunger or malnutrition.
Take those 5 catergories out of the public schools, and I doubt you’d see any high “failure” rates.
Sure, I’ll admit there are some public schools where an unacceptably large % of the students don’t seem to learn- but how many of those kids fall into one of those 5 categories above? From what I have seen- it is nearly 100%. (here in CA, the % of kids who fail who are in ESL programs is very high) It is not primarily the schools which are failing to teach- it is the parents who are in categories 2>5 who are failing their kids. (And yes, we do have to undertsand that some parents might not have arrived with an ability to speak english- but some never try to learn, or ry to see that their children learn it). If indeed, you are not in the above categories- then if your kid is failing to learn it is still in the end- YOUR fault- there are tutoring programs available, many for free.
If your kid is not learning- it is ultimately YOUR fault- don’t blame “the schools” for your failing.
But how does that automatically change just because the school is private? Private school teachers can and do belong to unions. It seems to me that if private schools suddenly started opening up in response to vouchers, a good part of their teaching positions will be filled by the teachers whose public school jobs were eliminated. If a public school was privatized tomorrow, would the school suddenly improve? Of course not. They would still have the same parents, teachers and students.
There are a couple of things that people fail to acknowledge when they complain about the public school system. One is that the schools cannot choose their students or their parents. It’s not that hard to have a 100% graduation rate when you restrict your enrollment to parents who are interested in their child’s education and children who will do the work. It’s a little harder when you have to deal with parents who think that babysitting younger siblings or a child being tired in the morning because he or she stayed up too late watching TV, or a two week vacation in the middle of the term are acceptable reasons for the child missing school , or children who simply refuse to do the work or don’t care about getting an education.
Secondly, how a school looks on paper may have little to do with the education actually provided. For example, my high school looked terrible on paper. Low graduation rate, low numbers of students passing regents exams, high absentee rate. Yet I got a good education there and so did my friends. It wasn’t that the education and good teachers weren’t there. They were. If the “students” who didn’t bother to attend or do their work could have been dropped from the rolls. the schools would have looked much better on paper.
Third, while the the public school system contains some of the worst schools, it also contains some of the best. I live in NYC, and while the zoned high schools (who have to take anyone who lives within the zone) look pretty bad on paper,the three elite high schools ( Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant) and some of the specialized high schools and programs look very different. These schools have two things in common with private schools- the ability to choose their students, and the ability to send them back to their zoned schools if they can’t or won’t keep up with the work. Same thing with special programs in the lower grades- the ones with contol over which students are accepted look much better on paper.
I’m not against vouchers because of church vs state issues, but there is a very big difference betwen the vouchers I’ve seen proposed and Federal or state college grants. That is, although a graduate of a New York State high school has to be accepted at a state university campus, and graduate of a NYC high school must be accepted at a city university campus, the state or city university system doesn’t end up with a budget reduction to pay for the grant being used at NYU. Sure, the budget will change depending on the number of students , but it won’t go down by a specified amount per student. because the costs won’t change a specified amount per student. (Say you have a public school that goes from pre-k to 8 th grade. The vouchers are $3000 per child. How much does the school save if thirty children leave? Depends. If it’s three children from each grade, almost nothing. If it’s an entire sixth grade class, quite a bit, but probably not the whole $90,000 lost to the vouchers. But the funding lost to the vouchers is the same either way.)
I wouldn’t have a problem with a voucher plan that funded the vouchers through means other means than taking the money directly from the public school budget - say through increased taxes or a special lottery.
IIRC, higher education is regulated pretty stringently through the accreditation process. Federal monies do not got to non-accredited schools.
My college went through a fairly thorough review recently to renew ours, and things like curriculum, academic standards, etc. were very closely looked at. That cost of review is borne by the school itself, knowing that a failure to have review or to pass it would result in lack of funding. (non accredited U’s- think Bob Jones U)
I suppose I would accept this at the primary level as well, knowing that religious schools that neglect to provide a rigorous academic training would be ineligible for voucher funding.
How do you feel about federal monies (Pell Grants, especially, which are not repaid.) being used by students at religiously affiliated colleges?
I just wanna throw this in: there are some religious schools that won’t accept Pell Grants or student loans as payment. Pensacola Christian is one that comes to mind. They do this so the government won’t start telling them how to run their school (they’re very strict, but from what I hear, excellent as far as educatoin goes).
I don’t mind trying, like with a small test case, but voucher proponents are pushing for implementing, without concrete evidence that it works.
And your hypothetical example is grossly off-base – I don’t know of a public school system where none of the students are getting an education. With a starting state that slanted, any change – even one that benefits only 1% of the student population – is bound to be an improvement by comparison.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (and women, and children, and students) are created equal…”
Portions of doreen’s first post above really deserve to be reprinted:
Well said.
Private schools don’t have some mystical quality that bestows upon them higher graduation rates, higher test scores, or a better education than public schools. Those private schools that outperform public schools do so in large part because of smaller class sizes, higher teacher salaries, and/or an ability to select which students they will enroll. A conundrum: how do we get vouchered kids in the good private schools (which, for the sake of this discussion, I’m happy to define as “providing higher test scores etc. than public schools”) without increasing the class sizes of those schools? Without limiting their ability to cherrypick their students?
If I had a school that could keep all the good students and kick out all the poor students, I’d have high test scores, too.
If I had a school that could keep all the good students and kick out all the poor students, I’d have high test scores, too.
That’s just it. Public schools can’t kick out the riffraff. Private schools can, which is one reason their schools generally kick public schools’ ass.
And no, I’m not referring to poor students as riffraff. I’m a poor student myself. When I say riffraff, I mean the criminals, the druggies, the bullies, the disruptive loudmouths, etc.
Get rid of the riffraff in public schools and I think we’d see a vast improvement, shitty as they are. Thing is, nobody will.
Um, true…but you may have missed my point. The point of vouchers is to allow public school students–including the “riffraff,” if they or their parents want–to afford private schools. And if you’d see a vast improvement in the public schools by getting rid of what you term the “riffraff,” what do you think will happen to the private schools who let the riffraff in?
There’s nothing about private schools that make them intrinsically better than public schools except for their ability to be selective in their admissions.
I can’t see the private schools letting the riffraff in to begin with:
“You did what to the school mascot? You got into HOW many fights last year? You broke someone’s nose? Umm, Mr. and Mrs. Hellion, I don’t think little Jimmy would be comfortable at our school.”
Or they’d just kick out the riffraff the second they started acting up.
And since you asked, what do we do with the riffraff? Kick their asses out! Public AND private schools should be able to do this. If they won’t behave and they are constantly disrupting their classes and intimidating other students (and sometimes the teachers), why should we pay for them to go to school? The government pours thousands into educating just one kid, is it unreasonable to expect that they BEHAVE? I think public education should be considered a privilege, not a right.
Ever seen “Lean on Me?” Morgan Freeman plays the principal of some crappy Jersey high school and on the first day goes in and kicks out all the delinquents and then proceeds to turn the school around in one year? I mention this b/c it was based off of a true story, and apparently kicking out the riffraff worked for the guy in real life.
The reason for opposition to school vouchers is simple. No one with any other viable alternative would use any of the major urban public school systems, and most of the non-affluent suburban school systems as well. The public school system is loaded with career union members who serve no interest other then their own.
Our public school system is a defacto private school system anyway. When Kobe Bryant was in the Lower Merion school district, we heard about high schools that had two swimming pools, one for girls and one for boys. Of course, you must live in Lower Merion to attend the schools. Houses start at over 500k and go way up from there.
On the other hand, if you live in Philadelphia, your children walk through metal detectors to over crowded classrooms, without books, with teachers going through the motions. This school district will not even tell you that your child is cutting school until they do so for three consecutive days.
The weak argument offered by the TEACHERS UNION is that vouchers will drain resources from an already struggling school system. You bet it will. Offer a better product or go out of business.
Philadelphia has so much faith in its ability to educate our children that they contracted out administration to Edison, the corporation that manages schools, supposedly at a profit. If the city doesn’t trust the school board, why should I?
This. Is. The. Whole. Point. I’m beginning to think your posts may be intentionally parodic.
Well, when poverty skyrockets, drug use skyrockets, and crime skyrockets because of your novel “Let’s Leave a Whole Bunch of Children Behind” plan, I guess we’ll know who to thank.
That each child may receive a public education is of benefit to society at large. Reread your Thomas Dewey. Hell, just reread rjung’s post, right above yours:
The affluence of families that can afford private schools
Better locations
Non-politicized management
More stable home environments
Don’t get me wrong, opposition to vouchers, at least here in Philly, is mainly a Union/Political thing. But there is much more involved then selective recruitment. The Catholic School system achieves the same goal as many private schools at a much lower cost per student.
And do you also kick out the eight year old whose parents let her stay up late watching TV and don’t make her go to school when she’s too tired in the morning? Or the twelve year old who is regularly kept home from school to babysit younger siblings? Or the child who arrived here last year, not speaking a word of English? Because those students will also make the school look bad on paper if there are enough of them.
How about the mentally and physically handicapped children? Or the children with single parents-parents that often have two jobs and can’t meet the requirements of parent participation that a lot of private schools have? “Riffraff”, indeed.
And don’t even get me started on that one-sided piece of claptrap, “Lean On Me”. That movie is about as accurate as those Buford Pusser “Walking Tall” movies.
But #2 , #6 and #3 as modified to “families that can afford and are willing to pay for private schools” are part of being selective in their admissions and retention. “Selective” doesn’t have to be based on test scores and grades.
#1 and #4 aren’t always true - certainly there are many dedicated public school teachers and there are unionized Catholic school teachers. The locations of Catholic schools and public schols may not be very different at all.
Don’t get me wrong - I have nothing against Catholic schools. But I know that my kids’ Catholic school would not have nearly the good results it has if the principal had to accept and retain every child who lived within a specified boundary
In my NYC experience, that’s just not true. Perhaps most [but not nearly all] of the people who could afford private school would choose a private school over a zoned school. But nearly everyone (with the exception of those who find a religious education or a single sex school or the St Grottlesex sort of private school very important) would choose Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech over a private school, and many would choose even a special public school program (for example a school that specializes in aviation or a program that specializes in journalism, music, or art) over a private school. I remember all of the complaints that the Catholic high schools required a non-refundable deposit before the public high school acceptances came out earlier this year- because the parents didn’t want to lose their deposit if their child was accepted in the preferred public school. It’s not that people in NYC are unwilling to use the public school sytem at all if they have a way out-they are for the most part unwilling to use the zoned high schools if they have an alternative and to a lesser extent unwilling to use the zoned middle and elementary schools if they have an alternative. The schools that people won’t use if they don’t have to are the very schools that share the system’s inability to be selective.
Kids of single parents, kids who stay up too late, mentally/physically handicapped are not riffraff.
I already explained the kind of students I consider to be riffraff. It doesn’t have anything to do with grades, it’s about behavior.
I was a kid of a single mom, stayed up too late all the time and had undiagnosed ADHD. I managed to get through school without getting into trouble Didn’t get into drugs, didn’t smartmouth my teachers, didn’t bully other kids, etc.
Like I said, is it too much to ask that students BEHAVE? Even if they’re shitty students?
Didn’t get into drugs, didn’t smartmouth my teachers, didn’t bully other kids, etc.