Here’s some data from India. From this paper
What’s interesting is this bit -
Can you name any business, at any time in history where the government was totally out of it? I can’t think of a single one. But by all means, knock yourself out.
I can’t open pdf files at work-does it say what percentage of children attending school go to private schools?
Yes, that’s why my name is attached to the post.
Baah, “tertiary industry” is just economists’ cant to categorize everything. Politicians render a service too, are they an industry?
Dead people are essentially “free”. Hell, if you do it right, they can even pay for themselves…he proposed modestly.
Equality of opportunity isn’t uniformity.
Good thing for my argument that I never mentioned performance as something that needed equalizing, then.I’m talking about equalizing the inputs to the system. yes, the outcomes will vary - I believe they’ll vary less with equality of opportunity, not more.
A teacher, the same. Mental fitness (academic results), knowledge (continued education and testing) and carrying out “missions” (postings to different schools)
By averaging it out over a range of postings. 2 years in a good neighbourhood, two years in a bad one - shitty teaching will tell.
Cute, but I’m not treating human beings like products.
Yes.
You’re sacrificing actual, valuable educations imparted by private schools for the ideal of equality of opportunity, while admitting that such equality won’t actually equalize outcomes. This sort of Harrison Bergeron equality makes society worse off, not better. We need educated people, full stop. Deliberately sabotaging little Jimmy’s education so he doesn’t get too far ahead of little Joey, instead of just working on improving little Joey’s education, is monstrous.
Don’t you want your best teachers working with your worst students?
My mother was a private school teacher and I’ve never heard anyone argue for doing away entirely with public schools.
And yes, I do think as a general rule, private schools do a better job, but that’s due a number of reasons which couldn’t realistically be replicated in a public school.
The problem with such studies is that the private schools don’t exist independently of public schools. They exist in an environment in which the students tend to be those with the most-involved, and often wealthiest, parents (since less-involved parents won’t send their kids to a school that takes work to get them into). Private schools therefore get students whose parents prioritize education, and who are probably getting educational support at home. They’ll have lower costs for exceptional children overall (with obvious exceptions for schools that specialize in EC students). And they can pick and choose teachers: given the small number of teachers they need compared to public schools, they can take folks who don’t need teaching income as a primary income, often parents of kids who go to the private school and can afford not to be bringing in lots of money. The minimal government oversight means that the school may have better working conditions. Even shoddy teachers might have better results at a private school than decent teachers at a public school, since the students are selected for academic prowess.
For all these reasons, it’s inaccurate to look at such studies and conclude that private schools are superior for education to public schools.
First off, did you miss the bit in the study that said it controls for student background?
Second, I’d argue that just the fact that parents who prioritise education send their kids to private schools should tell you a lot about which one is better.
Third, Indian government schools are truly horrible, but there’s a reason it is so. That reason is government was too powerful in India for too long, and got in too deep and stayed in too many things. Here’s a great case study, if you have the time. (addition in <> brackets mine)
To summarise - teacher incentives got misaligned. When the government decides what you get paid, what your parameters of success are, how you will be evaluated etc. teachers are no longer incentivised to teach well, but to influence government decisions. And governments are not formed nor broken on the issue of school quality, which anyway properly comes to light only many years later.
It might be an indicator that the parents are better and involve themselves in their children’s education.
No, I didn’t miss that part, but I’ve never seen a study that controlled for parent prioritization of academic performance for all kids.
As a teacher, teaching a room full of such kids sounds like a lovely dream. Having a room with like 3/4 these kids and 1/4 kids whose parents disparage schools and teachers and only send their kids because they have to? Totally different dynamic.
And yes, of course schools are better when everyone there is there because they value schools. That’s not controversial. I will freely admit that if I were teaching in the local prestigious private school I could get my kids to do amazing things. Heck, for the 25 minutes a day I get to work with the slightly-above to high-above-grade-level third graders, I’m teaching them binary numbers, game theory, and computer programming. That’s because I’m working with a group of highly motivated kids who get to go home and continue working on these engaging academic subjects on their home computers with parents who make space for them to do so.
But we don’t just educate those kids. We educate everyone, because the real client for public schools is, after the kids themselves, society at large. We want universal education. So private schools can’t be our only answer.
Czarcasm - To your post of whether governments should be in education at all, I think they should set standards, provide testing and vouchers for all students. They shouldn’t be in delivery of education at all. The standards bits are a crapshoot too unfortunately. I know you’re probably looking at it from the point of view of religions intruding into the classroom, but government involvement is no guarantee of keeping religion out. Look at Pakistan’s government mandated textbooks for instance. They propagate hatred of Hindus, and India, and IMO are a big factor in keeping the countries at loggerheads. Indian standards and textbooks have generally done a good job, but when the Hindu leaning nationalist BJP came to power, it immediately mandated changes in text books to glorify Hinduism. I’d much rather that such power not be a socially acceptable option. So maybe governments can have one set of standards, with others providing competition? There already is something of that sort in India, with an international curriculum being followed by some very elite(ist?) schools.
Perverse incentives. Competition isn’t the magic cure-all many people like to pretend.
Doing nothing to give the “students” a real education and just pocketing all the money for yourself would be an example. A common result of voucher schemes I understand. Another example would be a school that’s run by the same people who own a for-profit prison, and who have children arrested on made up pretexts so they can get paid more for holding them as a prisoner. Something similar to this.
No, we can’t. For both political and practical reasons a libertarian/theocratic nightmare is exactly what we’d get, and is exactly why the proponents of privatization want it the first place (they don’t think of it as a nightmare of course).
Sure, it may, and ‘better’ parents are making the judgement that private schools are better. I think that’s a good indicator that private schools are better. I don’t rule out the possibility that it may just indicate that all good parents only think private schools are better, and hence end up fulfilling their own prophecy, but I think it less likely.
Why not? Let the government pay for those who can’t. Whatever the education budget is, divide that among all school going kids as vouchers (could be limited to economically backward kids if needed, though I’m not sure if that’s necessarily advisable), and provide for a testing mechanism to provide information to the parents. Why is that a priori worse than public schools?
Fred’s mom is an addict. She frequently doesn’t wake up in the morning in time to get Fred ready for school. She hated school and lets Fred know that every day. She hates his teachers–all teachers–on principle. She mocks him if he shows any academic interest.
There’s a private school in the neighborhood just for her: it requires no homework, doesn’t make a fuss over attendance, and issues barely-hidden kickbacks to parents by spending the bulk of the voucher dollars on easily-resold items like iPads.
There’s a private school in the neighborhood for the kids of parents who care: they require homework and attendance and expel kids who aren’t performing well.
Where is Fred going to end up going? Multiply Fred by a million: where will all the Freds go?
Public schools just give one baseline option, and it answers not to the parent but to society at large. Fred’s mom will send him to school, or she’ll talk to the truancy officer. If Fred’s not doing his homework, the social worker will pay a friendly visit to his house to see what’s going on. He’s held to high standards at school.
Private school is often great for kids whose parents are actively engaged and who prioritize education. For kids whose parents don’t, it can be a nightmare.
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No, we can’t. For both political and practical reasons a libertarian/theocratic nightmare is exactly what we’d get, and is exactly why the proponents of privatization want it the first place (they don’t think of it as a nightmare of course).
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No, we wouldn’t. Ever. And it’s because of political and practical reasons we wouldn’t, despite folks like you fretting about it. We will NEVER get the government out of the system, and any system we put in place will basically be an extension of what we already have, merely modified in some minor way. Just like we’ll never get a liberal fantasy world with perfect socialism or whatever…ain’t going to happen. Instead, you’ll get aspects of the fantasy. Like the health care reform stuff. A public school reform would be much the same…something no one would be happy with, but something that the various groups could perhaps agree on enough to make it practical for some marginal change, with perhaps the current dominant political party getting a touch more of their fantasy and the current minority party getting a touch more lemon.
But like the OP, feel free to fret about something that no one realistically thinks will ever happen, namely that the evil liberatrians (a.k.a. as ‘those that say’) are going to take over and get their way 100% and push through their fantasy.
FYI: The OP isn’t “fretting” about anything. Just weighing plusses and minuses, and asking for real world examples.
Even if I take it for granted that government is a better agency to oversee kids education than parents(I’m genuinely not settled on this matter), you can have all the oversight of the sort you require with private schools too. Works far better in fact, because then government isn’t delivering a service and overseeing it at the same time. Fewer conflicts of interest.
As has been pointed out, there aren’t any…and even if there were, it’s not going to happen in the US. Taking the government out of the process would be a radical change that is pure fantasy, whether you are drooling in anticipation or, as seems more the case here, shivering in fear. What we will get, realistically in the actual ‘real world’ is some incremental change that will be a political compromise. As you don’t want to talk reality, however, I think it’s safe to say that our current system is much, much better than the fantasy system of zero government involvement, as it has the virtue of being realistic, as opposed to a fantasy or a strawman. So, rest easy there big hoss.
Why are you posting in this thread?
This is an interesting point. Not only were the Big Three automakers competing with each other, but they had already defeated American Motors, Studebaker, Willys, Hudson and a bunch of other rivals.
By the standard of “competition makes a better product” the 1970s and 1980s should have been the pinnacle of American auto manufacturing, right?
As for a real-word citation, the City of St. Louis had 31% of its students enrolled in charter schools, the publicly funded, privately run institutions that are supposed to be free of all the problems inherent in public schools. The results can only be described as mixed – certainly nothing that shows one system is inherently better than the other. As a matter of fact, one operator had its charter revoked because it managed to place all its schools in the bottom five percent of all schools- public and private - in the state.