Why America’s Prep Schools Aren’t Following Arne Duncan’s Public School Education Reforms
The basic premise of this piece is that if school “reforms” are so great, why aren’t the rich using them?
Debate topic:
What is the best course for American education to follow?
From the link:
President Obama is the latest in a long line of Presidents and Vice Presidents who have sent their own children to private school while voting to deny poor children the right to attend similar private schools. Many Congresscritters–roughly equally split between Reps and Dems–also send their kids to private schools, yet they keep passing legislation which they assure us will fix the well-known wrongs of the public schools. If they’re so confident in their legislation, why not put their kids where their mouth is?
Well done, ITR Champion. Very well done, indeed.
One can easily believe that very expensive private schools are better than public schools, while at the same time believe that private schools that would be funded mostly by the public till would be worse than public.
There is also the issue of “sunk costs” in the form of infrastructures that have already been built to accomodate public school students whose costs would not be recouped with the subsidization of transfer of students to private schools.
I’m not the biggest fan of Jimmy Carter, but he did send his daughter to public school. (How many others have done that?)
I don’t know exactly what is meant by a “prep school”, but private schools are already subject to the market in ways the public schools are not. Plus they have the sine qua non of any school in which the students do well - motivated parents.
IOW they have either already implemented the reforms, or they don’t need them.
Regards,
Shodan
If I remember, the Secret Service presence was rather disruptive and young Amy was not allowed out at recess.
ETA: The Kennedy Administration was the last previous family with young kids. Other than that, it was just the Clintons and the Obamas.
This is important to note. If there were a way to legislate motivation for parents to have their children well educated it would do much more to improve public education than the various plans that rely simply on the schools themselves.
Indeed, another thing the public schools have to wrestle with is unmotivated parents and children, because it is much more difficult to get kicked out of public school than private.
From an ideal perspective, it would be more efficient to not force children to attend school they are not learning from, other than the babysitting aspect. The state would save resources and the children would gain the economic good of having more free time even if they just use it to fool around. However, in practise, there is the babysitting aspect, both in terms of letting the parents work and having the students slightly less liable to run into mischief, plus it is difficult to discern students who really don’t want to attend, versus those that are just running into a bit of trouble, or think that flipping burgers is the road to riches simply because it pays an order of magnitude more than an allowance.
I was going to say that I assume most modern presidents don’t send their children to public school for security reasons. The daily logistics would be a nightmare and, as mentioned, the disruption to everyone would just be too great. Besides, if something happened (like, say, a hostage situation), I can just imagine the fallout if some innocent bystander was killed because the POTUS decided their child needed to attend the same schools as the rest of our kids just because.
Is it too obvious to point out that the problems and solutions for public schools probably aren’t the same for private schools? I would also guess that the problems at Johns Hopkins are different than the ones for county hospitals.
In any case, I don’t think public schools should simply follow what private schools do, or vice versa. If some parents want to send their kids to Waldorf schools to teach their kids how to be hippies, doesn’t mean that public schools should punish kids who wear polyester shirts.
Let’s pay teachers babysitting wages. What’s the going rate now per child per hour?
What do high school students do with free time without supervision?
I would completely revamp the entire public school system. Require teachers to pass a National Teachers Exam (as was done in the olden, golden days). Build larger classrooms to accomodate more children. Have one master teacher for that classroom, but other people to take care of: discipline problems, write hall passes, give out lunch tickets, do the required paper work (those endless forms), escort students to restrooms and the office and the school nurse, grade papers, help students at their desks, enter and average grades, notify parents every three weeks of each student’s progress, talk with parents, make out lesson plans for In-School Suspension, give catch-up work to students with excused absences, etc. Some of these jobs should be done by teachers, others can be done by assistants. There is more, but you get the idea. Teachers can either vote to select the master teacher for the next year or rotate. More decision-making should be done by the team of teachers rather than people who are not in the classroom – the school board, the principal, U.S. Senators, etc.
By the way, the teacher that was the subject of the film “Stand and Deliver” eventually quit his job because of lack of support from the administration in dealing with discipline problems.
Even more important to my mind is that private schools can select who they let in. Besides the previously mention self selection bias (you have to be motivated enough to try to get in), private schools can limit which types of students they take in a way that public can not. Special education is probably the biggest factor. If you factor out the hugely disproportionate cost of special education, public schools would start to look a lot more competitive.
The thing is that the old/current model works just fine if you have parental involvement in students’ lives and educations. Most parents who send their children to private schools are reasonably involved, if only because they’re directly paying for that education above and beyond whatever they’re paying for the local school district.
Public schools on the other hand are expected to work even if the students’ parents do nothing more than provide shelter for their kids, and sometimes not even then. They’re not expected to even feed their children adequately at many, so expecting them to give a shit whether their kid is making a C when they could be making an A is probably an unrealistic expectation.
That takes a different model- nobody seems to have found one that works well for that situation, but for private schools, the standard model works just fine.
At any rate, it’s rarely teacher incompetence that is the defining factor in the success or failure of poor or inner city schools, it’s parent and community involvement. Children don’t learn well unless they’re getting the same message in the other 2/3 of the day that they’re not in school- if they hear and see drastically different things, they’re likely to go with the one that their parents, relatives, friends, friends’ parents and everyone else in their community espouses, rather than the one that their 5 or so teachers suggest for part of a single day, part of the year. The best teachers in the world can’t really do that consistently for all students.
Since the data clearly show that students at private schools do better by any measure than those at public schools, defenders to public education have to come up with a list of excuses. An enormous amount of research over the years has shown that these excuses don’t hold water. The key to comparing results from private and public schools is the same as the key to any good experimental design: randomization. Take a pool of students and randomly place some in private schools and others in public schools, then compare the results.
This has been done in countless studies. Here’s one example. The results are clear:
The results of this analysis show that, after only one year’s time, attending a private-school improved student performance on standardized tests in math and reading by between 5.4 and 7.7 percentile points. On average, a scholarship raised students from the 30th percentile to the 37th percentile.This is a fairly large gain—approximately 0.25 standard deviation in math and reading.
So then let’s look at the excuses.
[ul]
[li]Private schools can select students while public schools can’t. Nope. In this study, students were selected for the private school group and control group randomly.[/li][li]Students in private schools have more motivated parents. Nope. Randomization deals with that as well. In addition, the author of the study mentions that he analyzed all data on the two groups for potential differences among families and corrected when necessary; this didn’t change the results.[/li][li]Private schools just spend more money. Nope. As the study says:[/ul][/li]
Rising test scores and high levels of parental and student satisfaction indicate more-luxurious private schools with better resources, right? Far from it. Most of the private schools at which students used the CSF scholarships operate with less than half as much per-pupil spending as the public schools. Tuition at most of the private schools is less than $3,000.Additional fundraising brings no more than a few hundred dollars per student. The private schools actually offer sparser facilities and fewer services than the public schools.
That was an incredible article, literally.
What the article does not mention of course is that elite private schools all have the one thing most reform advocates want to bring to public schools, teachers that can be fired for poor performance. The idea of a prep school hiring teachers that can only be gotten rid of through a lengthy series of paperwork intensive steps is ridiculous. So her example undermines her arguement rather than bolstering it.
The obvious point is that teaching the children of the wealthy is much different than teaching the children of the poor. The intelligence level is going to be much different, the level of parent support, amount of chaos in the kids lives are all going to be much different. Thus prep schools can make all kinds of mistakes and still send kids to elite colleges while poor schools have to do everything right. That is why having data about how kids learn best is so vital to improving public schools.
The good thing about the OP is that no one claim that the idea teachers care about their jobs as much as they care about the kids is teacher bashing after reading that article.
What are you talking about?
You must think we’re all incredibly stupid. :rolleyes:
The student selection issue isn’t just about private students doing better because they start out better. Private schools in the study still got to pick the rest of their students. You don’t think having a bunch of smarter, well-adjuster kids around is going to make a difference?
As to your dismissal of the “motivated parent” issue, let’s look at a quote from the first page of your article:
Hmm. I wonder what sort of parent applies to a low probability lottery to get their kid into a better school.
What kind of services don’t they offer? The ones that resource intensive kids need? If you took all the public schools and took out all the discipline cases, special ed kids, and allowed anyone who didn’t want to be there to leave, I would bet that the scores of the kids remaining would go up without any other changes whatsoever. You could even cut out things like sports and other intramural and still get higher test scores.
Not to mention the economics of the thing. Guess who needs to pay more to keep teachers? A private school that has high motivation in students and parents and few discipline issues, or school that requires a metal detector and armed guards to keep the students from attacking the teachers?
You really think the fallout of a terrorist attacking Sidwell Friends would be generate less fallout than a random DC middle school? Of course Sidwell probally already has much better security because of all the high profile families (inlcuding Congresspeople & diplomats) that send their kids there so any security measures the SS insist on would be marginally less disruptive.
When did the US ever do that at a national level? :dubious:
I have very mixed feelings about this.
I confess, I sent my kids to parochial school and then to expensive, religious-affiliated but highly -regarded high schools. And they had SATs/ACTs and got into great colleges.
But the prep school teaching and curriculum were not what made the difference really. The prep schools provide extremely good college counseling; having attended such a school is a big help in the coolege admissions process; and the kids tend to come from families that can afford, socially and financially, to stress academic success.
So yes, prep schools don’t “need” reform. A great many public schools do, though it’s extremely hard to actually make it happen.