No it doesn’t.
Nails what, exactly?
The silly baseless stereotype that some conservatives like to imagine actually applies to the real world. You needed to ask?
Nobody’s arguing that the best students would do well anywhere, although they’d probably still do better at the private schools, if only because of name recognition.
It’s the kids that are on the bubble, so to speak, that benefit the most from the strongly education-focused environment at the good private schools. There’s constant reinforcement both at home and school about the necessity of doing well at one’s schoolwork, which isn’t always the case in public school.
I have a couple of anecdotal things that while not proof, do point out the differences I’m talking about.
I went to public elementary and middle school, and private high school. Middle school was generally a case where you showed up, you did your thing, and you got your grades. Your teachers and the school administration didn’t really care if you lived up to your potential or anything like that.
In high school at one of the most academically challenging private schools in Houston, I actually got called into the dean’s office my junior year and got my ass chewed for not living up to my potential.
Also, when it came time to apply for scholarships and what-not before college, I was in an orientation meeting talking about scholarships at Texas A&M, and they laid out the scholarship requirements- IIRC it was 1200 on the SAT(this was 1991), and top 15% of your graduating class. I made a comment about not being in the top 15% but had been invited to the orientation, and they asked where I went to school, and they said “Oh… School X; that’s different then. That top 15% doesn’t apply to you.” In front of a room of 100 people or so.
Those kinds of things are why parents pay for private schools, ultimately.
It’s not baseless. It’s very real. You can see it in this thread.
I must hear at least a few dozen times a year someone bemoaning the fact that there aren’t any fill in the blank hip and trendy ethnic food places to eat, or that there isn’t enough diversity in the nice area where they live.
Seriously. This isn’t something Shagnasty is making up. White Liberal hypocrisy and guilt is very real and definitely does exist. A poster upthread said that you should send you kids to inner city schools as a good example to them. This was said earnestly and wasn’t a joke. You can’t make this stuff up.
Well, why shouldn’t they?
You conservatives in this thread are the ones I see calling food “hip and trendy”. People who like ethnic food like a variety of flavors…which you can’t get in suburbs compared to cities. I would like diverse food if I couldn’t ever tell a soul about it, you are projecting your dorkish unfashionableness onto our motives for liking good food methinks.
And again I ask, if the whole point of Shagnasty’s idiotic post was to say that progressivism 101 was to inherit money and then cash the check, what percentage of progressives would you say inherit money from their relatives? What percentage of those go on to decry it? It must be well over 50% of Progressives are trust fund babies if it’s “fundamental” right?
I don’t even know where to start with this. The fact that BrainGlutton simul-posted you basically proving my point for me or how silly it is to try and bring percentages and statistics into it.
I don’t know why you put quotes around the word “fundamental” since someone on your side of the debate brought that word up. But I’ll say this: It’s widespread. Very common. Do I have a peer reviewed study of exactly how often in terms of percentages Liberals bemoan the lack of diversity in the exact areas that they choose to live? No. But I do know that it happens a lot, and it’s funny, which is why Shagnasty’s post was so funny. It’s also why it struck such a chord with so many of you and has you all defensive.
There’s plenty of conservative hypocrisy. When people point that out I don’t get all huffy. When some social conservative gets caught with his dick in the crazy you won’t see me defending him for instance. But to deny that the Liberal hypocrisy that Shagnasty described exists is just silly. I see it every week.
So instead of answering the questions I actually asked you, you instead choose to answer the questions you’d prefer I’d asked?
Your questions were based on a false assumption. So it isn’t possible to answer them reasonably.
You “asked”
That wasn’t the whole point.
So there you go.
Regards,
Shodan
Everyone tone it down, now.
We have enough partisan silliness on this board without expanding it to food fights. rogerbox, calling a post “idiotic” is not necessarily a rule violation, but it does nothing to promote discussion. Calling a poster “dorkish” is a rules violation and will not be repeated.
[ /Moderating ]
Really? “Seriously”? You are seriously wanting to paint a whole group of people who share what you want to label as “progressive” beliefs based on something that you hear “a few dozen times a year” from people who may or may not even have those beliefs.
You really don’t understand why that seems a bit baseless?
You are right: you can’t make this shit up.
FWIW in my real life I hear few complaints about the lack of good restaurants (as we have plenty of great eatin’ near me) but those few I do hear come from conservatives at least as often as from liberals. Not sure why complaining about not having good ethnic restaurants is something that you’d think has anything to do with one’s political beliefs. (A conservative can’t like Pho or Ethiopian?) I live in a diverse enough town but if there was no decent diverse neighborhood for me to live in that was near enough my work and that had good enough schools then I would indeed feel completely justified in bemoaning that fact without any hypocrisy involved.
Shodan if there was really any point to that Shagnasty post other than a silly attempt to label all with “progressive” beliefs as poseurs who all own fixies while whining about the lack of “hip” places to eat and the lack of diversity while cashing checks that they are ungrateful for, then please explain what it was. The high-fiving of that post should a source or embarrassment for anyone with a well thought out conservative position.
Because it’s hypocritical in some ill-defined way, apparently
Your anecdote has the ring of truth. However, I think you misunderstood what that officer was saying. The reasoning behind this is that it would be much more difficult to get into the top 15% of school X than it would be to get into the top 15% of a non-selective public school. If they actually held to such a hard and fast rule, it would massively disadvantage the children of affluent families; and that would not fly. (It also would not in fact be fair to those kids at the private school, I will fully admit.) Nothing about this story reveals whether the different scale they used for school X would actually be harder or easier to achieve.
This article from the WSJ, however, suggests that a bright student may have a better shot at getting into an Ivy League school from a public rather than from an elite private school:
Even if there is no clear advantage either way, one type of school is free and the other one is very expensive. So unless you have money to burn, you should be concerned IMO…unless, as I keep saying, it’s really just about keeping your kids away from the riff raff.
(That whole article should be a must read, by the way, for anyone still reading this thread.)
So your argument is that because Ivy League universities recognize that it’s harder for kids to do well in a public school, we should send our kids to public schools? Interesting.
And you can keep beating the “you just want to keep your kids away from the riff-raff” drum but repeating the claim does not make it so.
Whoa, where did you get that? That strikes me as a dramatic misreading (or distortion) of what I wrote, and quoted. Can you explain specifically how you arrived at this paraphrase?
Oh, the horror of generalizations!
At this point I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Shagnasty’s post caused a few of you to faint.
I guess we can all at least take solace in the fact that such generalizations and stereotypes of conservatives would never be tolerated on this board. Because, as we all know, when someone makes a funny cheap shot at conservatives they are never given high fives, but instead are immediately told how unfair it is to do such a thing.
It’s a fair summary of what you posted.
You “asked” me to back up my praise for a satirical post with facts and figures. My response was entirely appropriate: I pointed out how silly it would be to do such a thing.
FWIW… I WAS the riff-raff at my high school, coming from a squarely middle-class family that had just come off a long-ish period of unemployment. I got a scholarship and work-study to pay the tuition that my parents couldn’t; I don’t know how much of the total they paid, but I know it wasn’t much, based on the published tuition rates and the amount of work-study I was required to do.
The other reason for private schools is networking, and this one was actually articulated to me by my mother when I was a teenager.
Out of the guys I went to high school with (my class and the ones I overlapped with), we have probably 3 or 4 dozen lawyers, an office furniture magnate in Houston, a coffee magnate in Houston, a former special assistant to the Secretary of State (now a US consul in Japan), a congressional chief of staff, a Grammy award winning music producer, probably a couple dozen doctors, several career military officers, including a Marine Colonel, and a slew of college professors.
That’s a serious network, as opposed to the local high school I was supposed to go to, where other than a few football and basketball players and the odd rapper or two, there haven’t been nearly as many per-capita successful people.