Yes. I went to Catholic elementary school, then to a Jesuit high school, and went to a Jesuit college for one year (and then transferred to another university for reasons having nothing to do with religion). And it didn’t even cause me to lapse.
Of course not.
Sure. And I absolutely support their right to send their children to religious schools. Including your hypothetical Islamic school.
But when we’re talking about conservatives (as opposed to religious people who want to educate their children in their faith), it seems that conservatives don’t just want to send their kids elsewhere, they want to abolish public schools. And, of course, teachers’ unions.
For those who think unions are all about teacher pay, right now we are in my wife’s hometown, a city of about 125,000. A lot of wealth here, good jobs, Microsoft has a large campus here, Amazon is building a huge warehouse facility, it’s often on the safest cities to live lists and gets written up fairly often by east and west coast magazines as a gay friendly place to live. 85% white, 7% black, 3.5% asian, 3% bi-racial and the rest others.
Right now, teachers are negotiating for a new contract, and the number one thing on their list is not wages, hours worked, health care, or vacation. The number one thing is violence against teachers. The middle school( I think grades 6-8) teacher in the negotiations, said her school alone had over 2,200 instances last year. And that wasn’t even the top middle school, one had over 3,000. That’s a shit load of violence directed against teachers in a city that is basically one giant middle class suburb.
This comes directly from conservatives cutting school funding. There is very little money for students with special needs so they are just plopped down in a class with teachers who have no experience in what their needs are. These students can’t understand what’s being taught, hence comes frustration and then striking out at the teachers. Totally fucked up.
Whenever I see something online, or hear it IRL, that says something like “I believe that children should start every morning with prayer,” I reply, “Great! If you believe that, then pray with your kids over breakfast.”
IIRC it was on PBS where I saw some kids at a Muslim parochial school say, in the Pledge of Allegiance, “one nation, under Allah…”
Herpes CAN be fatal, if the person is immune-compromised.
My biggest issue with abstinence-only education is that it can be very distressing to teens for whom sexual activity is not an option because they couldn’t find a partner if their lives depended on it, or conversely, someone who’s being sexually abused by a family member or someone else in a position of authority.
Here’s a summary of some points made on the thread title-question of why many conservatives voice negative generalizations about public education. The quotation marks indicate that these are common beliefs of conservatives, as well as common motivations behind those beliefs:
“If government does it, it must be vilified”
“If unions are involved, it must be vilified” (some-time exception: police unions)
“Public education is demonstrably terrible and ineffective and corrupt, and so are the people involved in it”
What’s taught undermines conservative messaging (e.g. evolution; climate science; ‘diversity is good’—all contradict conservative and/or fundamentalist Christian orthodoxy)
Public schools serve non-whites, and white supremacists don’t want their tax dollars helping non-whites
Conservatives believe they own their children and should face no government interference, even in the case of committing violence against those children
I’ll add that even though each of these themes can be justified in view of the mindset and worldview of many conservatives, an additional factor (not yet mentioned, I believe) is important: These “reasons” for seeking the demise of public education have been sold to conservatives for decades, via the politicians owned by Koch Network and other dark-money suppliers, and via the right-wing media bubble supported and funded by those same entities.
People who identify as “conservative” hear these ideas again and again, from every news or opinion source to which they are exposed. Day in and day out, they get used to the idea that Everybody who’s Anybody accepts these ideas—because they never hear contradictory views expressed except in the context of ‘here’s a stupid liberal saying stupid liberal things.’
The right-wing media bubble is all that some conservatives ever experience. No wonder they are able to believe so many nonsensical things.
I don’t understand your point here. Could you explain further.
I agree with you about abstinence only education. It is kind of like in drivers ed not teaching what to do in a skid because you are not supposed to go into a skid.
Bumping this zombie thread, because my governor, Kim Reynolds of Iowa, is proposing a voucher program to which most people, myself included, are opposed. I believe that it’s a not-very-thinly disguised way to re-segregate schools, and that people who wish to support a given private school, whether they have children to send there or not, find a private school they believe in and donate to their scholarship fund.
I also worked at the library today, and saw a donated book I had never heard of before, “The Goslings” by Upton Sinclair (yes, THAT Upton Sinclair) and listed it on our Amazon account because it was a rare first edition. This condemnation of American public education was originally written in 1924. Plus ca change…
I’m a liberal, but I think the entire public school system needs to be scrapped and redone. We can choose where we shop, where we eat, which parks to visit, what church to go to, where we work, and within income restraints where we live, but the government assigns us a school and the school assigns us a teacher. To make it worse, schools are funded locally so poor areas have a smaller tax base to call on even though their students may need more help.
The quality of teachers varies widely. I know many awesome teachers, but I’ve met others that are just morons. One thought that Japanese people were genetically incapable of pronouncing "r"s another asked me if she needed to turn the thermostat up or down to make it cooler. Studies have shown that education majors generally have lower college entry test scores than other majors. When there are great teachers they are often driven out by bad administrators, ridiculous policies, and low pay. Meanwhile, teachers’ unions protect bad teachers.
I think we need to fund schools at the state or federal level, raise the bar for entering teachers to the level of doctors or lawyers, raise pay to reflect their importance to society, treat teachers like professionals and hire support staff to do things like monitoring recess and lunch, and let parents enroll their students without regard to geographic boundaries.
There’s a LOT of discussion going on after this incident in Newport News, VA a couple weeks ago. There are oodles of links, and I chose this one because it was posted the day it happened. The big issue here does not seem to be the shooting itself, but that the school district has appeared to take drastic measures to hide the truth, whatever it may be.
My dad moonlighted as a substitute teacher from 1961 until the early 00s, and he ALWAYS said that the wealthiest schools had the worst problems; they just covered them up better.
One complaint from educators matches that of health care, the latter more frequently in recent years, and it’s that assorted major decisions are consistently being made by people who have no hands-on experience, in the classroom OR at the bedside.
I used to be a teacher, having worked in one very wealthy and one quite poor school district, and I’ll agree with that.
The wealthy district had different problems, by and large. When I moved to a needy district I felt much more needed and wanted there. Different set of problems, and in the end it all became too much for me and I changed careers.
I’m both a big supporter of public schools, and also a vocal critic. I believe in the mission of public education, and indeed it’s very successful within its limits - they take everyone. Every kid, very few exceptions. And most of them come out literate and able to function.
That said, I’d love to see some basic changes made. Not sure we need to tear down the whole thing, but changes definitely, very likely having to do with money. In my current career I go for training in gleaming, state-of-the-art facilities with everything they need to deliver instruction, and with expert teachers. I always wish we could decide to do the same for kids.
Dad’s degree is in secondary history education. He left after a semester, because they were demanding that he teach things he disagreed with, and joined the fire department.
He always told my sibs and me not to believe the party line about the JFK assassination, among other things.
We have an uncommon last name, and I would meet kids who went to other school and they would ask if I was related to Mr. Nearwildheaven. I would say yes, he’s my dad, and they would always say things like “He’s pretty cool, but we can’t get away with anything when he’s the sub.” And that’s one reason why, for the last few years, they would often assign him to work at the alternative schools, or the behavioral-disorder classes. He said that even though he encountered some really scary kids there, he was never acutely frightened there, unlike many situations in the “regular” classrooms.
Well, so it does with the post office, another government organization similarly coping with the herculean task of supplying universal service to all residents. It would be stupidly inefficient to try to combine that goal with unlimited “consumer choice”.
You can of course seek out a competing private company such as UPS or FedEx to bring you your mail, if your correspondents will cooperate with you on that. Likewise, you can seek out a local or boarding private school to educate your kids. But if you live, say, in Topeka, you can’t demand that the government have the postal workers in neighboring Kansas City deliver your mail instead of the Topeka ones because you think the Kansas City ones do a better job. Attempting to offer the public that kind of arbitrary “consumer choice” would be a massive logistical pain in the ass and a huge waste of resources.
It would be similarly stupid to try to run a public school system with enrollments based solely on the shifting whims of consumers. Unlike private schools, public schools have a mandate to provide accessible and adequate education to all children in the US, including the ones who can’t manage or afford to go far from their homes for daily schooling. ISTM that the only reasonable way to organize a universal service of that magnitude is on the basis of geographical proximity, same as for mail delivery services.
I’m not by any means suggesting that the US public school system is perfect or incapable of being improved in a lot of ways. I’m just maintaining that the standard “solution” of unfettered “consumer choice” promoted in late-stage capitalism as a cure for all social ills is not a sensible approach to take to improving it.
To me at lot of this comes down to whether we agree with the idea that every child in America should have access to an education regardless of their circumstances of birth. The school-choice, voucher, get rid of public schools people clearly do not agree with this idea because their ideal for schools in America would not result in education being accessible to every child. If we can’t agree with the basic premise that we are obligated to ensure every child has access to education, then we aren’t going to be able to agree on anything else. It’s that fundamental to the debate. Either its ok to let some kids fall through the cracks or it isn’t. Of course our public schools are not perfect or close to it right now, but we can’t effectively improve our public schools if we can’t even agree whether they should exist, and while many people are actively trying to make them worse and destroy them.
I would augment this (very true) comment with the word “quality”. A school-choice voucher system would result in a system where a quality education was only available with those of means or who could prove that their child was likely to be successful in the private school they applied to. Those that were unable or unwilling to navigate the application process to get their child placed in a “good” school would be left in whatever system was propped up to take those remaining kids.
Most people I have spoke with regarding school choice don’t seem to have a good answer for how to deal with kids with special needs (be they physical, emotional, behavioral, or mental). Either you would have to force all schools to accept all applicants (perhaps through a random lottery) or you would need to accept that those students are unlikely to get a quality education. My experience has been that most conservatives that advocate vouchers don’t really care that those students will get a sub-par education, and are OK with the “reality” that they will be destined for poor career prospects. “The world needs ditch-diggers too”, and all.
Perhaps you could find a way to attach a massive amount of money to any student with an IEP, thus incentivizing private schools to accept them, but again most voucher proponents don’t really seem to want “those kids” at the private schools they hope to be able to afford with vouchers.
Funding for the rump of the public system also becomes a massive issue, because as more families move their students out of the public system, the likelihood of bond measures passing to fund public schools drops enormously.
Yes, to me it seems most of the voucher, school choice proponents are mostly concerned with having their kids go to a school without those “other” kids. And “other” isn’t always the same for everyone, but there does seem to be a desire for something their kids can have that is exclusive and limited to the right kind of classmates.
Well, the school is not coming to the students’ house, so I think the analogy breaks down. In countries with single payer health insurance people can generally choose their own primary care provider. There is not a dichotomy between providing parents and students more options and having a healthy public school system. Does it make sense to you that a student living in Boston, who might live as close or closer to a school in Brookline, not be able to access it if it has a program that is more suited to their needs? Does it make sense that some school districts can afford better schools than others?
Does your school choice plan require all schools to take any student that wants to go there? If not, what do you say to the kids left out? Tough? We either have quality education accessible to all children, or we do not. Before details are debated we need to decide where we are on that basic, simple question. I, for one, do not think a system that sets up exclusive schools for some, and leaves the rest to fend for themselves is even worth discussing. I can’t imagine a healthy society coming from such a system.
