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Anybody caring enough to put thier kid in private school is invested in their education regardless of their SES.
that is like saying anyone investing in a mercedes is invested in caring for its upkeep. Why are boarding schools an option, parents unable to invest "time" in their child['s education]?
Private schools can high grade their students. Public schools have to take everything that shows up. Public schools should not have to accept or keep the disruptive or unteachable beyond about 7th grade. Schools are for learning not babysitting.
I attended a private school for 2 years, then went back to my public high school in the early 60's.
At that time, my local high school was just as good or better than the private school. I transferred mid-term, and the high school here had every class I took at the private school; I was able to continue in Spanish, English, U.S. history, Art, Woodworking, all the math courses, a comparative religion course, and was able to participate in a wider variety of school clubs. The P.E. was better, too, as was the Art, History, and Woodworking. More languages were taught locally than in the private school; there, only Spanish and German were offered. Here in podunk Idaho, kids were offered Spanish, French, German, and Latin.
50 years later, I went back to the private school for the first time since leaving.
The tuition had gone through the roof from what it had been- well over 40 times more than what it cost when I was there, but the enrollment was filled and new dorms were being built. My local school now costs 4 times more to attend than in 1961.
The teaching staff was well paid and excellent. The school has regularly turned out Rhoades scholars, and 95% of the students go straight on to colleges.
My local high school has dropped almost all of the elective courses I enjoyed, and 8% of the students now go straight into college. Our school district is one of the most highly supported in the state, but we have lost most of our best teachers to early retirement or to neighboring states where the pay is better. Idaho now ranks at the bottom of kids going on to college from high school.
The private school now teaches many languages; all the students are required to take 2 to graduate, and they can learn Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Farsi, Russian and Turkish as well as Spanish, French, and German. The school constantly finds new specialist teachers for these languages and changes the language program regularly. They have also offered Korean, Italian, and other languages in the past, and those will rotate back into the schedule in the future.
My local high now teaches only Spanish.
The kids at the private school can learn how to build internet websites, how to create and operate spread sheets and data bases, digital art and editing, online business creation, and other stuff. My local high offers none of these.
The private school has an average class size of 7 students to one teacher. My local school's class size is 29 students to one teacher. That teacher is typically much younger, new to the profession, and won't teach for more than 5 years before quitting. The private school's teachers are about 10 years older, have all taught for years (some at college), and are selected from a long waiting list.
The graduates coming out of my local high don't stand much of a chance at ever entering demanding and high-paying professions. A few will go on, and will do well, but for most, their lives as young adults is pretty bleak.
The kids who now graduate from that private school graduate with very high skill levels. They will go on to good colleges, hone those skills, and mostly lead successful lives. They are so well prepared that any college they can afford has open doors for them.
Money counts, obviously, but so does support at the state level. There is no reason other than money that my local school could not do about as well as that private school. It once competed very well long ago, but has just gone downhill for a very long time now. Idaho has failed it's kids for decades now, and there is no sign that folks here are willing to change things.
This is not a liberal-conservative thing. Most of the parents who send their kids to that private school are conservatives, but they are smart. More than anything, they want the very best education they can afford for their children. Some of the parents are liberal, but they want exactly the same for their kids.
Private schools can high grade their students. Public schools have to take everything that shows up.
Yes, but they do not have to put them in the same classrooms as everyone else.
Read the article I linked earlier...
Quote:
"The contrast was stark: schools that had "severely declining test scores" had "moved determinedly toward heterogeneous grouping" (that is, mixed students of differing ability levels in the same classes), while the "schools who have maintained good SAT scores" tended "to prefer homogeneous grouping."
If attaining educational excellence is this simple, why have these high-quality schools become so rare?"
Goes on to explain how and why our public schools have become so degraded in the subsections entitled: The Incubus of the Sixties and The Shock of College-Level Demands. The Other Crisis in American Education - The Atlantic
I don't want my kid reviewing last year's material because someone else's kid is uninspired.
If they don't want to learn, they should not be allowed to hold up the rest of the class.
Exactly.
The fact that U.S. public schools overwhelmingly operate under that model, which restricts everyone's progress to that of the slowest-learning students in the class, is exactly why our country's students lag the rest of the industrialized world.
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Liberals, in general, why are private schools better than public schools?
