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Old 09-29-2018, 10:45 AM
 
Location: DC metropolitan area
631 posts, read 562,219 times
Reputation: 768

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Louisiana has the highest percentage of students in private schools in the nation: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/...the-us/375993/. This is due to Catholic schools in the south of the state. Why do so many parents in south Louisiana (New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and other towns) avoid the public school system? Is it that bad? Or do parents really want a Catholic education for their children?

CODOFIL has been pushing for French language immersion programs in schools throughout Acadiana. I suspect they have been unsuccessful because many of the parents who would likely most support these programs have elected to send their kids to private, Catholic schools... but I have no data to back this up. French immersion has great educational benefits, but places like Terrebonne Parish, Lafourche Parish, Vermilion Parish (and others) have none. There are not enough parents to advocate for them. I really think it is a shame that the public schools in Acadiana don't do more to revitalize French in the region. Maybe people just don't care enough... or they don't see the public school system as worthy enough to invest their time in.
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Old 09-29-2018, 11:41 AM
 
Location: Louisiana to Houston to Denver to NOVA
16,508 posts, read 26,291,623 times
Reputation: 13293
City governments and voters don't like to invest in schools and the neighborhoods that surround bad schools. Louisiana has lots of poverty that translates into the school system.
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Old 09-29-2018, 02:47 PM
 
Location: Phoenix
30,350 posts, read 19,138,862 times
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Much of Louisiana has terrible schools that are also unsafe. Catholic schools are generally far better scholastically and are safer and some people want the religious instruction for their kids.

Hopefully the French language of Louisiana will be revived.
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Old 09-29-2018, 03:52 PM
 
Location: New Orleans
1,554 posts, read 3,032,612 times
Reputation: 1960
To say that there isn´t a racist undertone to it all is sweeping a lot of facts under the rug...
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Old 09-29-2018, 06:15 PM
 
Location: Louisiana
806 posts, read 876,569 times
Reputation: 1248
When I saw the thread title I knew somebody was going to bring racism into it .
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Old 09-29-2018, 08:05 PM
 
Location: Lafayette, La
2,057 posts, read 5,324,621 times
Reputation: 1515
Lafayette has some good schools. I would send kids to those schools.
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Old 09-29-2018, 08:12 PM
 
Location: Louisiana to Houston to Denver to NOVA
16,508 posts, read 26,291,623 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by selogic View Post
When I saw the thread title I knew somebody was going to bring racism into it .
Well that's what helped shape American society.
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Old 09-30-2018, 08:10 AM
 
10,226 posts, read 7,577,745 times
Reputation: 23161
Quote:
Originally Posted by 2ner View Post
Louisiana has the highest percentage of students in private schools in the nation: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2014/...the-us/375993/. This is due to Catholic schools in the south of the state. Why do so many parents in south Louisiana (New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and other towns) avoid the public school system? Is it that bad? Or do parents really want a Catholic education for their children?

CODOFIL has been pushing for French language immersion programs in schools throughout Acadiana. I suspect they have been unsuccessful because many of the parents who would likely most support these programs have elected to send their kids to private, Catholic schools... but I have no data to back this up. French immersion has great educational benefits, but places like Terrebonne Parish, Lafourche Parish, Vermilion Parish (and others) have none. There are not enough parents to advocate for them. I really think it is a shame that the public schools in Acadiana don't do more to revitalize French in the region. Maybe people just don't care enough... or they don't see the public school system as worthy enough to invest their time in.
Louisiana, unlike most states, has a high percentage of residents whose ancestors originated in France. Many who ended up in Louisiana centuries ago, stayed there. That's why the French influence, and Catholicism, is still so prevalent there.

Bobby Jindal and the Republican legislature pulled money out of the public education system and transferred it to the private system. That's of course because the moneyed people in the state send their kids to private schools. I didn't live in La. for years, so that possibly happened before Jindal, but I'm not sure. So the public system is underfunded, and the teachers are underpaid, while the private schools attract the better teachers and have ample funding.

La. used to have a decent public education system. I don't think that's the case, anymore.

La., though it has made efforts to equalize funding among wealthier and poorer school districts, still has a discrepancy with that. Louisiana has a lot of poor districts...more than many other states. So those children in those districts are almost ensured at not getting a good education in the public system, and are destined to be at a disadvantage for life. It's no wonder that anyone in those districts who can send their children to a private school, would do so.

The new tax cut bill that took effect in 2018 gives tax breaks for parents who send their kids to private school. Whatever money you use to pay for private school for Kindergarten thru grade 12 comes off the top of your income, so you don't have to pay federal income tax on that. Quite a benefit. That program is going to morph into one that is like the college savings program that exists currently for people to save for someone else's college education.

About 1 in 5 kids in La. goes to a private school.

It's a shame. I'm older, so I was educated in the public system back when it was better. Since moving back, I have noticed how a lot of people now don't speak with basic correct grammar. This was not the case years ago, no matter your income level. Now there's rampant using of the wrong verbs, horrible spelling...a general lack of knowing how to communicate past an elementary school level. That's not French or cultural. Even my cajun grandma, may she rest in peace, who spoke cajun French before she learned English, and was a poor, country woman, spoke better English than what I'm hearing these days. When I was a child, my mom required us to speak at least decent grammar at home. We weren't allowed to say "ain't," and we had to use subject-verb agreement. This was just a basic for decent people, in her view. She didn't want her kids sounding ignorant. When we had normal kid questions, like "how smart is a horse?", she'd say, "Look it up." So we'd look it up in the encyclopedia, and all of us would listen while one read it aloud, and we'd all discuss it.

More and more people in Louisiana are home schooling their kids. I don't know if that's a good or bad thing.
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Old 09-30-2018, 08:27 AM
 
1,153 posts, read 1,049,358 times
Reputation: 4358
Quote:
Originally Posted by aab7855 View Post
To say that there isn´t a racist undertone to it all is sweeping a lot of facts under the rug...
Who's saying otherwise? Who brought that up?

But you're right, why would I want to send my kids to failing majority black schools?

It's not a money issue: you could pour millions and billions and trillions down the drain funding those schools, but until you change the culture of ignorance, violence, and the pursuit of failure, nothing will change.

Besides, public schools are becoming a joke regardless of who attends them. There's too much federal regulation of what should be a local matter, too much dumbing-down (in large part in order to accomodate the failures at the expense of successful students) of the curriculum, and almost no accountability on the part of teachers, the administrations and their unions.
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Old 09-30-2018, 08:47 AM
 
Location: Lafayette, La
2,057 posts, read 5,324,621 times
Reputation: 1515
A lot of it has to do with the kids too. I went to a couple "bad schools" and turned out quite fine. I would consider those schools underfunded in terms of amenities and things of that nature, but the teachers were quite good and put their all into giving us a great education. I appreciated my humble surroundings.
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