Liberals, in general, why are private schools better than public schools? (dollar, compared)
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The answer is very simple. Every study about education that I have ever read (and I have read a lot) shows a very distinct correlation between socioeconomic status and success in school. Obviously, people who can afford to send their kids to private school are going to almost always fall into a higher socioeconomic class.
Remember the school in Texas where the administrator got in trouble for not testing the low performers and encouraging them to drop out etc?
The private school doesn't have to admit the kid with an 85IQ that ate lead paint chips as a kid and drags down the school test scores.
I mean imagine you and I are going to have a free throw shooting competition. Your team is composed of 20 highschoolers chosen at random from your kids school. My team is composed of 20 kids that I selected after observing their abilities to shoot free throws.
I would win. I guess it's because your school sucks at teaching kids how to shoot free-throws?
Thanks for the example. I hate how nasty we are to our teachers, when they have a tough job, and most are working their tails off.
The answer is very simple. Every study about education that I have ever read (and I have read a lot) shows a very distinct correlation between socioeconomic status and success in school. Obviously, people who can afford to send their kids to private school are going to almost always fall into a higher socioeconomic class.
You are correct and here is one such study:
Quote:
The results for fourth- and eighth-grade consistently indicated that demographic differences
between public and private schools more than accounted for the relatively high raw NAEP
mathematics scores of private schools. After controlling for demographic differences, no charter
or private school means were higher than public school means to any statistically significant
degree; moreover, particularly at grade 4, public schools actually scored significantly higher
than did private and charter schools.
The short answer is that private schools are self selecting. They can pick and chose who attends. Public schools, being taxpayer funded and all, don't have the same luxury.
That's only true at the K-12 level. At the college level, public schools, being taxpayer funded and all, can pick and choose who attends.
No reason why K-12 can't be the same way. It would go a long way towards eliminating "The Other Crisis in American Education."
Quote:
While students in the bottom quartile have shown slow but steady improvement since the 1960s, average test scores have nonetheless gone down, primarily because of the performance of those in the top quartile. This "highest cohort of achievers," Rudman writes, has shown "the greatest declines across a variety of subjects as well as across age-level groups." Analysts have also found "a substantial drop among those children in the middle range of achievement," he continues, "but less loss and some modest gains at the lower levels." In other words, our brightest youngsters, those most likely to be headed for selective colleges, have suffered the most dramatic setbacks over the past two decades--a fact with grave implications for our ability to compete with other nations in the future.
Religious schools are NOT better than public or secular private schools.
According to the data, Catholic private schools are indeed better, even when controlled for SES factors.
Quote:
"...controlling for socioeconomic status (SES) eliminates most of the public-school/private-school differences in achievement-test scores in math, reading, science and history. But even after you control for SES, Catholic schools run by holy orders (not those overseen by the local bishop) turned out to perform better than other schools studied."
Private doesn't necessarily mean for profit. As it stands, the best universities are private. In K-12 your income determines the kind of education your kid is going to get. If you can only afford $100K for a house you aren't going to have access to the schools that people with $500K houses have access to.
In past there was a time period when some states dictated that state funded colleges had to accept any student that graduated from a public school in the state. That was the policy when I went to the University of Kentucky. I want to tell you, the ensuing deer-in-the-headlight look, dropout rate was really bad every fall semester. They changed the policy sometime in the last 35 years, now that is the policy of the community colleges in the state. I was told they did it to increase the rankings in the state's flagship universities.
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