Quote:
Originally Posted by natalie469
Omg, catholic schools were the way to go in the 60's and 70's. But not anymore because a lot have closed. What la la land am I in. It's a fact
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I was educated in Catholic schools grades 1 through 12 graduating from high school in 1989.
The Milwaukee Public Schools have closed a lot of their schools just as the Catholic schools in the city have. Washington High School in Milwaukee--or what it once was called when I was young--is now composed of something like
3 public schools in that single building.
Washington is not the only one. What was once Wilbur Wright Middle School is now called something else and composed of both a grade school and middle school.
Jackie Robinson Middle School which was near my grade school of St. John de Nepomuc closed years ago. The big building set vacant for years. The City of Milwaukee sold the building to a developer and now it houses seniors at low cost.
Info and photo of the school in the link:
Company begins converting MPS school to apartments - JSOnline
Quote:
A development company ceremonially broke ground Wednesday on converting a closed Milwaukee middle school to an apartment complex for seniors.
Developer Gorman & Co. bought the old Jackie Robinson Middle School from Milwaukee Public Schools and intends to convert the building at 3245 N. 37th Street into the 68-unit Sherman Park Senior Living Community.
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Even in Chicago the city is closing down a lot of public schools. I think Chicago is closing down close to 100 public schools in the city. In a lot of cities like Chicago and Milwaukee the tax base has fallen as well as the number of students enrolled in public schools has dramatically reclined. I think in Milwaukee it might be more due to a fall in the tax base whereas in Chicago it might be more due to blacks, Latinos and others leaving the city for the suburban areas.
The Catholic schools--at least in Milwaukee--started closing before the public schools. But they were privately funded. You also have to consider who was doing the teaching and how much they were being paid. Originally, at St. John's, all my teachers were
nuns (and they still dressed
like nuns back then unlike this horse sh__ today.). The nuns lived together right on the school grounds (now that building houses young black mothers on drugs or being rehabilitated for crime I think). So, I suspect the cost of them as teachers was not very monetarily large. However, at some point in my school career there we began getting lay teachers and even a male lay person as a principle (who instilled no fear in us like the sister we previously had for years that we both respected and feared
). The lay teachers were women. And they--though I did not know it at the time--were being paid incredibly low wages.
Financially, the school could not sustain itself. And its worth bearing in mind by the time the school closed it was almost entirely composed of Black-American students. It was largely black when I started it in 1st grade but there were still plenty of whites in the school. But maybe by the 4th or so grade the school had become essentially a black school.
Quote:
Originally Posted by natalie469
Maybe it's the state you live in because the public schools are far superior in my state. Catholic schools focus on religion. Why is that a better education
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Catholic schools do not simply "focus on religion" as you say.
For one thing, they educate anyone irrespective of their religion or lack of religion. However, when I was in grade school we did have religious instruction I think once a week. One of the priests (they still lived in the rectory of the parish church back then) would come over into the school and give the lessons. And we had to attend morning Mass before school, although, I'm not sure if the non-Catholics had to or not. We said prayers in school as I remember and had to stand and do the pledge of allegiance to the flag with our right hand on our heart every morning too. But basically we were taught the material from non-religious subjects.
However, there is a cost to everything, and there is one with the voucher program. A cousin of mine educated in Catholic schools too, has complained to me that the material and standards at the Catholic school he sent his daughter to was lowered, and he was told its because they had to accommodate kids from the public schools that were generally not up to speed.
I'm not an anti-public school person. Actually, I was sad to see what happened to the Milwaukee Public Schools I grew up with, even if I did not attend them.
And there are some very good public schools in Milwaukee. The problem is there are some that totally suck, there seems to be no uniformed standard, and MPS has a huge bureaucracy.
But maybe what is most important is that at some of the public schools most of the parents simply don't care how their child is doing in school. You can be the best teacher on earth and be given billions of dollars but if the kids don't want to learn at all and the parents refuse to be involved then there really is little you can do.
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