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I propose the exact opposite. We should make public education mandatory and eliminate all home, private and religious schooling. That would result in the rich and the poor starting off on with same knowledge base and social connections.
The more I think about this idea, the more I like it.
This is the easiest to answer for now. Homes schooled children would no be affected at all, but encouraged as they would add to the competition for students and thus help lower prices. You would have the following groups competing for children
1. Privatized Schools (for profit schools)
2. Private Schools (non-profit Religious Denominated)
3. Home Schooling
I propose the exact opposite. We should make public education mandatory and eliminate all home, private and religious schooling. That would result in the rich and the poor starting off on with same knowledge base and social connections.
The more I think about this idea, the more I like it.
I'd go along with that.
I don't want to pay for anything but public school.
Never used one, but everyone deserves to have a good basic education.
Here's what a lot of people don't get. Government does not make a profit. Private industry makes a profit. There is no guarantee that private schools cost less. On an individual case, perhaps, but not generally.
Do not expect me to pay for private education. I pay taxes, willingly, for a public education. I went to private school where my parents paid; I am childfree and had no offspring. A public education is what I'm willing to provide to support my community.
Private schools not so much.
Religious schools not at all.
Sorry Chielgirl, but anytime you have a monopoly running an entire industry you have higher prices, less choice, and extreme amounts of inefficency. It is really simple economics, nothing more nothing less. Increasing competition rises efficency, lowers cost, and provides greater incentives for innovation and technological advances. Why do you think the American College System is the best in the World, but our Public Education System from K-12 is in mid place against the rest of the civilized world?
The current Government Run Monopoly is extremely expensive, especially for the sub par results we are currently recieving and it limits the tenents of the constitution and prevents children and parents from freely choosing thier own destiny.
To add you wouldn't be paying anymore than you currently do to send kids to public school. In fact in most cases you'd end up paying less, because the school system would be run much more efficiently and cost savings would be a big part of running the newly formed privatized system. Furthermore, studies have shown it is much cheaper to educate a pupil in private school than it is in public school. I think the average cost of a private school pupil is 1200 dollars and the average cost of a public school pupil is 5600 dollars.
I know what the government pays for contract employees, it is much more than a regular employees. Not for the first year or two, but after that certainly.
truthout, show me the figures and I might believe it. I work in finance and I've seen the very opposite.
Sorry Chielgirl, but anytime you have a monopoly running an entire industry you have higher prices, less choice, and extreme amounts of inefficency. It is really simple economics, nothing more nothing less.
Simple economics isn't nearly as simple as you seem to think. An illustration of the premise that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing? Meanwhile, a checkerboard of small local school districts run by locally elected school boards hardly comprises the grand John D. Rockefeller type of monopoly seen in the picture you are trying to paint, and public schools outperform private schools once their student bodies are corrected for socio-economic differences. As <Lincolnian> quite correctly pointed out earlier, the two variables most directly associated with student success are levels of parental income and education.
As for your promises on behalf of for-profit school systems, we do have the history of for-profit Edison Schools Inc. to look to as an example of what to expect. Higher costs, lower achievement, and no profit at all would be three key things to expect on that basis.
Overall, the public education system in the US is one of the nation's finest large scale achievements. There are, of course, some who regularly trash it for partisan purposes. And sadly enough, some who believe them...
I want to make all the alternatives to public education unavailable to eliminate a system where workers are indoctrinated in the public schools and managers/leaders are trained by the private sector to enhance their perception of their exclusivity and superiority.
I see education as the basis of the class system in the US, and along with property, the rest of the world. The New Deal and the post WW2 GI bill were the last real advances for the lower and middle classes in the perpetual class war. In the last 40 years the aristocrats have rolled back most of the gains. We have to reverse the trend to aristocratic rule before it completely destroys our Republic and renders our democracy meaningless.
[color=black]So I really mean it when I say stop ALL home, religious and private schooling and require all children to be educated in a very well funded public system. This, along with a Universal health care system, would decrease the societal and economic class separation among our people. I believe the creation of a true meritocracy where the really skilled become the leaders is far more desirable than a system that promotes a preppy fool to the presidency entirely in his family connections.
Public education in the US is already free and in many areas adequate if not excellent and yet so many don't avail of it. What people in third world economies would do to get to the level of the US public school system and pay nothing extra but for your taxes!
There are many successful public schools throughout the country. There are many problem schools as well. If you look at what separates the successful from the not so successful you will see that education and income levels of the parents are major factors in the achievement level of the children in the public schools they attend.
There are a number of reasons why but one of the main reasons is that the parents are vocal in how much they value education and expect the same of their children.
Many of the low performing schools are on the opposite end of the income spectrum and many of the children attending these schools have to deal with home environments predominantly run by single mothers who are often high school dropouts. The children also experience considerable disruption to their environment moving frequently (sometimes 3 or 4 times within a school year), having new people move in and out of their lives, have fractured and difficult to understand family structures consisting of brothers and sisters from different fathers/mothers often absent from their lives altogether. There also is a much higher incidence of drug and alcohol problems openly displayed in their home.
Additionally, many of the students in the poorly performing schools suffer from learning and/or physical disabilities resulting from poor prenatal care and unhealthy behavior by their mothers during pregnancy.
How would privatization deal with these problems? Would children from these environments with learning and behavior difficulties be given the same choices as those from homes where education is a high priority?
Keep in mind that many of the programs, funding, and disciplinary actions are subject to outside regulation and required by federal mandates.
The long and short of it is that education in America is a complex issue and can not be solved using cursory solutions. NCLB was a program of good intentions but the reality has done more damage IMHO than good. We now have a "competitive" system of schools teaching to the test which has resulted in inflating the Real Estate values of richer suburbs as concerned parents migrate out of their more diverse communities with lower average test scores to more homogeneous communities with higher average test scores.
NCLB's reality is that it is hurting cities and 1st-tier suburbs more than before the law was enacted.
Private schools don't have to worry because they aren't subject to any of NCLB's high-stakes testing requirements.
To Sagnista, Lincol, and Chilegirl
What a load of collectivist liberal indoctrinated crap! You seriously think that children can only succed if they have 1. Two Parents 2. Come from an Affluent Household. To my knowledge that only reprsents less than 10% of American households. Yet, many people are succeeding in education without those requirements. I'll agree very strongly that those requirements make it much more likely you'll succeed and certainly make it much easier, but nothing is ever written in stone. Basketball is much easier to play if you're 7'0 tall, but tell that to Mugsy Bogus a guy that is 5'3 and was an all-star. Nothing is ever impossible unless you start to believe the people telling you it is.
I'll leave you with a qoute from one of the articles and a few websites that contain the information you requested
"There are formal schools where blacks and Hispanics do well, too. The December 2, 1995, Economist highlights the Barclay Elementary School in Baltimore. It adopted a severe prep-school curriculum and zero-tolerance approach toward spelling mistakes to get suburban-level 60th-percentile scores in a city where failure is the norm. Seattle's Zion private school boasts test scores above average with a largely black student body. The story of how Jaime Escalante fashioned a class of Advanced Placement calculus whiz kids out of a barrio school was made into a movie.
Whitney Young Magnet High in Chicago rivals many suburban schools. With a student body that is mostly black or Hispanic, it ranks above the 99th percentile among state high schools in 8th- and 10th-grade math and writing, and has ACT (American College Testing) averages that make it the equal of Asian-dominated Lowell in San Francisco. The best SAT scores in Georgia aren't in a rich white suburb, but at Davidson Fine Arts Magnet in Richmond with a 42 per cent black student body, near an Army Signal Corps base.
At the college level, Martin Vaern Bosangue of Mt. San Antonio Community College near Los Angeles found that black and Hispanic students who took a calculus workshop and studied more hours than whites and Asians who started with higher SAT math scores wound up getting better grades than even the Asians.
Economic and race-based interventions have never been shown to achieve the equality that was set as their justification in the first place. After all, the numbers that matter are not the percentage of blacks on the staff or in the classroom, but grade point average, reading and math test scores, and hours spent on homework and attendance. As Thomas Sowell and Lawrence Steinberg observe, if students of all races worked equally hard, their disparate rates of success and failure would plausibly lead to explanations based on, on the one hand, racism and poverty, or, on the other hand, innate superiority or inferiority. When they differ on every measure of effort, what else would you expect?"-Arthu Hu
Friedman Foundation
Milton Friedman web-site supporting the right to school choice
Thomas Sowell - "The Education of Minority Children"
Thomas Sowell with an informative article about Dunbar High School, Washington DC in the early 1900's, that sent more than 60 blacks to Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Wellelsey etc from 1880-1955.
Enjoy, all of the arguments you all made were down right offensive. You are basically saying "All Poor people are at extreme disadvantages, not because they are poor, but because they are stupid" I tend to disagree strongly with this view. Funny, you all are continuing to argue against something that would actual help them like school choice totally does not shock me one bit. I'll bet all three of you all not to make this political are "progressives?" Yes or No?
Sorry.. privatizing education is a great way to get the schools to run on GREED..NOT on what is best for the education of hte child and a great way for the rich elite to block out a good education with those that do not have as much money as them.. BAD IDEA!! Really BAD IDEA...
Just My Opinion..
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