this is the truth. Massachusetts is #7 on the list..yet when my nieces moved there..they discovered that the 2nd grade classes in Massachusetts were reading a full Grade level BELOW what they were reading in Texas.
I don't really follow this subject at all, so if someone could help me out here it'd be appreciated. According to tallanover's post, government expenditures per pupil was around $9K a year a decade ago. I went to a private K-8 school where the tuition was around $10K a year (it was about 50% higher at the high school I attended fwiw). There was a 5-year waiting list to get in and class sizes were limited to around 25-30 per grade level. Why the huge discrepancy in quality between the two if the cost per pupil were so comparable? (and I don't mean this to be a public vs private debate, but I definitely feel like I got a better education than people who went to my local elementary and middle schools)
Private schools can not allow in students who are low performing, have various disabilities, would be distraction behavior issues etc. Public schools must take in all students. That's part of it but not all of it.
Yes and the state standardized tests are different from state to state. Not only that, in some states students might score the exact same, but in one state that is passing, and in another state it isn't passing. So when people look at which state has the most students passing the standardized tests, it doesn't really mean anything.
Just so you know..my wife is a Public School Teacher.. Kids that go to private schools (regardless of income level) tend to have parents that are more involved with their lives & education. They also tend to back up the teacher if there is a disagreement at school, as opposed to taking their kids side..ie..the parents actually respect the Teachers. Teachers at private schools have more control over what they teach and how they teach. Also, teachers at private schools can be fired, something thats much much harder to do with a public school. Private schools typically have more free reign when it comes to punishing. Basically, a lot of it comes down to the parents. Private schools are less afraid of the parents. Their parents are more trusting of the schools, and the parents are usually more involved. Private schools also do not suffer from the large bureaucracy that public schools have. that being said...I do believe that public schools can work just as well..if you can convince the parents to be involved with their kids education. By that, I don't mean volunteering or spending a lot time at the school. I grew up in a single-parent, dirt poor home and although my mom worked OT and went to school at night, she made darn-sure I did my homework. If a teacher called her, she immediately called back. She took their word when they had comments, and she made a point to make every Open House our schools had. Strangely enough, very few parents went to our open houses, but my mother never missed one. My wife is lucky to be teaching in a good district where the parents are very involved..and it shows in that her school is one of the highest rated elementarys in DFW. They are very successful, partially because they have incredible parental support.
Private schools have to perform well or nobody will pay to go to them. Any private school that doesn't perform better than a public school would instantly go out of business. Public schools will always have attendees no matter how bad they perform.
and this is why standardized tests should never be used to compare students from different states. Texas and California are harder to educational systems to grasp due to a larger population size. We have problems that many states don't have to deal with as much. Large #'s of immigrant children that drop out to help support their families (a noble but poor decision in the long run for both parent and child), larger share of children needing bilingual learning at a young age, an above average percentage of children with health issues, highly segregated metro areas. Smaller populated midwest states have a much easier time with education. We haven't yet figured out how to overcome these obstacles. I'm curious how you guys handle these issues in Cali?
Yes, and when No Child Left Behind passed some states like TX and Cali upped their standards of what would pass the test, but other states lowered their standards so that they would look good. In Cali drop out stuff is very hard, and immigrant children especially the first few years they are in school are a huge burden on testing, and schools. The students who stick with it long enough and complete English Language Development end up scoring better on the tests than English Only students. The first few years they do worse, but by the end of the program they do better. The problem is that if students don't exit English Language Development by middle school they are screwed. Their English classes are then not taught according to the state grade level standards but to English Language Development standards, yet the state tests cover the same grade level standards that all the other English classes will cover, but the kids haven't been taught that. It makes it very difficult for them. They also don't get electives like other students because they have to do more ELD work. This causes them to lose interest quickly in school in a lot of cases. So the push is to make sure they exit the ELD program by the time they are done with elementary. It definitely doesn't always happen. In addition in Cali students with a significant number of ELD students have to have the same percentage of students who are ELD pass the standardized tests as other EO students. So some schools may meet the required percentage of students who pass the standardized tests but if the percentage of ELD students passing is too low then they still don't qualify and become program improvement schools. It's pretty difficult. Schools have to target ELD students to make sure they are going to learn the standards they need to pass the test, and it's where a lot of teaching to the test happens. A ton of test taking strategies gets taught to try and give these students the best chance of passing. The successful schools do this, and get parents involved early and offer incentives for parent participation. My elementary has a counselor that offers parenting classes for teachers that are identified as a problem. The school puts all kinds of pressure on these parents to get them to uphold their end of the bargain, and make their children's education important to them. For some of the immigrant families school is extremely important and they sacrifice a ton even though they don't have a lot to give to make sure their students take school seriously and do the best they can. For others school isn't really important, and they don't care about school. As a result neither do their children. It's a tough situation. Next year California and I think Texas as well, but maybe not are switching to nationalized core standards. Most states are going to adopt these national standards. It could help.
Then public schools are vastly superior than private schools because they meet the needs/demands of a larger and more diverse segment of the population. In other words, public schools give the "customer" what s/he wants more often and more consistently than private schools do. Additionally, the premise of your response, "Private schools have to perform better," is backwards. Only public schools "have to" perform at all, as they are legally required to serve the entire school-age population. Finally, if public schools do not give their "customers" what they want, those customers may work to elect public officials who will improve their schools. Thus, both public and private schools are accountable for poor performance, albeit in different ways. Your answer to the question of why there is a discrepancy between the quality of public and private schools is severely lacking.
Everything that has been said by tallanvor and DFWRocket is the equivalent of saying "private schools do well because most of the parents have much, much more money than parents who send their kids to public school." It's a tautology.
More exclusive private schools tend to be very selective in the students they get and often times attract a better quality of teacher as a result.
citizens are forced to pay taxes (how public schools are paid for). Whether or not people want to do business with a public school is not a choice. They must. A public school has little to no incentive to give it's attendees what they want. There will always be students who can't afford to go anywhere else. Your comment that public schools are held accountable for their performance is obviously wrong. This is evident by how many parents are forced to send their kids to ****ty, unsafe, inner city public schools (if they were held accountable these schools would go out of business). I have never heard of a parent saying 'I wish my son didn't have to go to that ****ty, unsafe private school I pay for him to go to' (private schools are held accountable for their performance). NO, I said private schools do well because they are held more accountable for their performance. A school whose attendees are penniless can be held accountable (a voucher system).
Wrong. Almost everyone in the country would rather send their kids to private schools. They just can't. I did answer. If public schools were held accountable for their performance there wouldn't be so many ****ty public schools. Thus you are wrong. There are very few ****ty private schools (they would go out of business ). you don't understand my metric. I said 'Giving customers what they want'. Most public schools aren't giving their attendees what they want.
Again, that proves my point. Private schools aren't serving public demand for education (not to mention the many other services public schools provide). Public schools are, at least to a greater degree, and therefore are better at giving customers what they want. This is a tautology. You are assuming that certain public schools are ****ty in order to prove that public schools aren't accountable, and thus ****ty. I have also shown why, according to your own metric for performance, public schools are actually superior to private schools. Therefore, there must be more ****tiness in private schools than public schools; and either public schools are more accountable than private schools, or accountability has no bearing on performance. They most certainly are.
A person who goes to a public school is not a customer they are an attendee. I think where you are getting confused is the application of force then i guess we don't have an education problem in this country..... Anyways if anyone is interested Waiting for Superman is on Netflix and explains the education problem in America.
OK...so this statement makes no sense: If attendees aren't necessarily customers, then all your talk about what the attendees want is meaningless when evaluating performance in terms of what customers want (your metric). No, I think you're confused by this, seeing as it has nothing to do with the present discussion. We don't have an education problem in this country. We have many education problems in this country. A voucher system wouldn't solve any of them, at least not without creating worse ones.
