Oh. Don’t even get me started else I will Never Stop. Not ever. Feel blessed you only got this simple comment that doesn’t even say anything.

Feel free to say what you think. It’s welcomed.

Ok, so here’s the deal. Clearly, private schools will have better test scores, better clients (because that’s what they are — not students) and better resources, because everything is hand picked. They can choose what students they have in schools. It would be like comparing apples and oranges to compare a private school’s standardized test scores to a public school’s. But let’s say we do. A private school is still compelled to teach the same state core curriculum. They can not get around it, they can only add to it. So all the added ‘extras’ is really not going to help the students with the end of level testing. It’s the same exam. It just means they have learned the state core curriculum PLUS extra curriculum on whatever the private school is specializing in.

Further, parents who are required to volunteer as part of the private school’s requirement… are you telling me that these parents who were “too busy” to volunteer in their children’s public school are now all of a sudden free to fulfill the duties of volunteering in this private school their children have made it into? I call bull ****. These parents were perfectly capable of volunteering before. They just chose not to do so because it was free. Now that it gives them a feeling of entitlement, they feel better about doing so.

The fact of the matter is this: parents, in the quest of wanting their children to not feel “the same” as everyone else, look for ways to make their children “different’ and “better” and so put their kids in private schools. Or worse, charters, which are just half-ass private schools.

Where I live, up until last year, it wasn’t even legally required for private schools/charter schools to have their teachers have a criminal background check or a teaching degree. Parents were blissfully sending their children off to school with “teachers” who could have had previous felonies and not even trained to teach. Yet, this was better than public schools.

Furthermore, what charter school proponents won’t tell you, is that they are still under the jurisdiction of the local district, still have to give end level testing, and still have to teach special education classes. And when public school kids are kicked out of the district schools, these are where they are sent often times.

Great topic! I’ve actually always been one to advocate for parochial schools. A lot of those variable stated in regards to selection process of students would, over time, be irrelevant if all children attended private schools. I believe the children would be taught the essential material so that they are consistently at the level they should be in.

Parents are usually required to volunteer to qualify for a reduced tuition rate. It helps decrease financial burden for the parents and at the same time saves cost for the school. Whether a teacher has credentials or not ultimately shouldn’t matter if the child is still performing above level.

I attended both private and public school and I definitely see the difference and impact both have. Private schools are at the most local level a school can get, which means that parents DO have a direct influence on how well a child may do. Furthermore, teachers don’t have to abide by bureaucracy or being politically correct when addressing the children, necessarily. In other words, parents give the teachers authority to also discipline children when misbehaving rather than filling out needless paperwork. Teachers expect a lot more from students as well.

After being in a private school from k – 8th grade I was shocked at how behind students were when I attended a public high school. Freshmen could barely grasp the knowledge which I had been taught at 5th grade. Furthermore, they were more advanced sexually than any of my peers. This doesn’t mean that a child in a public school can’t succeed, but numbers don’t lie. 99% of children who go to private school graduate college. So far, all my friends from private school have minimum of bachelors degrees, the majority have masters degrees though and are financially very stable.

There’s something to be said about it.

In an important study put out in 2003 — important in that many were expecting something much different after the passage of NCLB in 2001 — researchers found that there really wasn’t much different in terms of bureaucracy and autonomy between private and public schools. In fact, they found something interesting. Depending on socioeconomic values, if the private and public school were in a lower socioeconomic area both types of schools struggled with getting parents into the school to be involved. If the opposite were true, schools struggled with parents being too involved. Likewise, a common complaint with some parochial schools is that they didn’t have much autonomy at all — the archdiocese would be very prescriptive in terms of what to teach and how to teach. Very similar with school boards, etc. Teachers were quite frustrated. The concept of being able to have more control over who they hired and fired also was confined to socioeconomics. Private schools in the lower areas knew there were teacher shortages and wouldn’t be able to attract teachers to their schools, and therefore rarely fired low performing teachers.

Time and time again, study after study, private and charter schools fail to indicate that this concept of “competition in the market” will force public schools to improve. Why? Not because they aren’t good enough. That isn’t the issue. It’ because there are too few of them that are at a level high enough to show that it can compete.

The issue of graduation rates is an interesting one. Most researchers will say (at least those who aren’t trying to perpetuate an agenda) that graduation rates are not a stable marker to track. Students are not a stable marker to track. Why? Too many move. They transfer schools. They skip grades. They seek alternative graduation routes. You can’t track a consistent individual to measure graduation. These are estimates. To do such a study, in which it would be determined that “99% of a class graduated…” researchers would need to conduct, more than likely, a cross-sectional observational study in order to attempt a statistical model. These provide the weakest protection against selection bias — which is why researchers try to not use them. It is too difficult to approximate ideal causal impacts and so forth. Because of these things, this is why people will resort to anecdotal experiences — because my experience was so fantastic, everyone must have had a fantastic experience. It’s understandable. Even if the statistic was taken off of Answers.com and cited from NCES (1999-2000).

Looking at the survey, though, I see that many things could have contributed to this number and its exaggerated comparison. First, common sense should indicate that the sample size would be comparatively different. The survey indicates that the sampling has been weighted in order for the more than 87,000 public schools to be represented and the sample size to be the same with all the schools in the survey. This means that not all graduating seniors will be accounted for. If they counted seniors. Most surveys will actually count in-coming freshmen. Next, when it (I mean Answers.com) says that “93% …will go on to a four year college compared to 35 percent of high school seniors” it almost guarantees that someone didn’t read the charts correctly. And I don’t have the time to find the error. Such a dramatic and strange discrepancy is just strange and dramatic.

Whether or not a teacher has credentials, well that can be neither here nor there. I suppose it wouldn’t matter if a doctor is trained either, right, as long as he is competent with a scalpel. Teachers are professionals. There is a reason why they are trained to be in the position he or she holds. Granted, a student should be taught at the level he or she is comfortable in and then pushed to do more. I think it is interesting that there is a focus for a student to be held to a standard above. This is why teachers, credentialed teachers, need to be involved. It’s setting a student up for failure to hold him or her to a standard that he or she cannot do simply because parents think they know what’s best.