Why aren’t there a lot of them? Does the state make it difficult for more of them to pop up and compete for students? If so, how?
There are a lot of them where I’m from.
There aren’t so many in my area and the ones that are here are expensive. I would think that the state keeps more of them from popping up and am looking for the reason why. Maybe because people believe if they are paying school taxes, they might as well send their child to the public school? It’s not as if you can retire from paying these taxes if you choose to send your child to a private school.
I don’t really know tbh. The ones in my area range in cost. Some of them are more expensive than others.
I wrote this a year ago:
(un)Schooling in Holland
I’ve been interested in schooling in Holland lately. I was wondering what the options where if I would have a child. So I did a little research and these are the results:
There are three types of schools: 1. Public, 2. Special, 3. Private. Public and special are both state funded, and thus, state regulated. Public is run through the local (city) government and special is run by a school-board. Special is usually a religiously affiliated school, but there are other types as well. These other types have to do with a certain education philosophy or system, although these exist only at the elementary level. Those schools/systems have gone through a cycle of state acceptance before they were granted public funding status.
In order to be allowed to teach in a state regulated school you need to have a diploma from a special teacher’s college (4 years).
Testing is standardized. At 12 years of age (the last year of the elementary school) everyone takes a nationalized test. There are three levels you can graduate from at ‘middle school’ (age 13-16, 13-17 and 13-18 ). These levels also have nationalized tests. The reason this is important is because the Dutch university/college system uses ‘middle school’ diplomas for admission. Generally your grades don’t matter as long as you have the diploma (for doctors your grades matter and there is a selection plus a random draw). This means that you cannot get into a college or university based on their own tests (or another solution), because they don’t offer them.
Currently, books in middle school have to be bought, but often there is a school-fund and/or some other way to lower the cost for the parent (with likely some state funding). However, from 2009/2010 all books at state funded schools will be entirely state funded too.
The cost of admission for a state funded school used to be 936 euro per year/child. Now it’s free.
The cost of private school is roughly 15,000 euro per year/child. (excluding cost for special materials and whatnot).
There are roughly 2.4 million children in Holland between the age 5 and 16. The law says you must receive schooling between those ages. There are roughly 3,000 children in private middle school. There are 0 children in private elementary school. There are roughly a few hundred children being homeschooled.
To give you an idea of the percentages:
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In order to be allowed to homeschool your child, you must either have a traveling home (like a circus) or you can get an exception based on your ‘life philosophy’. You can only get this if your child has never been entered into a school. Also, a school with your ‘life philosophy’ cannot be in the area where you live (and you have to apply/notify for it every year). ‘Life philosophies’ that have currently attained this exception are: (fundamentalist) baptism, (spiritual) Holism, holistic pacifism and ecological awareness, (holistic) humanism, (messianic) Judaism, Paganism, mystical Christianity, Sabbatical Christianity, and Seventh-day Adventism.
The person deciding whether to accept your claim or not is the school inspector from your city district. Numerous court cases exist on this. Generally these act as precedent. Here is a pro homeschool website that also has example letters. Interesting to note is that if you mention the quality of schooling of available schools in any way, the city will immediately move to legal proceedings against you.
The economics of the situation is simple: once you start subsidizing something, you will get more of it. The private schools cannot compete with free books and free schooling. Now only the rich can afford private school. The Dutch government is all about the welfare and regulation. If it weren’t for that, maybe private schooling would cost a small part of what it does now (together with economies of scale), but that’s not the case. Furthermore, all diplomas are nationalized and you need one to get into college/university. So even the private schools have to teach the children the same things. All in all, almost everyone sends their child to a public funded school, and 99.98% of children learn the nationalized material.
Contrast this with unschooling. Unschooling is a form of homeschooling. The idea however is not to sit at the kitchen table and go through the same material as they would get in a public funded school and make the same tests. That would be a big missed opportunity.
Unschoolers commonly believe that curiosity is innate and that children want to learn. Some argue that institutionalizing children in what they term a “one size fits all” or “factory model” school is an inefficient use of their time because it requires every child to learn specific subject matter in a particular manner, at a particular pace, and at a particular time regardless of that individual’s present or future needs, interests, goals, or any pre-existing knowledge he or she might have about the topic.
Many unschoolers also believe that opportunities for valuable hands-on, community based, spontaneous, and real-world experiences are missed when educational opportunities are largely limited to those which can occur physically inside of a school building.
Dayna Martin explains very nicely what unschooling is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4GyDc8SInw&fmt=18
(don’t click on the ‘better version’)
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Thank you for sharing this, Nielsio!
Government taxes individuals for public education so even if were one to want to send their children to private school they have already put forth so much money toward public schooling that it would prove the more cost efficient decision.
So you can either; pay taxes, and send children to public school or pay taxes and spend another 20k on a private school.
The government also sets standards on curriculum and attendance in private schools iirc.
Rothbard’s Education: Free and Compulsory is a great look at the history of public education in the west and the manner in which it gradually took control over private schooling.
You’re welcome.
Maybe I could make a video out of it; it’s a bleak picture and most people aren’t aware of it.
The reason why most private schools that do exist in the US are expensive is because there is a high threshold on where it becomes ‘worth it’ for the parents to decide to pay twice. Also, the public school distorts the market in other ways through things like the teachers union, making it much less attractive for a teacher to decide to want to work in a private school. Also, because of regulations on private schools, their curriculum can “only be so different” from that in the public schools, which is probably why a lot of the private schools that do exist are religious. Teaching religion classes is something those private schools can use to differentiate their product.
Do you have a link to what regulations private schools must abide by? I looked last night and wasn’t really able to come up with much. Thanks!
For starters: competition.
I imagine it’s rather difficult for a private school to compete with state schools funded by redistributed wealth. Why would parents want to pay out of pocket when they’re already paying taxes and when there are numerous public schools to choose from? Thus, the existence of state schools probably has a negative effect on the demand for private schools and thus competition in the private sector.
I’m sure there’s also a good amount of bureaucratic red-tape to cut through in order to get a private school going.
Also, I am sure that a lot of the private schools that already exist feel like they already have more than enough competition and would want to put up barriers to entry to prevent more private schools from popping up. So its likely that its only going to become more and more difficult to be able to start a new private school, and the private schools that do exist will probably only become more and more pseudo-public.
Well for starters, you didn’t make clear where you were from (My guesses would have been USA, Canada, or U.K.)
Mind you that such is not the case in many parts of the world. Many countries in Latinamerica (including my own, being Guatemala), private schools are the dominant form of education in the country, and they are the ones responsible for producing graduates in a complete middle education capacity. The State of course creates a base curriculum from which the schools must use as basis, but the curriculum itself is in truth a base, and not a strict set of guidelines, and thus allows a significant amount of liberty when it comes to schools designing and choosing their curriculums (This was thanks in part that in 2010, our ministress had the presence of mine of actually getting feedback from the private sector in what can and cannot work in school curriculums), but it still is a pain sometimes, and I blame the standards the United Nations imposed on us the moment they decided what it is to have a “quality education”.
Of course, the State also charges the tax of property of the school ground, but it’s the standard that all landowners have to pay, so it’s nothing special really. Other than acquiring permissions and licenses, starting a school here is relatively easy, and each year, more and more schools pop up, but some also die out in the process (That’s free market after all no?).
Here, there are schools of all sorts of price ranges, but what you pay is what you will get. The cheaper the school, the less it delivers, the pricier the school, the more complete education you will get. And mind you that in here, even if we removed all tax expenses and regulations, the schools are still quite pricy (Salaries for teachers, support staff, school supplies, maintenance, it’s not exactly price friendly either). Even so, it doesn’t help either that teachers even in the private sector are being payed a miserable amount of money. Were it not for the “charitable” character most teachers here exhibit, school teachers would be an incredibly scarce product here.
What I am saying is that, at least here in Guate, though schools aren’t regulated in the same scale as more developed nations, it isn’t saying much either. We are quite free in free market terms when it comes to creating and molding schools of our choosing, but they aren’t that top notch either (By Austrian expectatives, I would have expected an increase in quality, but that is not happening at all). Typical Austrian would say that the State is trumping it’s development either, but that is only partially true, for it’s degree of intervention is quite low. However, I am no economist (I am a student of International Relationships), and part of the reason why it also it’s not developing as well as I would have hope has to do a bit with the poverty in the country (There, the State definately has played a role in impoverishing it severely), and also that Guatemalan temperament is not exactly one oriented towards innovation or high quality standards. I do think that there are factors outside the “Market of Schools” that are affecting it’s development expected of a free market of private schools, and not inside factors, at least that is what I suspect, but until I become more learned, I will not advance it’s theory as proven, for I am only a student, and I am limited only to what my limited expertise can take me.