Is anybody up-to-date on the topic of private vs. public schools? I’ve made basic pages about them, but could use more content especially for the private ones, like how widespread they are, how successful, etc., in the US and elsewhere. (Homeschooling is also a possible topic.) Statistics and general thoughts equally welcome.
I work a a public school. I can just sense it in the air. Government controlled schools are on their way out. They won’t last. We don’t even need to fight for the argument anymore. I have a sense that its over. Its just a matter of time.
As someone who is planning a career to work at my old public high school in a few years (teach math, or maybe basic economics) I’m not really sure how the condition would be. VA is a ‘right-to-work’ state so no overbearing unions with their pensions etc.
To be honest I don’t even know how private schools would be implemented if the consensus of people have the mindset of “Public school = everyone gets educated since tax dollars pay for it; Private school = the rich and elite can get in” even though I can see schools privatized to meet the needs of the public with extra voluntary funds. If education really was a wanted service there wouldn’t be a need for money to be taken first (since I don’t believe people ‘pay taxes’ if the idea is that the gov’t steps in with its hands in your wallet) for funding..
Comments on my thread?
https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/the-role-of-the-free-market-in-the-fall-of-the-state/22412
As to sources about education, see
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/education-in-colonial-america/
For this and much more (on other topics), see my article here http://www.reddit.com/r/Libertarian/comments/rggzj/i_dont_have_a_very_good_understanding_of_what/c45neru
One can always point to private schools in the poorest countries being cheaper and better than public schools, and more focused on the poor. Education is certainly a desired service, but in the more developed countries are the “free” schools available for everyone and tend to crowd out private schools despite lower quality.
In the long term, I think stagnating public schools may be undermined from the side by the Internet… with more and more educational resources available online, for money and for free, many students will find actual education for whatever they need, while the schools will provide only some basics and will be suffered through or ignored. Eventually it will be obvious that people don’t need that much formal schooling, which could put an end to the phenomenon… or not. We shall see.
@Wheylous: thanks, man! Missed your post and finally added the articles to the Wiki page. If you happen to have more on private schools, let me know.
I was referred to a great study of schools in one Indian town. Turns out most of them are in fact private, cheap and better than government schools. Good stuff!
A third option exists, one which has caused a huge shift away from NEA-dominated public schools here in Michigan and that is the Charter School. Charter schools, particularly those based in traditionally strong Union areas, are thriving and expanding while public schools continue to cut back as enrollment declines. The beauty of this third option lies in the fact that families have a choice, especially lower income families, without any tuition expenses, not to mention that these schools tend to be more “customer-driven”.
Over the last several years we have seen such a deline in the public schools’ domination of education that I can foresee either a total collapse of the public school system on the horizon or at a minimum a restructure that will allow the public schools to be competetive, a concept never before embraced by the NEA / MEA. Predictions aside, charter schools have been the best answer to date to the question of how to break union-controlled (and failing) public education.
Dear Peter Sidor:
Patna being the capital of a state (Bihar) that had been severely misruled until a few years ago, might have escaped severe regulation by the authorities and hence become home to an extremely large number (70% of all schools & 68% of all enrollments in the city) of private unaided schools. Therefore, in the absence of a country wide census and survey of private schools, it is indeed possible to argue that Patna could be exceptional, not indicative. However, there is a reasonably well regarded yearly study of school education in rural India called the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), which reports that 25% of all enrollments in rural India are in private schools-almost all of them low -cost schools. So, between the 25% enrollment in the villages and the possibly exceptional 68% enrollment in Patna, it will be safe to assume that about half of all enrolmments in urban India should be in private unaided schools. So in a way, what you read about Patna is true of all towns in India.
Best,
Bala
Since things you do are dictated by little more than “gut feelings”, I assume you don’t have any actual evidence to support this claim, right?
While we’re having this thread, I have a question for you all. Are you okay with ending federal involvement in education with full knowledge that private education, homeschooling, and an end to federal attempts to uphold the precedent of the Scopes trial in the face of “state’s rights” are going to be a huge boon for parents seeking to raise their children as Christian fundamentalist knocked-up-at-13 retards?
Also, when private education is brought up, why are there never discussions about Pakistan’s highly successful madrassa private education system shining its beacon of enlightenment upon inferior secular public schools?
Christian girls are about the least likely to be knocked up at 13. Anyway, state schooling is bad enough to compensate and then some and then some more. Especially when you are me.
Oh boy… I don’t think that’s accurate by the way. Abstinence-only education defintely doesn’t work.
You haven’t been to private religous school yet. I haven’t either, but I did go to sunday school (and it wrecked my spellign). That was enough. There’s no purpose to be served in allowing kids to attend schools that teach the earth was created in seven days and the universe is younger than some trees.
I would refuse to attend a religious school, like I refused to attend public school. So, it makes no difference except that I would have met far fewer police officers and judges without the Education Act.
Not everyone has parents with a brain, though.
Even if charter schools weren’t already a dissapointing social experiment, I really don’t want to facilitate fundies spreading the word of Jesus.
The problem is that the whole idea of school as we know it is stupid, the idea that everyone should be schooled is stupid and the compulsory attendance statutes are what keeps that in place regardless whether schools are privately owned or not. I proved that you can’t grow on your own terms and stay out of court. It’s not like public schools empower people. Most adults still have the financial IQ and logic skills of a child, which is why most people will believe almost any stupid notion religious or otherwise and have no security until death. Bible kids fail at life at about the same rate as everyone else, which is why Darwinism hasn’t killed off fundamentalism. The people that are generally the most successful are the ones that don’t let their schooling get in the way of their education or let their beliefs get in the way of their knowledge.
If that was not the case, it would be beneficial to opponents to let fundamentalists go their way because they would sink to the bottom of the world and lose influence automatically. The inability of opponents to beat fundamentalism is condemning, like the failure of China to beat Europe is condeming of far eastern tradition.
Is that the best argument you can put forth to defend Christian fundamentalism in education? Because when these people go down, they take a lot of abortion clinics and middle peace plans down with them.
Hopefully, they will lose influence, as long as we can keep them out of religious education. There’s no reason why we have to tolerate them any longer or allow them to teach their kids this shit. If you’re suggesting social darwinism, that doesn’t work either. In a free market, the dumbest poorest fucks always breed the fastest. And if you’re suggesting that fundamentalism gaining influence is any kind of desirable outcome, I hope you never vote for Santorum.
- The main differentiation between private schools and public schools is that private schools are not funded by the tax payers while public schools are. So, in a sense when we say a school is private or public, we refer to its source of funding and by extension its type of management. It is true that private schools get to decide their curriculum and hence some of them choose to teach ‘creation’, but the answer to that problem is not shutting down the schools. It is just a few hours of instruction that children in such schools receieve on ‘Creation’ compared to years of instruction on other secular subjects like Math, Language, Science, History and Geography. Surely, depriving children of years of education from a school their parents prefer cannot be an efficient solution to the problem of a few hours of education.
Besides, while we have our right to find Creation illogical, those who prefer it for their children have their right to belief. We will be wrong to assert one kind fo freedom of expression for us and another for the others. Even so, in the interest of the growth of human knowledge, nations should be making subjects that teach children how to question and reason a compulsory part of the curriculum. This is not just so children will decide for themselves whether creation or evolution is a more probable explanation, but so that they question the loop holes in even what they think is the more probable explanation. That is the way forward for the collective human knowledge.
- The ill effects of religious schools in Pakistan is not because they are privately funded or managed. The state itself is theocratic. So the problem there is one of lack of rule of law. There is very little governance happening in the North West Pakistan where such schools have mushroomed. That problem will be solved only when the country’s government adopts and enforces secualrism.
Don’t get me wrong, the public schools are pretty terrible too. The problem with the madrassas is that they are still tolerated, still directly funding terrorism, and (because of the government’s ideology) aren’t at least regulated or having their curiculuum reviewed.
You may see religious fundamentalism as a free speech issue, but I don’t. Secularism is something that the government can enforce- as has been done successfully in countries like Turkey.
Regarding the quality of charter schools, I’m still not convinced that they are more effective than public ones. It’s been tried, and charters have delivered poorer results. And I hope you can agree with me that if charter schools are going to be funded by taxes (as all the currently realistic proposals involve), it’s not worth it at all to allow lower quality schools receive tax dollars.