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Why One Woman Says Sending Your Kid To Private School Is Evil
theodp writes "Slate's Allison Benedikt is ruffling some feathers with her recent manifesto, If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person. 'Not bad like murderer bad,' Benedikt writes, 'but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation's-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what's-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.' If your local school stinks and you send your child there, Benedikt explains, 'I bet you are going to do everything within your power to make it better.'"
Click here for a refutation of her argument.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
Larry Correia (multi NYT bestselling author of Monster Hunter International) did a point by point slam on this article:
Fisking Slate over Public Schools
Naked link to same article:
http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/fisking-slate-over-public-schools/
The woman who wrote the slate article is married with 3 kids in New York. Strangely, last year she wrote in Slate about how happy she will be to stop paying $5000/month on private preschools.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
Personally I think social security is fraud. My dad paid a ton of money into social security, literally maxing out the benefits for 30 years in a row, and he only started collecting SSI just a few months due to back pain from all of those years of being an auto mechanic (they wouldn't give him disability, so he only collected about $700 a month.) He died just a day before the next check would have come. I tried to get at least a partial payment so that I could give it to my mom to pay her mortgage, and the asshole on the other end of the line told me how SSI is welfare and he had to live the whole month to get anything at all.
What a fucking joke. The whole thing is setup with the promise that you pay into it and you're taken care of should any problems come down, so how is collecting on that promise welfare? He paid I'm guessing close to a hundred thousand dollars into it over his lifetime (he made quite a lot as a mechanic because he was pretty damn good at what he did) and they won't even give his widow a single $700 check.
Fraud is defined as being deceptive, which is exactly what social security is. It's a Ponzi scheme that you are forced by law to "invest" into. I honestly can't wait until the whole thing collapses, which is exactly what it is going to end up doing soon.
Sure we've all been screwed over by private entities/individuals plenty of times, but almost none of us have been ripped off and outright scammed as bad as social security is doing to us right now.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
You cannot say on the one hand that we can't have control over our public schools and then on the other hand that we have to be sent to them.
And yes, we've tried to reform our public schools but they won't let us do it.
How hard is it to fire a pedophile teacher? Nearly impossible. How hard is it to fire a bad teacher? How hard is it to put in hiring standards for teachers?
We've tried to put this in place for decades and the schools, teacher's unions, and politicians have stopped us. So fine. You don't want us to have any control over these schools. Mission accomplished. But why would I feel morally compelled to stay in the system if you're made every effort to systematically marginalize me?
You cannot have both. Either you let me have influence over the system... and I will change it so that I find it acceptable... OR you do not get me in the system.
Choose. Effectively, either the teacher's unions need to get neutered or you can expect intelligent parents to choose other schools when public alternatives are unacceptable. We are not sacrificing our children on the alter of your corruption and incompetence.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Let me clue you in.
In, on December 24, 1913 when no one was looking Income Tax came into being. The problem is there were people out there who spent a whole lifetime free. They earned their money and did with it what the wanted. Compliance with paying income tax was low to the point of being nonexistent. It would also not be likely that a jury of your peers would find you guilty of doing anything wrong if you had not paid it.
There had to be a way to get people to comply, and they had figured it out by the 1930's. Social Security was a program you could opt into. If you did, you also opted into paying Federal Income Tax. But now, you could retire at 65 and the government would take care of you. The average life span was less than 65. It would be much like Social Security being started today and them promising benefits when you turn 85. Your average white, wage earning male (the major working population back in the 1930's) is not living to 65 back then, nor are they living to 85 now.
It was so very nice for us that the government offered a 1 in 5 lottery program and all we had to do was to opt into paying income taxes AND have social security payment come out of our wages. Don't forget your employer pays to. Do you know why you are only worth $14 an hour and not $16? Your employer is already paying into Social Security on your behalf as well. It counts towards your pay and figures into what they are willing to offer for wages.
Speaking of bad Social Security Stories. My parents were divorced and remarried. One division of Social Security believes that they never remarried and therefore my mom is entitled to no benefits. The other division believes that they did remarry, and she is responsible for reimbursing his funeral expenses.
It will be a shame when it collapses. There are millions of people who had been promised that they could rely on it, have planned on it being there, and will find that it is not there. If you think unemployment is high now. What happens when 65-100 year olds are dumped on the labor market?
vi +
Most of education outcome is more correlated with the parent's money than anything else. Children who grow up in poverty tend to underperform no matter what you do with them in school. Overcoming a difficult home life is really hard, and neither teachers nor their lesson plan will change that very much. Meanwhile, rich kids can do well anywhere. If all a child has to worry about are grades, their life is straightforward.
When someone has a terrible local school, their options include private school and moving to a higher class neighborhood. Since school quality depends more on the parent's wealth than anything else, those neighborhoods also cost more. That's not just a correlation, it's a direct cause and effect. Expensive areas block children from lower incomes, which makes all of the jobs a school has to do easier. Has nothing to do with the effort parents put into school or the kids; it's just plain easier to focus on being a student (and have the resources to do so) when your parents have money. The writer of this article is pretty naive to think that all parents can affect a change simply by being more involved.
The only way to equalize this issue across the population of the US would be a massive shift toward socialism, probably via higher taxation, to more evenly distribute wealth across the country. Good luck with that.
...Public school... well, one of the lines that annoyed me the most is about how your gifted child will be fine...
They are ALL gifted... if you check each and every kid will have little trophies, awards, ribbons, and certificates stating that in no certain, exact, or quantifiable way... It's not like they're keeping score... (they could be sued, or worse, someone might feel bad). I'm shocked they are still allowed to even hold a spelling bee.
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Sadly, I believe you'll find that --as far as education is involved-- Slashdot is not a place that welcomes people with experience. Instead, people are valued for uninformed opinions and political stances based on anecdotal experience. To them, it is better to punish a hundred people (teachers) because one of them annoyed them ten years ago than try to actually try to analyze the problems.
If someone posted on a story saying "I'm a restaurant waiter and I think we need to seriously look at adding some restrictions on the Open Source system" they would get 800 comments laughing at them for talking about something they know nothing about. But say: "I'm a coder with self-diagnosed Aspergers and people should listen to what I have to say about the education system" and somehow its considered "informative".
They don't care about your experience. They don't care about logic. The vocal minority (I hope) here simply thinks that their limited experience is both typical and sufficient for them to draw conclusions about a diverse system spread across a country.
Yes, I've spoken to the shivering worms. I live in a district , now nationally famous for being a FAIL. I gave up 3 years ago and removed my child from a discipline problem, underachiever quality public school. The board are the politically motivated, inept losers you would expect on a television show, interested in protecting themselves and their positions.
Locally, I recommend private and home schooling. There are wonderful home schooling projects going on and the students make the public kids look stone age. I, do not have the resources to do that myself at this time. I found a wonderful private school within my budget and her world has taken off.
Public schools will never be fixed until the special interests are removed and never let in again. We had a working process and broke it. Either do it over the way it worked or give up, it's not worth it.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I was raised with a combination of public school and home school and self taught. The most advanced electrical class was how to read an analog Watt Hour Meter. My dad did more for my technical education by providing erector sets at younger ages and electronic components, hand tools, soldering iron, etc at an older age.
When I went into the military, I opted for the advance electroncis program. The first class was called BEEP Basic Electricity and Electronics Prep. I challanged the class on moved on. Already knew basic DC and AC theory. Later sat the ISCET exam and received my Journeyman certification. This combination of self taught in a supportave environment and military school and certification is worth the same as a degree to employers. I have no student loans.
The truth shall set you free!
John Adams wrote, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."
There is a long generational tradition in the USA of sacrificing for the next generation starting with the revolutionary war.
I'm afraid you might be right, but I'm a public school teacher. I go into work every day excited to fight the good fight with people who have a lot in common with the slashdotters you describe.
It's what I do.
An important change for education.
Assuming you haven't already had a collapse and all the people who could and care have abandoned ship, who'd be far more likely to move than return to public school. I went to public school here in Norway and it was a somewhat mixed bag but the bright and average managed to keep a decent learning environment despite the disruptive and indifferent students, one year (8th grade, I think) they redivided the classes to split up a disruptive bunch across three classes and it helped keep a decent environment in all three. If they'd done the opposite and kept all the gifted together and all the disruptive together the last one would become a total hellhole that'd be sure to drag everyone in that class down with them. Nobody's going to send their kid into such a class as a "rescue" operation, once such a critical mass is created it only expands.
We've seen this with the distribution of minority students here, once the "minority" percentage of a school district reaches 60-70% the remaining natives abandon ship and a few years later it's at 90%-100%. Nothing wrong with minorities and getting to know other cultures but when you're raising a kid in Norway I'd like the primary cultural influence to be Norwegian. As a result you have many children in minority schools that grow up with hardly any contact with the rest and a lot of multiculturalists wants us to become better integrated but hardly anyone wants to send their kid to be the missionary. Instead of mingling it's more like a ghetto with border regions that keep moving.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Teaching to the test IS the problem. My oldest son, instead of being given math problems to practice, was made to spend his time studying test-guessing strategies. As a result, in 7th grade, he was still counting on his fingers when the going got tough, and his PSAT math was 48/80. Mine was 80/80. His teachers named him as among their best college bound scorers.
At that point, I started requiring an hour of math practice aday, before other homework.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Not only that, private schools know that they have no hold on students. They piss off the parents and the kids get put into another school. End of story.
A big issue with public schools... especially bad ones is that they feel they are entitled to student enrollment indifferent to their incompetence and corruption. And more importantly, they believe they're entitled to funding despite not actually doing their jobs.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
problem children are expelled
Which is great for the private school. but that just means the problem children end up at the public school. If the private school can cherry pick the students, they can probably provide them with a better education, but that doesn't remove the need for ALL students to be educated, problem or otherwise.
The American right wing is just pro-corporate and pro ruling class.
Not even American.
That's the definition of right wing in a political context.
That's why the examples of right wing we have to point to are Monarchy and Fascism/Nazism.
It sickens me no end that there are people living in America with the contempt for themselves and this nation as to actually describe themselves as right wing when our major defining wars (the revolution and WW1/2 were fought against the right and the right are always portrayed (and often actually are) complete fucking monsters.)
There is one major flaw with her logic. People who send their kids to private schools still pay taxes that support the public schools. By not sending their child to the public school, there is actually more revenue per student enrolled in the public school, unless the state legislature does something like reappropriate it elsewhere (which would make them evil, but again, they are politicians).
So, if people pay for the public schools but don't cause an increase in the variable cost of running the public schools because their kids are in a private school, that is evil how?
Oh yeah, the left were just angels. Stalin and Mao were model leaders.
I now anxiously await your belabored response spouting that Stalin and Mao were really right wing.
There is competition in US public schools. If you don't like the school move. That's what I did once our kids became school age. I didn't pay for private school but just moved to where parents actually care about education so the school is better. It has nothing to do with funding or even the teachers abilities. It all has to do with having kids that grew up in homes that value education. You see this all the time in charter schools. They take the kids in a poor neighborhood whose parents give a shit and put them in one school and all of a sudden they learn. Imagine that. You get rid of all the kids that are impediments to learning and work can get done.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Market forces simply cannot operate effectively in an education environment.
Sure they can, and that is why private schools are generally better.
This program would cover things like: eating habits, sexual behavior, phys ed, and at least a basic program on managing money.
This sounds like trying to teach the kids something that should be taught by parents. I recognize that some households are bad in that area, and that the issue of poor public schools is complicated, but I do not think it wise to give MORE excuses for the parents to tune out and let the school raise their kids. Parental involvement is generally recognized as key in a good education.
Agreed on just about everything else.
I'm pretty sure you were being flippant, but as someone who worked in retail for many years I used to have a manager who said that if a customer ever complains the first thing you do is thank them. Most customers, if they have a bad experience, will leave and never come back. By complaining they are giving you an opportunity to fix whatever the problem is.
The way to get improvement isn't simply to take your money elsewhere (even just in the form of per head govt funding), it's to give specific, targeted, constructive feedback on what is wrong.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Oh, like the one in Finland for example that ranks very high in PISA scores, and that American scholars come learn from? Admittedly it was not built in a day and the teachers are highly qualified and have a lot of autonomy compared to what you seem to have in the States, but I wouldn't say that a near-monopoly in education has guaranteed a bad system here...
You say the problem is with "students who don't want to be there and disrupt the operation of the classroom." What were you, the biggest nerd in school? Why do you have such a bone to pick with the other "less diligent" students? Sure, they contribute to the problem, but (except in your fantasy land) they are not the problem. The problem is complex and it encompasses many different aspects of the way our school system is structured. For examples of how a "good" public education system is run, we could look to other countries such as Finland, Hong Kong, Japan and the Netherlands.
I actually spoke with people who taught in urban public schools in the US. In addition to being a brutal environment that chews up and spits out new teachers, there's a lot of kids who don't want to be there either. And they disrupt classes for those who do.
The US does sometimes run schools like those great European examples and sometimes it doesn't. It is worth noting that the US spends a considerable amount on education and doesn't get education results commensurate with that spending.
I'm simply explaining the social dilemma surrounding public education
It's not a social dilemma for those other countries because those school systems are much better run. It's my belief that some US school systems are so bad, that it would be better to do away with them altogether than keep them in their present state. They're just really awful, dangerous, and expensive baby sitting services.
Other people would invest but get unlucky and lose their entire investment (and it could be you)
This! a 1000 times this. People DO NOT GET THIS.
They think that if they "invest wisely", diversify, invest in index tracking funds, pay attention, and do all the right things, that they will be fine.
And this is idiotic. Statisically, yes, this will pan out. But investment is still a calculated risk. If this "do everything right strategy" yielded a 99.99% chance that you would have sufficient money for your retirement and everyone followed it there would still be several hundred thousand people who didn't.
Doing everything right does not guarantee a positive return. It maximizes the chances of a positive return, but a negative return is still entirely possible, and its going to happen to people, even people who did everything right.
Besides, what happens without social security?
Crime. Because the people who don't have enough to survive aren't going to just roll over and die, they'll try to take what they need any way the can from anyone they can.