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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.'"
I'd not call it interesting: It's mostly name calling and a bunch of strawmen.
Now, I do not think that sending a kid to a private school is in any way evil, but I'd much rather see a proper refutation, instead of just answering crap with crap. I mean, I'd understand sinking to crappy dialectic if the original point was actually difficult to refute, but why not use proper logic to refute an argument as full of holes as that one? If anything, a refutation that bad gives credence to the original article,and makes me think this guy is right in the same sense that a broken clock is right twice a day.
I've seen better refutations in the slashdot comments.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Pupil to teacher ratios have been declining for decades. Public schools are already down to a student/teacher ratio of 15.4, with a median class size of 20.0 for public elementary schools (according to the National Center for Educational Statistics).
Pay for teachers has more than outpaced inflation since the 1980's, rising from an inflation adjusted ~ $44k to ~ $54k. Once you factor in benefits, extended summer vacations (or additional income earned teaching summer sessions), pensions and the potential for tenure, the overall compensation picture is hardly unfair or unattractive. And the UNESCO statistics show that starting salaries are actually relatively competitive, internationally speaking; behind Switzerland, Germany,Demark and the Netherlands, but ahead of Australia, Spain, Norway, Ireland, Austria, Iceland, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Sweeden.
Money is good. Some schools are legitimately underfunded. However, it is not a panacea, and there is little evidence that too little money is pumped into public education. Consider this; the best funded school district in my area, on a per pupil basis, currently spends over $27,000 per student and achieves the absolute worst results, as measured by performance on standardized tests, graduation rates and college attendance. Other districts excel with half the funding. Parochial schools outperform with less than a QUARTER the funding. And nationally, home schooled children consistently out-perform their peers, in spite of per-pupil spending that is often measured in the hundreds, rather than the thousands.
Agreed.
Something you may find interesting; A copy of the text of an eighth-grade test circa 1895.
http://www.salina.com/1895test/ (Google also shows a working link to the document available directly from Kansas State Dept. of Education as .PDF)
Heading:
"Examination Graduation Questions of Saline County, Kansas
April 13, 1895
J.W. Armstrong, County Superintendent
Examinations in Salina, Cambria, Gypsum City, Assaria, Falun, Bavaria, and District No. 74 (in Glendale Twp.)
READING AND PENMANSHIP - The Examination will be oral, and the Penmanship of Applicants will be graded from the manuscripts."
I don't think a majority of college grads these days could pass the above-linked test. Yet those with power over public schools want to go further down the same path and throw ever-more money into a system that's resulted in a decades-long history of utter failure to educate better.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.