I believe a child’s home life is the biggest factor that influences their personal success at school. Children that are abused or neglected at home are not as likely to be able to learn at school. Neglect can be in the form of basic lacks of housing, clothing and food.

College wasn’t even thought about in my family, and I’m sure my parents would have laughed at you if you suggested they sign me up for a private school. I attended a lower-income, rural public school. As someone mentioned above, as long as the parent (yes, sorry parents, but your children’s education is -your- responsibility) is active/pushy, I think a child can get just as much out of a public school as a private one.

Maybe I was fortunate to have some amazing teachers in the small public school system I was a part of. I remember in 5th grade, there were a few of us who were excellent spellers so the teacher made a special spelling test just for the four of us so we could feel challenged. She didn’t have to go out of her way to do that.

Unfortunately, I have no experience with attending a private school so I can make no judgments. I have, however, attended both a private and a public college and did not like the personality traits and attitudes of over 50% of the other students at the private college. I think that attending closed-campus, private schools causes one to lose touch of reality.

A challenging learning experience has never been in short supply for two reasons: all of us tested ‘gifted’ at an early age and were shunted into parallel learning programs that were and are simply terrific. Secondly, although they peter out by high school, but then students can jump classes to fit interests and abilities similar to what a college offers. Like me, my son will combine local public college and high school from his junior year to continue math studies now that he has completed the high school offerings. I should mention that our local high school core curriculum is crap, but we have learned (admittedly somewhat belatedly) to enroll our kids in summer and online classes to finish off the junk quickly and leave the school year for Advanced Placement classes and electives the kids are interested in.

The point: public schools can be ‘gamed’ to fit the demands of good students and involved (read: pushy) parents.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) however, is almost reason in itself to leave public schooling. Upwards of three weeks every school year is dedicated to this moronic exercise in bean counting. Schools have deemphasized physical fitness to the point that most students in high school do not take any gym classes. ‘Academic time constraints’ is the classic excuse, but the real answer is that idiotic testing is the time sucker. All I ask is that the testing stop when standards have been met. If a child tests at 5th grade proficiency in the first grade, give them a pass until the 6th grade ! Alas, I’ve yet to convince the schools, and my kids have so far resisted my suggestion to 0 and 99 on alternative years.

In defense of public schools, like the article said about the students of lesser academic abilities being funneled off to vocational schools, this is the way it is in other countries we are constantly being compared to – China, for instance. The American test scores include everyone, even the special education students. I don’t remember there being any special education classes at my school. Also, I believe the Chinese children go to school six days per week.

Still, to say public education is *free* is a gross misstatement of the facts. In my state it costs taxpayers around $7,000 or $8,000 per student – and my state has one of the lowest cost per student rates in the country. The wasteful, incompetent board of education here can find money to spend on pet projects, but at some schools the buildings are in a state of decay to the point of being unsafe. Yet, the ten years we’ve lived here our property taxes have consistently risen. The test scores in most of our schools are miserable – except the ones in the more desirable areas.

As far as private schools having less extracurricular activities, I don’t see what that has to do with receiving a poor education. One activity during the school year is fine, but how does it benefit a student to be involved in as many as they can schedule? It doesn’t. Also, I would venture to say that MOST public schools have old computers, old equipment, old buildings, and very little money for “extracurricular activities.”

Bobbi said that schools have to accommodate students. I just want to say that her school is an exception. Most school systems now – especially in California, Maine, and Massachusetts – are telling parents they have no say in what their children are being taught. None.

In conclusion, there’s no excuse for even one child going through any school – public, private, whatever – without learning how to read. How can you learn anything for yourself if you don’t know how to read? With resources available in most homes via the internet, or for free at the Library, it makes no sense that every child can’t at least learn how to read.

In my opinion, no absolutely not. The curriculum is horrible, and the teachers that actually want to make a difference are held back by it. In one of my classes one of my best teachers said “I want to teach you how to do that, and I feel you are ready for it, but they say I can’t because then the colleges won’t have anything to teach”

What is that? They throttle students education because they want them to pay for it in college. Public schools receive funding to do this. The goal of school is not to “prepare students for the real world” but to send students to pay for college.

In school, I never once learned anything practical about money or finance. Even though most of what I have taught myself can easily be learned and taught. How many people know what money is? I learned that in a hour on YouTube, yet it was never once mentioned in any of my classes ever.

I took classes that by name and description, where in sync with my education goals and abilities. I took all of the most advanced classes I could. What did I get? The EXACT SAME CLASS!! taken 3 times a year, every year. I never learned anything new. Every class had a different name, got me credit, but was the same thing.

Look at how they teach history. It’s the same periods over and over again. Egyptian, Civil War, Industrial, French Revolution, World War II, Kennedy. Again, and again, and again. Yet most people don’t learn anything with it. How many people will say our government is a Democracy? When it’s really a Federal presidential constitutional republic, which is entirely different. I got out, not having a clue how politics worked.

They don’t even formally teach you any of the widely know best ways to learn or memorize things . What did I get out of the public education system? ABC’s, 123′s, and my heart broken.

Our education system is not fine at all.

I also want to comment on the person above who listed reasons to consider private school. I think a big part of this argument is that public school is a big category. A large urban school is a very different environment than a small rural school, but both may fall into the public category.

I AM NOT INTENDING TO BE READ AS SHOUTING, I SIMPLY WANTED MY THOUGHTS TO BE DISTINGUISHED FROM THE POSTER I’M REPLYING TO.

* You want your child to have a more well-rounded (music, art, etc.) education. I ALREADY STATED MY EXPERIENCES THAT PUT THIS AS A PLUS FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

* You are opposed to having your child beaten / stabbed / shot. This is on the rise in even the best public schools. THIS IS A HUGE GENERALIZATION THAT SEEMS MORE LINKED TO THE NEIGHBORHOODS IN GENERAL THAN THE SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT IN PARTICULAR. THE ONLY FRIEND THAT I HAVE THAT TEACHES IN A PRIVATE SCHOOL IS ALSO THE ONLY TEACHER I KNOW WHO HAS BEEN IN A LOCKDOWN SITUATION BECAUSE OF A WEAPON.

* You don’t like the values that public schools are teaching (intentionally and unintentionally).
WHEN I HAVE KIDS THEY WILL ATTEND PUBLIC SCHOOLS- I WOULDN’T WANT THE PRIVATE SCHOOL (MOST OF WHICH ARE RELIGIOUS) DISCOUNTING MY FAITH IN FAVOR OF THEIRS. VALUES ARE ULTIMATELY TAUGHT AT HOME AND A STUDENT WHO IS RAISED WITH THE RIGHT VALUES WILL UNDERSTAND THOSE SITUATIONS WHEN THEY ARISE AT SCHOOL.

* You want your child to think (for him/herself), which is explicitly *not* the goal of a public school education. EXACTLY HOW IS THAT OUR GOAL?

* You want your child to gain an appreciation for knowledge and achievement instead of self-esteem and “nobody standing out”. MY STUDENTS DO LEARN TO LOVE LEARNING. WHILE THEY MAY NOT ARRIVE AS THE BEST MATH STUDENT, THEY LEAVE KNOWING THAT THEY ARE CAPABLE OF ACHIEVING ANYTHING IF THEY CONTINUE TO WORK HARD.

* You want more of a “say” in your child’s education. Public schools, because they serve literally everyone in the community, cannot accommodate parents’ wishes or preferences.
ACCOMODATIONS ARE LAW THESE DAYS. IF PARENTS HAVE A LEGITIMATE REASON TO WANT SOMETHING DIFFERENT/SPECIAL IN THEIR CHILD’S EDUCATION IT IS DONE. ONE COLLEAGUE HAD TO RIGHT AN ENTIRE UNIT FOR A SINGLE STUDENT BECAUSE THE PARENTS DIDN’T FIND THE BOOK BEING READ APPROPRIATE FOR THEIR SON.

SORRY I JUST COULDN’T READ ALL THAT AND NOT COMMENT.

We also had on average some of the lowest SAT scores in the nation, absolutely scraping the bottom of the barrel. Me personally, I did good in english and bad in math. But whatever, that’s just standardized tests.

If I had kids, I would not send my children to many of the public schools in the L.A. area. It’s very hard for me to think anything good about public schools after my experience, but I’ve come to recognize that public schools in some parts of the country are good. CA isn’t really one of them though.

I’m curious: where does this belief that public schools crush individual thought and stress conformity come from? In my experience (Catholic school K-12, now a public high school teacher), private school is much more likely to do that.

And then there’s the standardized testing that actually only teaches them how to take a test but not actually use any of the information they are learning.

But hey, as long as our government schools are doing okay compared to a selected demographic slice of South Korean students, everything is just hunky-dory in American public schools, and there’s no need for concern, investigation, or reform.

It’s okay, don’t worry, be happy, you can go back to sleep now. Or maybe the nurse will give you an overdose of midazolam because she can’t convert between pounds and kilograms, and you’ll sleep for a long, long time.

In Germany, that’s illegal. For the poor in America, that’s impossible. So much for that idea.

I have been told that nursing students in one college in San Bernardino, California, have a problem in performing simple, elementary math, the sort which would be required of them on the job, and which I was taught at least by the time I was 13 or 14. A University of Arizona student working as a cashier at a Phoenix gasoline station was incapable of determining either the amount owed or the change required without the aid of the computer. But educated ignorance is not new. A close friend, also a graduate of the Los Angeles Unified School District, at roughly the period I attended, believed that stars were merely burning balls of gas, somewhat like gas fires, and was completely unaware of the fact that they are actually massive fusion explosions.

Bob Griffin
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