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Are Private Institutions Making Things Worse?

Howard said:
https://www.breitbart.com/big-gover...e-poverty-by-sending-kids-to-private-schools/

And yes, I know, Breitbart. The horror.



Fwiw, President Obama does send his children to a private school (at $37,000 a year per kid).

Anyways, discuss. Are private schools an unfair advantage? Do we need to spend more on our public schools?
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obama also wants to keep protecting his daughters with guns. but doesnt want you to be able to do the same.

but on the subject. public schools are turrible
 
I went to the UofU bookstore a few days ago, looking for some textbooks for my twelve year-olds. The Horror!

textbooks are a racket worse than the mob in this country.

I say just shut down the public schools top to bottom and send the whole next generation scurrying into the webz for education. There'd be a huge rush to set up accredited courses for everything on the webz, and competition would restore price sensibilities. What can a tottering old prof waving a pointer in the bottom of pit offer that can't be done on a video download or a DVD or web course? Or even, for that matter, a first-year grad student who is still wobbly on his subject, and spending most of his energy on his own classes?

I hate the property taxes I pay supporting the educational cartel, the stupid state school boards that have got themselves legislated into huge advantages come time for us to elect school board members, and you hate the shyster federal loan nightmare that draws you into those high-priced but "necessary" courses. .. ... which now thanks to so-called "trade agreements" gives you training for jobs that aren't available anymore because they've been exported, or don't pay a living wage because we import all those geeks from India. . . . so you end up saddled with a school loan you can't pay even if you live in mom's basement, and it gets turned over to the creditors who double it in two years with all their fees, so that there you are, now, a jobless 26-year-old having hissy fits on JazzFanz and owing more than a home mortgage to the banksters who own Obama. . . .

It's time for us to throw over those college campuses entirely and set up little villages on the town square protesting The Man, and educating ourselves in plywood shacks on the park lawns. Anybody who owns a book can be a professor.
 
Howard said:
https://www.breitbart.com/big-gover...e-poverty-by-sending-kids-to-private-schools/

And yes, I know, Breitbart. The horror.



Fwiw, President Obama does send his children to a private school (at $37,000 a year per kid).

Anyways, discuss. Are private schools an unfair advantage? Do we need to spend more on our public schools?
Click to expand...

Unfair advantage? perhaps but that does not mean it should be taken away. Life is unfair. It's unfair that I have to work but some kid with a rich daddy does not. Oh well, that's life. Doesn't and shouldn't always be fair.

Now do we need to spend more on education? Sweet Lord Almighty yes. But as pointed out, at great lengths in outher discussions, money does not solve the problem by itself. Without getting into specifics on how to fix it let me say this: I think that our children (speaking on a national level) are our single greatest reasource. They are our hope, our future. We as a nation have failed them on a mind numbingly massive scale. Horrific imo.
 
My kids go to public school. Just this week I pulled my 14 year-old daughter out of her history class, with the consent of the school, which agreed to allow her to finish the class with the grade she has earned so far this year. This, after receiving texts from my daughter from the classroom that the teacher was ranting at students "again" about the utter falsehoods surrounding the theory of evolution. Yes, you read that correctly: Her HISTORY teacher has been teaching 14 year-olds that Darwin was a fool, and that the theory of evolution is utterly, unequivocally false. He has also been enlightening his students with such historical truths as homosexuality being the primary cause of the fall of the Roman empire, Islam having an established record of violence and hatred that may justify the eventual genocide of "Arabs", African Americans being responsible for their own mistreatment by whites and law enforcement, and other spectacularly offensive gems. My daughter, who had finally heard enough, contradicted him during a particularly ridiculous "lecture" a couple of months back, and as a result became a target of ridicule by him in the classroom up until earlier this week.

If it sounds like I'm suggesting this teacher is representative of what our kids get with public education, I suppose I am guilty as charged. While I believe most educators in the public school system have our kids' best interests at heart, they are shackled by a heavily regulated curriculum that fails to identify with the diversity of student aptitudes and abilities. And, in reference to my example above, public education often falls victim to its own broken system of tenure. I'm totally soapboxing here, I know, but I'm disgusted. I want this man gone, and I want someone to wave a magic wand making the quality of education given in high-tuition private institutions available to our kids in the public school system. Idealistic and unreasonable, given the highly liberal nature of this request, I know.
 
Tenure protects ideological, as differentiated from factual, liberals as well. Public education makes it difficult for parents to effectively secure good education that a more diversified market could more efficiently and economically provide.

The idea that it's unfair to allow good parents to raise better kids than any "norm" demonstrates the race to poverty and ignorance inherent in top down systems.
 
babe said:
Tenure protects ideological, as differentiated from factual, liberals as well. Public education makes it difficult for parents to effectively secure good education that a more diversified market could more efficiently and economically provide.

The idea that it's unfair to allow good parents to raise better kids than any "norm" demonstrates the race to poverty and ignorance inherent in top down systems.
Click to expand...

I don't see the discussion that way. Not this exact discussion at least. I see it as should parents of good financial means be allowed to use that to their kids benefit? Better financial means =/= good parents. Even then my answer is yes they should be able to. That parents often have different levels of financial means despite hard work is often unfair but that's life.

We should up the bar for public schools. One way is scraping the current tenure system and coming up with one that rewards good teachers while holding bad ones accountable).
 
Howard said:
We don't spend enough?

View attachment 4221View attachment 4222
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By itself it looks worse than it is. The US GDP is 2.5 trillion more a year than Germany, Canada, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Spain, Japan and Germany combined. That 2.5 trillion as its own GDP places it behind only Germany, japan and the UK (from this group).

So the US can more than afford the difference if we just got smart. But again, we can throw money at this all day long and accomplish next to nothing without reform across the board. Tenure, teacher pay, school books, tech integration, real world sckills, removal of politics, teacher qualifications, parental involvement, after school programs...

To me this is the US single most imprtant issue. This issue will heavily impact all others immediately or down the road. Security, joblessness, poverty, racism, immigration, foreign politics...
 
DutchJazzer said:
obama also wants to keep protecting his daughters with guns. but doesnt want you to be able to do the same.

but on the subject. public schools are turrible
Click to expand...

STFU. Public schools are turrible because dumb *** parents who have no clue how to educate young children run the show. Could your types just grow the **** up and let the professionals handle what they're trained to do?
 
Stoked said:
I don't see the discussion that way. Not this exact discussion at least. I see it as should parents of good financial means be allowed to use that to their kids benefit? Better financial means =/= good parents. Even then my answer is yes they should be able to. That parents often have different levels of financial means despite hard work is often unfair but that's life.

We should up the bar for public schools. One way is scraping the current tenure system and coming up with one that rewards good teachers while holding bad ones accountable).
Click to expand...

On the basis of your definition of the question, this thread is just another troll topic for the agenda of those who want class warfare in the US.

Sure life isn't fair, but it's not the aspiring upper middle class that's the problem. It's the uber-rich I call "elites" who want to stomp on the grasping fingers of wannabe "elites" trying to give their kids a chance to become real "elites".

The real elites are never gonna have to run with the peasants.

American education should not be subjected to "elite" management, nor left in the hands of government. It's the worst thing you can do to human minds.

We've had a century of compulsory public education and it has not produced equal opportunity or a cohesive society. Just keep the libraries and Internet open to the public, and let private education have an equal playing field with a voucher system that provides equal resources to each student.
 
With my daughter now a few months into a German public school I can say that I am not impressed. EVERYTHING she has learned she has learned at home. She is supposed to be in a cutting edge program from Saxony (Sachsen) that helps integrate kids that don't speak German, created primarily due to the heavy influx of refugees, and so far we have given the program a D-. They have some very archaic and weird rules, for one. For example, every student is required to have the same equipment for classroom instruction, which at 13 years old should not include crayons, should it? But she got in trouble one day for not bringing her crayons and the teacher had a sit down with us to explain the importance of following the rules. Not to mention how pissed the teacher got when I asked why she needed crayons anyway as coloring at age 13 is not going to help her learn anything besides art skills. How dare I question the wisdom of the almighty German education system.

So far the teacher, who actually is pretty nice I think, has sent us home notes every day that our daughter doesn't pay attention and that her mind wanders and she doesn't do work in class. When I told her that was because she doesn't understand anything and it is hard to pay attention when you have ZERO foundation in the foreign language, which we thought that class was supposed to provide, the teacher became very indignant and said that she talks directly to our daughter and therefore she should pay attention. I of course point out that blabbering gibberish at someone directly does no more to help them learn and she got mad again.

So we have been teaching our daughter German, helping her do every assignment, going over the basics, and the classroom has done nothing. Not impressed so far.
 
Howard said:
https://www.breitbart.com/big-gover...e-poverty-by-sending-kids-to-private-schools/

And yes, I know, Breitbart. The horror.



Fwiw, President Obama does send his children to a private school (at $37,000 a year per kid).

Anyways, discuss. Are private schools an unfair advantage? Do we need to spend more on our public schools?
Click to expand...

Howard said:
https://www.breitbart.com/big-gover...e-poverty-by-sending-kids-to-private-schools/

And yes, I know, Breitbart. The horror.



Fwiw, President Obama does send his children to a private school (at $37,000 a year per kid).

Anyways, discuss. Are private schools an unfair advantage? Do we need to spend more on our public schools?
Click to expand...

Are private schools an advantage? Probably so. Are they an 'unfair advantage? Depends on what you mean by unfair.

I don't think it's being hypocritical to acknowledge that sending one's schools to private schools isolates the parents and children from poverty and the plight of the less fortunate. I think this is a true statement, yet we too have sent all our children to private school. I don't think I'm being a hypocrite either.

In a similar way, I can recognize that the tax code grants advantages to wealthier tax payers at the expense of the lower income tax payers, while at the same time I'm taking advantage of those tax codes.

While I am alarmed at how the rules of the game are constantly being tilted toward the self interested of the very wealthy (to a large extent thanks to the rank and file republicans who'll stop at nothing to give the wealthy more bene's even though the rank and file will never themselves benefit), I have no problems with wealthy people using the advantages their wealth provides them. I'd do the same.

If we believe it makes good policy sense to induce more people to send their children to public schools, then the better solution is to improve public schools, not to diminish the choice/opportunity wealthy people have to send their children to private schools.

The common, and false, criticism of liberalism and progressivism, is that we want everyone on the same level and to have the same opportunity. Nope, what we want is for everyone to be at a minimum level that gives them a reasonable opportunity. Aside from the very few radicals, progressives don't believe in radical redistribution but only in leveling the playing field a bit so that others have opportunities as well. So, instead of a playing field at a 90 degree tilt, maybe a playing field at at 45 degree tile or something like that.
 
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