Admiral Rockwell Tory
Diamond Member
I didn't create this thread with the aim that it morph into a public vs. private school debate, yet that appears to be the nature of what people want to talk about. I don't know why for the behavior I described is that of parents in response to discovering the private school to which they sent their child isn't as great as it was purported to have been or as they perceived/expected it to be. Additionally, the questions I've asked in the OP have to do with the timing of parents' griping about the schools their kids attend; the temporal theme is found in all three paragraphs of the OP. How does one miss that? ....Yet people would become temerariously pissed at me were I to ridicule their reading comprehension skills....
The central theme is that people "bitch and moan" about private schools after the kid graduates, whereas they do so about public schools before their kids attend, and presumably after their kids graduate. Some people likely deride public schools when they don't even have kids or haven't recently had any who were in a K-12 school.
I didn't introduce the matter of whether or to what extent public schools are better or worse than private schools. I'm sure that topic has been amply covered in the Education sub-forum of USMB. It doesn't even make sense to me that is the line of discussion onto which people have lurched given what I did write in the OP, and yet here we are with you, a moderator, having failed to adhere to the theme/topic introduced in the thread's OP. (Expand the quote below to see what is the theme of the OP; I've emboldened the sentences that contain it.)
It would really do you some good to do your own research. Maybe then you'd know what you are talking about, or you'd at least be able to express what you mean (as compared to what you wrote) in a way that aligns with reality. Read on to see why I say that.
On what are you basing that claim? Surely it's not a claim resulting from your analysis of the public and private schools in Nevada? Perhaps you're sending her to a school outside of Nevada?
Based on the information found at the two links above, NV has several public schools that are at least as good, if not better, than the private schools there. (Your ID shows you as being in NV, so that's why I focused on NV. Is the location indicator on your ID a mistake?) Perhaps you have some other metric/dimension that gives credence to your claim?
Have you made the claim above (in whole or part) to interject a deflection into the discussion? It seems so given the theme of the central question the OP asks is why people don't complain about private schools before it's too late and there's ample indication that the nation has lots of very good public schools. Moreover, it appears that most students at the nation's top universities graduated from public schools:
- Harvard -- 63% public school grads
- Yale -- 68% public school grads
- Williams College -- 58% public school grads
- MIT -- 67% public school grads
- About half of the students at Ivy League colleges and universities come from public schools.
Note:The claim that "public schools suck" seems highly inaccurate given that roughly a 2/3rds majority of students at four of the nation's top universities/colleges graduated from public high schools.
Interestingly, I could not find the same metrics for the four public colleges for which I sought it -- UC Berkeley, UVA, Univ. of Michigan Ann Arbor, and Univ. of Connecticut. Do state colleges/universities not track that data point? I don't know. I would think they must....Maybe it's "out there" and I didn't dig deeply enough to find it?
Additional info that suggests public schools don't "suck." I realize some are good and some are not, but that's so too of private schools. Merely being a private school doesn't make a school be good.
You would need to ask the politicians who you think have paid "lip service" to public schools. I can't speak for them.
Of course there are politicians who send their kids to private school and politicians who send their kids to public school. Merely claiming, as you did, that politicians "send their kids to private schools" carries about the same intellectual and discursive value as saying "mammals swim."
I can find information about where schools federal level politicians send their kids to school. I cannot find similar information about state and local level politicians. With the exception of Jimmy Carter (He later sent her to Holton Arms), I believe modern Presidents have sent their kids to private schools, but were talking about a very small number of people when we consider the matter of where Presidents send their kids. Among members of the U.S. Congress, 41% of representatives in the House and 46% of U.S. senators send or have sent at least one of their children to a private institution.
Yes, a high proportion of elected officials do send their kids to private schools. In D.C. I sort of get why they do, at least for high school. D.C. public high schools are average at best, even the one in the "posh" part of town. But that's not necessarily the case at all public schools. Indeed, there are several nationally ranked ones in the D.C. 'burbs and there's not much reason to send a child to private school if going to one of those schools is also an option.
For public officials, as with other celebrities and their kids, there is also the security and privacy factors that are important. People don't want their kids at a school where the press and fans/na'er do wells have easy access/visibility to their kids. Look at the Sidwell campus vs. the St. Albans campus, which is right next door. They are equally good schools, but St. Albans sits in a sort of bowl-shaped parcel of land poised on a slope just below the highest crest in the city that allows people from the street fairly unfettered visibility to the kids when they are outside. You can sort of get a sense of that from this photo if you look at the top left corner. (You can sort of tell from the Google map too.)
In contrast, Sidwell, sits on top of the very same crest. From the street, all one sees is the front lawn.
This, however, is the actual campus. As you can tell, the buildings themselves restrict visibility, to say nothing of their being nestled behind the landscape so even they aren't all that visible.
One can from the back of one side of the campus -- where the sports fields are -- see onto the fields, but the kids aren't on that part of the campus except for sports events and practices. (Click your way around the block to see what you passers by see. Not much is what folks see.) One also cannot see into the classrooms.
In light of the security considerations that public figures and celebs face that the rest of us do not have to deal with in quite the same way, private schools seem like they offer a higher degree of safety. Their campuses are more secluded usually and the smaller size of the student body also helps with that. Also, being private, there is far less cause for unknowns to even show up at or linger around the facility. I know those seem like "small things," but in the scheme of providing a secure environment for the kids of the rich and powerful, it matters.
Among people in general, when looking at public or private schools, the following factors come into play when parents choose one or the other:
Ultimately, the decision to send a child to private school is one of personal choice for huge quantities of people (in large part because the majority of the U.S. population lives in urban/suburban areas more so than existential need, and invariably there're good public schools in every "metro" area. With magnet and charter schools making it possible for high achieving students to attend a good school even if the one serving their neighborhood isn't, having to send one's child to a private school isn't generally a necessity, though I realize there are exceptions. Exceptions, however, are just that, exceptions.
- Academic reputation and college preparation -- for choosing for my kids, this was important
- School size and Class size -- this was most important
- Safety reputation -- this is always important, but I wasn't concerned about their safety in the way a celeb/politician would be
- Special programs -- this turned out to be important, but when I was deciding, it didn't play a big role
- Costs
- Religious and Moral instruction -- ethics, yes; religiously based morality, no
- Location -- this held some appeal, but wasn't a driving factor
- Ideology -- this was important
My own circumstance growing up is one such exception. I was sent to private schools because "it's where one went" as far as both sides of my family was concerned, and my parents are very WASPy, so there was that too. My family also lived in a city that didn't have high quality public schools.
People are, of course, free to send their kids to public or private schools for myriad reasons. Some of those reasons are supported by objective facts that give credence to them as reasons. Others, not so much. I sent my kids to private schools, but I could have, for vastly less money than the cost of 12 years of tuition for four kids, simply moved across the river (or into MD) and had a perfectly fine public school for my kids to attend. My kids might have gone to one of these schools had we bought a house in the corresponding neighborhoods instead of in D.C., but we didn't. We bought in D.C. more or less "across the street" from the school my kids attended until I started having to be on the road most of year.
- Virginia
- Maryland
I sent my kids to boarding school because I traveled a lot for work and was rarely able to be at home. But for my traveling, I would have left them at that school for all of their K-12 years. (I'd have been fine sending them to the boarding school in my neighborhood, but they didn't have a boarding spot available when I needed them to have four. They could have gone as day-hops.) I also wanted my kids to be in a rural setting, but that was not a first line priority. Lastly, I thought it best that they grew up among kids who are like them -- smart, motivated, curious, outgoing/assertive, and fortunate -- and where those qualities are encouraged and built upon.
[Some of the comments in the preceding "section" pertain to the emboldened comment above.]
I don't see that as being a legitimate claim unless (1) there is a special circumstance(s) that augurs for doing so, or (2) you've opted to send your daughter to a "pipeline" (TSAO and very similar) school. Those schools send an inordinate quantity of their grads to elite colleges and universities. There are a variety of reasons for that. Certainly one of them is the child's scholastic performance. Another reason has to do with parents of those children being "legacies" not only at the high schools from which their kids graduated -- I'm a "legacy" alum, as are my sons, from my own high school -- at the colleges and universities to which they send their kids. Then, of course, there's the matter of the kids who went to those schools often enough being from families wealthy enough to, if need be and the parents are willing to do so, "donate" their kid's way into the school (not a lot of kids for whom that happens, but it happens).
Public Schools vary greatly in quality. The dilapidated state of too many urban and rural schools in the United States is a well-chronicled tragedy, and a large number of suburban public high schools offer many of the amenities of a private school as well as a lineup of strongly credentialed, dedicated instructors. Opportunities abound for the motivated and talented attending public schools. AP courses are typically plentiful and public schools actually offer more opportunities for International Baccalaureate (IB) and dual-enrollment courses. (You'll have to do your own "clicking" to see the details and course offerings pertaining to individual schools from that list.)
One may also gain an edge by being a big fish in a small pond, or if one prefers a less overused analogy, a gargantuan begonia in a miniature greenhouse. Moreover, it seems that attending a school surrounded by fellow academic superstars actually has a negative effect on your admissions chances at an elite college. (See also: Getting Into an Elite College Is Easier Than You Think) In other words, a student with a 1300 SAT at a public high school where the average SAT is 1000 will have an admissions edge over an equal student at a private school where 1300 is the average SAT score.
Holistically looking at the matter, literally millions of parents have lots of "sane" reasons for not sending their kids to private school.
[Let me note that the article you've cited does not link to the original data it references. That's common with "news" articles written with an "axe to grind." I'm not disputing that Ed. Week didn't find as the article claims; I'm saying there's clearly more going on than the article shares.]
Okay. You live there. Please reconcile the dichotomy between the data found here -- 2017 Best Public High Schools in Nevada -- that indicates there are good public schools in NV, and the considerably less glowing information reported in the article you linked.
I looked at a Reno school and a Vegas school to see what the schools report about their student performance and there's no way you can legitimately say they are not good school.
I realize that's just three schools, but still, looking at those schools's metrics, I have to say that it calls into question the credibility of that article you linked. Even content in the article itself suggests there may be "something" suspicious about how the rating organization arrived at its conclusion about NV schools. For instance, the article notes, "The report judged Nevada on its 60 percent graduation rate of 2012. The state’s graduation rate passed 70 percent in 2015, which wasn’t taken into account." And here we are in 2017.
- Davidson (Reno) -- The school shows SAT scores in the 710+ range and ACT above 33. That's not indicative of a school's being bad. If kids are going there, there is clearly ample high quality educational instruction going on. Kids don't earn scores like that if they aren't being taught well.
- ATECH (Vegas) -- I looked quickly through this school's Accountability Report. ATECH is a school that serves a large number of students from poor backgrounds. Over 60% of the students enrolled there are in at least one AP class, and 83% of them passed the AP exam.
- West Career & Technical Academy (Vegas) -- This schools Accountability Report indicates ~99% its students perform at or above the expected levels for reading, writing and mathematics. There again, I'm just not seeing data that corresponds to the school "sucking."
If one considers a different source for state high school rankings, one find that whereas Education Week (the surveyor on whose data your article is based) placed Massachusetts at the top of its list, Mass. is ranked fifth and NV is rated 20th, far from dead last. That survey is limited to high schools, and the content of my post focused on high schools as well. Yet another survey rates NV at 44th.
I don't live there as you do, but when I look at the data, it doesn't jibe with your claim that public schools "suck." I acceded in my earlier post to the fact that the quality of education in public schools can be hit or miss, but the same can be true of private schools. You live there, so that's why I'm asking you to reconcile -- not with hearsay, but with something that holds up under close scrutiny -- for us the schism in claimed and observed information. You made the "sucks" claim. I'm asking you to defend it with some rigor.
- Perhaps the reconciling difference between your article's (Ed. Week's) assertion and what one sees looking at individual high schools can be found in the performance of primary and middle school students?
- Perhaps there's a huge gap between the performance of students at the high schools I looked at and the remainder of NV high schools?
Then you should have no trouble calling her and asking her for some credible content and metrics that you can either link to or upload.
"Been well known" by whom? I didn't until this conversation give a moment's thought to Nevada schools. Why are you even "on about" NV schools? Your remark wasn't limited to NV schools; you made the broad assertion that "public schools suck," not that "NV public schools suck." I'm the one who introduced NV and I did so only because you mentioned your daughter's schooling.
More importantly than any of that, the original claim I made has nothing to do with NV schools. It doesn't have to do with any state's schools or school system. It has to do with parents behavior. I made that clear to you earlier and you still haven't actually written one word that directly addresses the actual thread topic. Why do you not just address the thread topic?
At this point, I really want to know. To whom do I report dissatisfaction resulting from a moderator's complete refusal to respond, even in your very first post in the thread, refusal to address the topic introduced in the thread's OP, which, BTW, you happened to quote in your first thread post? There must be someone to whom we members can report our grievances.
Do parents have an effect? Yes. Sometimes. But here's the deal. Teachers spend more waking time with kids than the parents do. Thus, to claim that it is all the parents fault is BS.
Really? I see my students for less than one hour 5 days a week. The parents have them at least 6 hours a day 5 days a week and all day on the weekends holidays, and breaks.
You claim is patently false.
