US Budget BasicsFollow

That's a bit of an extreme way to go about getting props for Home Economics classes.

Failed home sex ed, I guess.

Nope. Not even close.

Not to call varus right, but from what little I looked for, NYC graduation rate is 52.2%, so that's pretty close. NY State however has a higher graduation rate, of 69%.

Huh. I went looking and found a NYC graduation rate of over 60%, but I may have missed some qualifier. As it is, I am not in the city (check my Posting from tag) so the 69% rating is more appropriate.

You really aren't helping your cause.

This is whats wrong with the country at the moment:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/newsgraphics/2011/0119-budget/index.html?hp

If anyone can find nasa on there anywhere, let me know where it is, ok?

The pink rectangle around the word "Other". Looks like the largest section of the "Other" group.

Thats way too tiny. Lets get rid of that agriculture **** and make bigger spaceships instead!

To be fair though, none of what you said changes the fact that you didn't present any evidence to support your position either. There are numerous studies comparing achievement and developed abilities, and private schools consistently and repeatedly outperform public schools (in the US of course). In order to make public schools come close, you have to start adjusting the data to account for socio-economic factors. And while that's a completely legitimate methodology if done correctly, it's also susceptible to subjective interpretation. That's one of the reason why such studies end out being all over the map.

Um... But even when do some post-data manipulation to help out public schools, private schools still tend to do better when we look at SAT scores (developed abilities tests rather than achievement). SATs are consistently the best indicator of how well a student will do in their first year or so at a college, so this is somewhat relevant. It's also significant because achievement test scores usually reflect best on rote learning. If you study for the test, you'll do well. While development tests (like the SAT) test critical thinking and "learning how to derive the answer" skills rather than rote answers.

This suggests that while public schools do ok at teaching students to regurgitate information, they fall a bit behind at teaching students how to assess information and derive an answer when they haven't been told how to solve it. How significant that is kinda depends on what you think we should be teaching and what kind of skills you think are important to have later in life. I guess the point here is that we can at best say that public schools are only a little bit behind private schools, but in a raw sample, they are far behind.



And I can understand why you'd want to focus on one semi-extreme statement made by Varus in order to shift the need to defend the public schools away from you. But at the end of the day are we really assessing a single statement made by Varus? Or are we making a determination of which method of education actually works better for the most students?

The issue of and arguments for school vouchers are legitimate even if the broadest and wildest claims of their advocates don't turn out to be 100% correct. And isn't that what really matters? I'll also point out that while socio-economic factors of the students are often factored in by public school advocates in order to make their schools look less bad compared to private schools and homeschooling, they manage to avoid factoring things like cost. Most private schools actually cost less per student (and many a hell of a lot less), while achieving those results. So one can argue that even if the effect in terms of test results are unchanged if we assumed that the full range of students currently attending public school all shifted to private schools via a voucher system, we could still make the argument that we'd accomplish the same (or marginally better) results while spending less money.


Isn't that a sufficient reason all by itself?

Edited, Feb 14th 2011 9:29pm by gbaji

They're not "all over the map". When private schools aren't allowed to self-screen for the students they want, they fail to perform any better than public* schools. This has been shown time and time again when cities have created voucher programs and other programs designed to allow "school choice". As I've noted before as well, attrition rates in these programs are rather high indicating that parents soon realize that "private school" isn't a silver bullet that ends all their education woes.

If privates schools were actually "better" at instructing students, they should be able to show significant results over public schools no matter who walks in the door. They can't.


I've talked enough about education that I feel pretty confident with my record. As I've said in the past, until private schools can show significant benefits to education over public schools without the need to screen students, there's no reason to even have the debate aside from trying to score political points.


This would need to be proven across the board to hold firm if the private schools actually needed to handle the entire spectrum of students, not self-screened ones. Including special needs students, ESL students and all the rest. Parochial schools tend to "cost less" in terms of raw tuition because much of the school's expenses are subsidized by the churches they're associated with. As a result, the school size is constrained to what the church can afford. If we provided a glut of students into the schools, they would be forced to significantly raise tuition to accommodate the new numbers. There's even less to go on with secular private schools since most are special achievement style schools like the Montessori programs which wouldn't be taking the rank-and-file students anyway. So, no, this alone isn't a good reason to change systems. Not without a whole lot more evidence on its side.

*The DC voucher program resulted in higher graduation rates but showed no benefit to test scores. Presumably, families that took the time to apply for and use the program were more academically motivated even if the schools themselves failed to provide a better education.

Edited, Feb 15th 2011 12:46am by Jophiel

The teacher is far from the only factor. Private schools have more freedom in curriculum and textbook selection. Having attended a preschool-8th grade Christian private school, I'm pretty sure public schools didn't have mandatory religion classes, in school chapel services, and creationist textbooks.