Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene

[Nevilledog]

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Josh Kraushaar
@HotlineJosh
"The tensions at Dalton are fascinating: Are there enough wealthy white parents willing to pay $54,000 a year to have their kid play the part of Racist Cop in science class"

Private Schools Have Become Truly Obscene
Elite schools breed entitlement, entrench inequality—and then pretend to be engines of social change.
theatlantic.com
9:23 AM · Mar 11, 2021

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/private-schools-are-indefensible/618078/

Dalton is one of the most selective private schools in Manhattan, in part because it knows the answer to an important question: What do hedge-funders want?

They want what no one else has. At Dalton, that means an “archaeologist in residence,” a teaching kitchen, a rooftop greenhouse, and a theater proscenium lovingly restored after it was “destroyed by a previous renovation.”

“Next it’ll be a heliport,” said a member of the local land-use committee after the school’s most recent remodel, which added two floors—and 12,000 square feet—to one of its four buildings, in order to better prepare students “for the exciting world they will inherit.” Today Dalton; tomorrow the world itself.

So it was a misstep when Jim Best, the head of school—relatively new, and with a salary of $700,000—said that Dalton parents couldn’t have something they wanted. The school would not hold in-person classes in the fall. This might have gone over better if the other elite Manhattan schools were doing the same. But Trinity was opening. Ditto the fearsome girls’ schools: Brearley, Nightingale-Bamford, Chapin, Spence.

How long could the Dalton parent—the $54,000-a-kid Dalton parent—watch her children slip behind their co-equals? More to the point, how long could she be expected to open The New York Times and see articles about one of the coronavirus pandemic’s most savage inequalities: that private schools were allowed to open when so many public schools were closed, their students withering in front of computer screens and suffering all manner of neglect?

*snip*

[abqtommy]

1. I was sent to private religious schools in Junior High and High School back in the 1960s.

Fortunately my parents had already taught me about hypocrisy so I spotted that right away. Obscene? Probably. Definitely not a good experience for me and just one more
reason to hate my parents.

[brooklynite]

2. I'm on the Board of one of those schools...

Our price point isn't as high as Dalton, but you'd probably call it obscene as well (that tuition supports a lot of financial aid).

As for the problems with public schools, the solution is to raise taxes to pay for them. The parents of private school students are a minuscule percentage of the voting public, and won't be able to block a tax rise, if you can convince everyone else.

[Hermit-The-Prog]

9. One problem here, at least, is funding schools by property tax.

Property owners are not the only ones who benefit from public schools.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. This isn't exactly typical of all private schools.

This is New York City, where even the public schools are competitive.

[mopinko]

4. the sad thing- everyone wants that stuff for their kids,

and john dewey, the granddaddy of american education, recommended that shit 100 years ago now.
ask barack obama or rahm emanuel. they sent their kids to the u of chicago lab school, started by dewey himself. the talent that has poured out of that school all these years is one of chicago's secret weapons.

but give that to all kids? oh hell no.

[Duppers]

5. Unreal!

[WhiskeyGrinder]

6. I ate this article up with a spoon.

[Tanuki]

7. Good old Dalton School where Jeffrey Epstein used to teach.

He was hired by former AG Bill Barr's dad, despite the fact that he didn't have a college degree.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-dalton-teacher.amp.html

[DFW]

8. I knew that name rang a bell

I had seen it while visiting my mom's parents who lived on E. 89th street since the 1950s. Never knew anything else about it.

I should probably check on the school where my elder daughter went in Dallas when she spent her high school semester "abroad." Since she was going to high school here in Germany, she wanted to try out a school in the USA, but was terrified of enrolling in some random program that could land her with some "Christian" family in the middle of Kansas somewhere. So we went for the obvious solution. Since I still had my residence in Dallas, I tried to enroll her in the local public school nearest where my housemates still lived (and still live). I think it would have been less paperwork to enroll her in the Dalton school.

They wanted my ID, W-2, driver's license, and about five other documents where my US address was listed. I finally got it all done, and she was enrolled, but I asked them why all the mountains of paperwork. They said, please stop by when you are in the States next, and we will explain it all.

So, next time we were in the USA, we stopped by. It turns out that THIS particular public school is one of the best equipped public schools in the southern USA. Flush with unreal amounts of local tax money, it was better equipped than I could possibly imagine most private schools. They had their own planetarium for their astronomy students (!!), an incredible sports stadium, professional quality theater, offered courses in journalism and subjects I had to wait for my university to be offered. I couldn't believe it. They explained to me that parents from all over the Dallas area faked their residence info to get their kids in there illegally, and so they couldn't believe it when I showed up from Düsseldorf with a legitimate residence claim to letting my daughter in. But they did, and it cost me nothing (seemed like a better deal than a few dozen thousand dollars).

There were still a few quirks my daughter had to get used to. First, she got herself a bicycle and planned to use it to get to school and back every day from our Dallas house. People stared at her as if she were a visitor from Mars. A BICYCLE?? We don't use those things here. In Germany, you can't drive until you are 18, so everyone uses them here.

Then there was the ritual chanting every morning. She asked me what that was all about. Ritual chanting? In a PUBLIC school? What the hell was THAT all about? What did they chant? There aren't supposed to be Buddhist public schools in Dallas. She said they all got up at a pre-arranged time, and trance-like mumbled some kind of chant, and then sat down. I was stunned. I asked if she could make out what they were chanting (neither of us understand Tibetian). She said it started out with "I spread the peaches," but she couldn't make out the rest of it. I had to digest this. A whole class of Dallas school kids turn into hypnotized zombies for a minute and chant in unison something that starts with "I spread the peaches?" She said, they sure did. Oh, and they put their right hands on their chests while they did it. She had NO idea what was going on, and felt too intimidated to ask, since the rest of them all did it as a matter of course.

I finally caught on. Her English was good, but there are some words that just don't come up in the course of normal conversation when talking in English to your 16 year old daughter living in Germany. I asked if by any chance they might be saying "I pledge allegiance?" She said she didn't know. What does "pledge" mean, and what does "allegiance" mean? I explained. In Germany, since the Nazi era, exaggerated, unnecessray displays of patriotism have been frowned upon, so nothing of the sort exists here. I had totally forgotten that they still do that in American public schools, and so she was completely unprepared for it, and had NO idea was going on. As far as she was concerned, she thought she had heard them chant "I spread the peaches" every morning, and bunch of unintelligible stuff after that, after which they all came to, and resumed their lives as if nothing had happened.