Are Private Schools Immoral?

with white making up the rest. Please tell me how that's immoral.

themselves.

Is Brooklyn a hotbed of "White wing" racism?

I honestly don't know. I've never been there.

Truth hurts, I guess.

rather than conforming to your own idea.

Don't be surprised if people answer. Especially if you've used a provocative headline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines is a bit of a cliche, because lazy journalists do ask questions that should probably have the answer "no", to get attention.

By the way, I am a black Puerto Rican.

She just got back from teaching a workshop at a Friends-sponsored Private School...in Ramallah.

So, I'm saying "no".

This isn't about your individual experience. This is about inequalities baked into our school systems and how we manage those inequalities.

...the article does not address the broad topic of ALL Private schools. It focuses on magnets and charter schools in NYC as specific alternatives to the New York public school system.

Now, the Magnet Schools in New York are quite good and if you have a kid into science or math...phenomenal. I don't know much about their charter schools, but here in Ohio, the Charter schools are a mixed bag. But most are better than any of the city public schools.

...change the subject line to one that better reflects its contents.

with funding. Also, there is a notion that a one size fits all education will suffice. This is not the case. Schools in poor areas need more funding and more support. Private schools often take kids who would be forced to attend really bad schools. My husband went to school at Mount St. Michael's in the Bronx. His school was so scary in Middle School, he carried a knife. You can't educate kids in that environment. His older sisters pooled their money and sent him to Mount St. Michael's for High School. He thrived there and won scholarships. Hubs is an engineer and I seriously doubt he would have made it out of public school in the Bronx...he would have quit. Mount St. Michael's is a diverse school...all nationalities and colors...great school and they do a great job. Parent want to send their kids to the best schools they can...and that is certainly not racist.

this will somehow improve the bad schools...never happens. We need a massive amount of money to fix these schools so that parents want to send their kids there. Most parent (me included) want to send their kid to local schools.

Ahhhh! New York.

In my area of Los Angeles, the schools are mostly Hispanic.

My oldest daughter was the only blonde in her class. The other children teased her about being a dumb blonde. She was probably the best student in the class.

Los Angeles is a pretty racially mixed city. That's all I can say. The schools reflect the mix. Especially the magnet classes.

Everyone should be required to go to public school at least 4 days a week and then if their parents want them to have religious ed, STEM enrichment, networking at some country club, working on the farm, online classes etc. they can do that on the fifth day.

Every child is entitled to a high quality education at their local public school. To the extent that any other kind of school drains resources and funding out of local public schools they are undermining democracy and reinforcing inequality in our society.

I will say, homeschool kids need to take state tests to monitor their progress.

...where public education has been controlled by corporate America with absolutely stunning success.


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sending kids to bad schools as a method to improve schools is going to lose and deservedly.

if all the parents who give a shit can easily send their kids somewhere else.

The reason they are bad schools is because all the parents in the district who are really invested in their kids educations have sent their kids to a different school.

Good schools or bad schools result from the communities that support them. When parents walk away from that community and don't hold administrators or teachers accountable, then you get bad schools.

Sorry.

And part of the reason we're in the situation we're in is because of a generation of fundamentalist megafamilies refusing to send their kids to school and brainwashing them to believe that voting for Trump will trigger the rapture.

Democracy crumbles without an educated electorate. If you want to have a United States, this is the price.

What if the school offers a program that the public school does not?
What if the kid is bullied to the point where they're not safe at public school?

ETA on this forum, I remember people giving the Obamas a hard time for sending their kids to private school as opposed to public school. The DC public schools are not set up to handle the security needs that a high profile kid comes with.

It's a downward spiral, like taking the public transport. The more people do it, the better and more cost effective the service. If you cut funding for it, service declines and then even fewer people do it so there's more of an excuse to cut funding.

Like I said, talented kids can easily go to their local public school for 90% of their education and go to a magnate school for enrichment classes once a week.

If a kid is bullied at one public school, put them in a different class or, in extreme cases, send them to a different local public school.

We don't need an entire parallel education system to accommodate the one kid in a thousand who is bullied to the point where they can't stay in the mainstream education system. Public schools have special ed programs, programs for teen mothers, etc. They can have programs for kids who are bullied if we fund them to do so, although really it's the bullies who should end up being taken out of the mainstream.

The point is we're never going to be able to find that funding if there's an easy "eject" option for every parent who thinks their kid is special and unique.

I went to a nationally recognized public school system that let me slip through the cracks. I was scared to go to school from 4th grade to high school graduation. Because I was at a small school, the chances of reinventing yourself are as high as Donald Trump respecting women. Mistakes you made in kindergarten were still talked about in high school.

I would have given my left arm to be able to go to a different school (public or private) just to get away from kids who wanted to make my life miserable.

The school's solution to me was to put me in counseling with girls who were drug addicts. If I fought back, it was me that would get in trouble. Never the (popular) bullies. My parents also didn't do anything.

(This was in the 80s and 90s, before anti bullying legislation).

for having the unmitigated audacity to be openly gay. I put her in a charter performing arts school and she's accepted. Our little boy, on the other hand, is doing quite well in regular public school.

Different solutions for different kids, and the safety, well-being, and education of my children trumps whatever ideological biases I may have about the issue.

and exist only to enforce racial segregation.

I sent my sons to a private school for very personal reasons. My older son, who was mildly autistic but VERY smart, was being bullied in the public school. Which, because this was Kansas, was pretty much lily white. The school district did k-6 elementary, 7 & 8 middle school, 9-12 high school. When the son was in 6th grade another mom, whose son was a year older, told me I could not send him to the middle school. Her son, who was not autistic, but who'd been bullied at that same elementary school, was being bullied so unmercifully that they wound up transferring him to a different middle school in that district. In the new school no one knew him and he wasn't bullied.

We were in a position to consider a private school and enrolled him to start 7th grade at an excellent secular independent school. Where the academics were amazing. While he did not get the most stellar grades there (the autism got in the way) he learned a great deal, did knowledge bowl and science bowl, helping his team from this very small school to go to Nationals two years. Right now he's in a PhD program in physics and astronomy.

What I learned most of all from the private schools experience is that public schools should be better funded. Smaller classrooms. Better support for kids who need extra support. Oh, and I have never believed I should ever be exempt from paying school taxes, whether or not I currently have a kid in a public school. We all benefit from good public schools. But there are times when a private school is the right choice for a particular child.

because of property tax funding. There should be state funding across the board. In Ohio, Kasich has cut the state funding for schools and all schools are suffering but the inner city and the poor rural schools fare the worst as they don't have a property tax base to fund the schools. With the GOP packing the courts. I don't see much we can do about it right now. Even in progressive states, the inequality in education is appalling...New York is a great example.

In public elementary and secondary schools. That’s over $12,500 per student. That is the 5th highest per-pupil spending amount in the world.

I would argue that the schools are not underfunded, but that those funds are mis-managed and improperly spent.

Very small, supposedly progressive community. The district lost more kids between 5th and 6th grades than at any other grade break, because parents decided to pull their kids from the public schools and send them to private/parochial schools.

I heard more carefully veiled reasons why parents didn't want their kids going to school with black kids than I ever thought I would. It was very disappointing.

I am positive that for the vast majority of these families, the bigotry was completely internalized. If they were called out on it, they would be horrified. However, it wasn't my place, so I said nothing.

Edited to add: I don't think private schools are immoral, in and of themselves. What I do think is immoral is the way public schools are funded, using the tax base of the communities in which they are located. It automatically punishes districts where poor people reside. This is not to say black people are always poor, but in some communities, the Detroit area in particular, poverty and unemployment tends to hit the black community harder.

Things are not immoral, people are immoral. If a system is immoral it is because the people within the system act immorally or at least accept immoral activity from others.

The way that public education is structured and funded in the United States is fundamentally flawed and the incentive of profit further exacerbates those flaws when private schools are introduced into communities.

The worst thing is that our universities US Universities have models of education that have been adopted by Finland, and other high performing countries. They came here and took our models of education, applied them back home, and are doing well while we continue to struggle relative to other higher income countries.

The politics of public education and the history of racial and class distinction have always been an anchor around the neck of educating our children.

.Only 80 students /40 boys and 40 girls
. 4 teachers
.grades 5-8 / 20 students per class

Excellent education!

I grew up in an affluent town in northern NJ in one of the best schools in the state. It still ranks in the top ten every year.

Each grade had about 250 students and we had one black classmate in each grade - if any.