There've been a few heated threads on the relative benefits of various school systems. So let's gather them into one heated productive discussion here.
First, Judy/JWV, I owe you an apology. I was poking fun at right-wing homeschooling survivalist fundamentalist Christians, the kind who can't bear to have their kids in school with all those other godless heathens, and I didn't mean to imply that all homeschoolers are that way. In fact the RHSFC are probably a very small but very vocal homeschooling minority and I don't think they're any indication of a "typical" HS/US family.
I've spent a lot of time on homeschooling/unschooling books, mailing lists, & discussion boards. I think it's a great way to educate your kids because it has the world's best student:teacher ratio-- 1:1 or 1:2 or more. The program can also be tailored to your kid's interests. You don't have to study ancient Egypt civilization because it's Tuesday and it's in the state's standards-- you study it because the kid is passionately interested in that subject. I've been very motivated to learn about HS/US educational systems out of a fear that our public school system would call us up one day to say "Take her back. We give up." However HS/US depends on a motivated teacher-- parent(s)-- and that's not always achievable.
Private schools can be great, too, but how do you tell? By charging for admission they automatically restrict their student population to the local native-speaking majority who are probably already highly involved in their kid's education. Meanwhile public schools have to cope with everyone else, including non-English speaking students, persistent truants, and parents who may not be so involved. My buddy the high-school teacher would much rather teach in a private school because the administration always backs up his classroom discipline, but he's met many more better students in public schools than in private ones.
Another issue with private schools is the cachet. My spouse met many people last week (during her Reserve duty) who started conversations for the sole purpose of telling her about their kid at Punahou. Their kids have NEVER attended a Hawaii public school and these particular braggarts parents don't spent much time with their kids anyway, so how the heck do they know Punahou is better than the local public school? It makes me wonder if they're trying to rationalize the $10K annual tuition by talking up the school. So your sixth-grader does her homework on her school-issued laptop. Does that guarantee Harvard and lifetime success? Or is it just achieving the same results at an excessive cost?
You would think that the money would restrict private schools to the best of all worlds-- small class sizes, plenty of educational resources, and motivated parents. However many of those parents tend to have more money than involvement, and many of the students are in private schools because they're just not hacking it at the public schools-- or they've been expelled. There's a reason that private schools tend to have tighter student standards of behavior.
Then there are the public schools. Some of them are wonderful and some aren't. Hawaii's public-school system is run by the state (teachers are state employees) which means that no neighborhood gets any more revenue per student than any other (although new legislation is changing this). So the "poor" kids in Nanakuli High are theoretically getting just as much educational money as the "rich" kids in Hawaii Kai. However the money doesn't account for Nanakuli's high rates of truancy, absenteeism, drug use, & violence. It turns out that the biggest factor in public school differences is... the degree of parental involvement. If a kid knows that their parents are going to take a very dim view of the "typical" behavior at Nanakuli, then that behavior won't happen with that kid. If the school administration isn't doing the right thing for the kids, then the parents will get involved and recalibrate the administration. Unfortunately again that population of involved parents tends to avoid living in Nanakuli so it's difficult to compare schools when the real difference is the neighborhood demographics.
Does anyone have any credible studies on the relative merits of the different systems? Link 'em if you got 'em, but I'm betting "NO." You can't design a double-blind randomized repeatable trial because every kid is different and their school experiences are highly individualized. You can draw some broad general conclusions-- kids who are uncomfortable with large groups will probably do better in homeschool or unschool-- but I doubt that you can declare one system generally better than another.
Besides schools are not chosen by the students. They're chosen by the parents, and most of those choices are made in the PARENT's best interests. Hopefully that includes the kid's learning style & special needs, but more often it's driven by money, work schedules, and whether or not the parent can tackle HS/US. So again you have kids attending the wrong schools for the wrong reasons. When they happen to be bad schools in addition to the wrong reasons, then the situation is doomed to failure. (I bet the next six pages are full of posts citing specific examples of individual horror stories.) Unfortunately the individual failures will be exploited in an attempt to generalize that particular experience to the entire school system. I don't think that's applicable. In fact it may be like TH's analogy of putting a bag over your head and running across a superhighway-- if nothing bad happened then it must be OK for everyone to do that.
I think that, like Social Security, public schools establish a baseline safety net for the benefit of society. If the govt is going to require students to attend schools up until a certain age, then the govt should fund those schools and it's perfectly reasonable to expect taxpayers to pay for it. Anything above that baseline is up to capitalism and the parent's ability to make it happen, whether that's money for private school or the time for HS/US.
I doubt that colleges, including service academies, prefer a specific type of school. I bet that their student populations generally reflect the proportions of graduates of the various types of schools. I do know that service academies look at the whole student record and don't particularly care whether that particular student comes from a particular school system.
As for the prodigies, they'll bloom wherever they're planted. They'll probably achieve their full potential in the school systems that they enjoy because they won't waste all their time fighting the administration. I know plenty of bright kids in public, private, and HS/US systems. Each of those kids would be uncomfortable in a different school situation, even if the school isn't teaching differential equations to sixth graders. Although we parents may think that a precocious kid does best in homeschooling, they may have the type of social personality that responds to a public school, or the inherently undirected personality that has to respond to a highly-structured private school. And again it's not as if we can run the kid through a few years of each system and decide which one was the best...
So while I believe that we all have a responsibility to support public schools with our taxes, the rest of the decisions have to be made according to what helps us sleep best at night. Hopefully that's the best decision for your kid, too.
First, Judy/JWV, I owe you an apology. I was poking fun at right-wing homeschooling survivalist fundamentalist Christians, the kind who can't bear to have their kids in school with all those other godless heathens, and I didn't mean to imply that all homeschoolers are that way. In fact the RHSFC are probably a very small but very vocal homeschooling minority and I don't think they're any indication of a "typical" HS/US family.
I've spent a lot of time on homeschooling/unschooling books, mailing lists, & discussion boards. I think it's a great way to educate your kids because it has the world's best student:teacher ratio-- 1:1 or 1:2 or more. The program can also be tailored to your kid's interests. You don't have to study ancient Egypt civilization because it's Tuesday and it's in the state's standards-- you study it because the kid is passionately interested in that subject. I've been very motivated to learn about HS/US educational systems out of a fear that our public school system would call us up one day to say "Take her back. We give up." However HS/US depends on a motivated teacher-- parent(s)-- and that's not always achievable.
Private schools can be great, too, but how do you tell? By charging for admission they automatically restrict their student population to the local native-speaking majority who are probably already highly involved in their kid's education. Meanwhile public schools have to cope with everyone else, including non-English speaking students, persistent truants, and parents who may not be so involved. My buddy the high-school teacher would much rather teach in a private school because the administration always backs up his classroom discipline, but he's met many more better students in public schools than in private ones.
Another issue with private schools is the cachet. My spouse met many people last week (during her Reserve duty) who started conversations for the sole purpose of telling her about their kid at Punahou. Their kids have NEVER attended a Hawaii public school and these particular braggarts parents don't spent much time with their kids anyway, so how the heck do they know Punahou is better than the local public school? It makes me wonder if they're trying to rationalize the $10K annual tuition by talking up the school. So your sixth-grader does her homework on her school-issued laptop. Does that guarantee Harvard and lifetime success? Or is it just achieving the same results at an excessive cost?
You would think that the money would restrict private schools to the best of all worlds-- small class sizes, plenty of educational resources, and motivated parents. However many of those parents tend to have more money than involvement, and many of the students are in private schools because they're just not hacking it at the public schools-- or they've been expelled. There's a reason that private schools tend to have tighter student standards of behavior.
Then there are the public schools. Some of them are wonderful and some aren't. Hawaii's public-school system is run by the state (teachers are state employees) which means that no neighborhood gets any more revenue per student than any other (although new legislation is changing this). So the "poor" kids in Nanakuli High are theoretically getting just as much educational money as the "rich" kids in Hawaii Kai. However the money doesn't account for Nanakuli's high rates of truancy, absenteeism, drug use, & violence. It turns out that the biggest factor in public school differences is... the degree of parental involvement. If a kid knows that their parents are going to take a very dim view of the "typical" behavior at Nanakuli, then that behavior won't happen with that kid. If the school administration isn't doing the right thing for the kids, then the parents will get involved and recalibrate the administration. Unfortunately again that population of involved parents tends to avoid living in Nanakuli so it's difficult to compare schools when the real difference is the neighborhood demographics.
Does anyone have any credible studies on the relative merits of the different systems? Link 'em if you got 'em, but I'm betting "NO." You can't design a double-blind randomized repeatable trial because every kid is different and their school experiences are highly individualized. You can draw some broad general conclusions-- kids who are uncomfortable with large groups will probably do better in homeschool or unschool-- but I doubt that you can declare one system generally better than another.
Besides schools are not chosen by the students. They're chosen by the parents, and most of those choices are made in the PARENT's best interests. Hopefully that includes the kid's learning style & special needs, but more often it's driven by money, work schedules, and whether or not the parent can tackle HS/US. So again you have kids attending the wrong schools for the wrong reasons. When they happen to be bad schools in addition to the wrong reasons, then the situation is doomed to failure. (I bet the next six pages are full of posts citing specific examples of individual horror stories.) Unfortunately the individual failures will be exploited in an attempt to generalize that particular experience to the entire school system. I don't think that's applicable. In fact it may be like TH's analogy of putting a bag over your head and running across a superhighway-- if nothing bad happened then it must be OK for everyone to do that.
I think that, like Social Security, public schools establish a baseline safety net for the benefit of society. If the govt is going to require students to attend schools up until a certain age, then the govt should fund those schools and it's perfectly reasonable to expect taxpayers to pay for it. Anything above that baseline is up to capitalism and the parent's ability to make it happen, whether that's money for private school or the time for HS/US.
I doubt that colleges, including service academies, prefer a specific type of school. I bet that their student populations generally reflect the proportions of graduates of the various types of schools. I do know that service academies look at the whole student record and don't particularly care whether that particular student comes from a particular school system.
As for the prodigies, they'll bloom wherever they're planted. They'll probably achieve their full potential in the school systems that they enjoy because they won't waste all their time fighting the administration. I know plenty of bright kids in public, private, and HS/US systems. Each of those kids would be uncomfortable in a different school situation, even if the school isn't teaching differential equations to sixth graders. Although we parents may think that a precocious kid does best in homeschooling, they may have the type of social personality that responds to a public school, or the inherently undirected personality that has to respond to a highly-structured private school. And again it's not as if we can run the kid through a few years of each system and decide which one was the best...
So while I believe that we all have a responsibility to support public schools with our taxes, the rest of the decisions have to be made according to what helps us sleep best at night. Hopefully that's the best decision for your kid, too.
