<p>Interesting....</p>
<p>(Moral of the story: whatever you do, avoid being born to poor parents.)</p>
<p>And if you are born to poor parents, get yourself adopted out!</p>
<p>Thanks Mini.</p>
<p>And if we carry this to colleges, maybe the top private colleges aren't really better either.</p>
<p>There are many different types of private schools. When you are researching private schools for your kids, and looking at schools with non selective admissions, you may well be getting kids who are not cutting it at the private schools. My little ones go to such a private school--all boys and I am sure that the ADD and other behaviour issues at this school are a larger % than at the public school which is primarily made up of affluent families, really the same pool as the private school. In fact, my kids are in the private school because they would be special ed kids in the public school. So the findings do not surprise me in the least. When I lived in Westchester county, school districts like Edgemont, Scarsdale, Bronxville, Chappaqua did not have large numbers of kids going off to the private schools, and certainly not to the many catholic schools there. The stats of those to publics were far superior to those schools. Parents who lived in Scarsdale and sent their kids to the smaller catholic schools did not do so for the superior education of that school, I assure you. It is with the upper end schools that reject more than they accept where you start gettting the private school effect that we often hear. Those kids in such school, however, are already preselected for academic excellence--it is not so much what the school has done to get them there, they are pretty smart already.</p>
<p>Jamimom pretty well hit it on the head. This is a ridiculous study to say the least. First, look where it is published - The Phi Delta Kappa magazine. The vast majority of Phi Delta Kappa members are from the public schools. Just as I would question a drug effectiveness research study in a journal published by a drug company, we must question this study. Secondly the results are terribly confounded, based on the mission of the private schools surveyed. How can you compare a special needs private school with a highly selective public school (yes, there are higly selective pulic schools - see schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in NYC). Finally, the article simply defies common sense. How can one possibly generalize that "...math scores are better at public schools". If you take identical students, place one in a public school math class of 30 students, and another in a highly selective private school math class of 12 students with lots of support, you are telling me on average, the students in the public school are going to have higher math scores? Certainly no one among us can believe such a preposterous claim. If you buy that one, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you (and I am not even from New York).</p>
<p>The moral is the same - either way.;)</p>
<p>Mini:
I am not so sure. You say:
(Moral of the story: whatever you do, avoid being born to poor parents.)</p>
<p>I think the trick may be to choose smart, motivated parents (which is positively but not perfectly correlated with rich parents). Examples: There is not a very strong relationship between income and admission to the highly selective public NY city schools (or our local magnet Atlanta area public schools), but such schools produce academically strong students. In fact, in at least one of these selective public schools, poor first generation Aisan students are overrepresented. Of course, the best choice is to have smart, motivated and rich parents. On the other hand, I am not sure if rich parents trump smart and motivated parents as the best choice!</p>
<p>The moral could be to make sure that your poor parents were born in Asia. Hey, it works for my kids.</p>
<p>Didn't I read that a good "hook" now was to have parents who didn't go to college?</p>
<p>
Well, thank goodness you cleared that up, mini. Otherwise, everybody would be clamoring to be born to poor parents ;).</p>
<p>As Jamimon and RHD point out, some people might want to read the actual study--and see what kinds of public and private schools were included--before drawing any conclusions. But perhaps that's not necessary when you already know the "moral"?</p>
<p>I am assuming those public schools don't have the math programs we have in Seattle- my daughter has never been taught long division and university professors are saying that incoming students are having to take remedial math at a higher rate than in previous years
<a href="http://www.nychold.com/testim-bailey-04xx.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.nychold.com/testim-bailey-04xx.html</a>
We have standards based assessments now in Wa- and as mandated by NCLB testing that is required for a diploma- yet while the test was initially designed to evaluate curriculum, it is now being used to evaluate students- without economic support from either the state or federal govt to meet these new standards.
Additonally- these tests are judged by many educators to be developmentally inappropriate.
I heard with my own ears the director of academics for the Seattle district practically admit that while he took the 7th grade test- he did not pass it.
Yet my 9th grade daughter will not be allowed to graduate high school unless she passes the 10th gd WASL next year- a test which she has never come close to passing- and a test that is more expensive to grade and to administer than any other previous test that the district uses.
Although teachers and parents have been up in arms about the way math is taught for years- it is only lately that they are even pretending to think about changing the textbooks- meanwhile my daughter in private school had excellent math courses and text books- the private school was also much more repsonsive to parent and teacher concerns.</p>
<p>There can be drawbacks to both - private and public. The cream of the crop in public is going to do well no matter what. Some private schools are terrific, but be aware. My friend's D is in private Christian school, because she is dyslexic and parent's didn't want her "labelled." All A's in elementary and jr. high, now in HS , she is struggling. It would appear that some private schools give great grades to make parents think their kids are wonderful in order to keep the tuition flowing. My friend is concerned that she really didn't learn what she needed. A recent study said that we keep hearing how horrible public education is, but that people believed their own school was terrific! If that's true, then the state of public education isn't quite what we thought. A lot of what we think of our public school system is based on published test results - comparing ours to Japan's and Germany's. Of course, this is comparing apples to oranges. Their systems are SO different from ours - in Germany, for example, kids are tracked in the 6th grade, and some students are vetted out after the 8th grade, and placed into apprenticeships, others are placed in vocational tracks, and only a percentage continue on the college track and do the abitur. It is these abitur students ONLY that take the tests. Yet, we test ALL students. And we compare all our scores against the elite of the other countries, and expect to somehow have the same results! If we compared our elite students to the elite of Japan and Germany, the results would be much different. But the media have taken up the cry - grousing makes for a better story. Saying things are OK doesn't fill much column space. If you have a great kid, that kid will find the education anywhere, It is available if you want it. The biggest problem education is that people pay lip service to WANTING an education. To do that, you have to apply yourself and work hard. Many people nowadays want to make things easier for their children - they shouldn't have to work as hard as their parents. The CC parents I have met here do not ascribe to this notion, however, and for that I am very proud of all of you!</p>
<p>You need to read the [url=<a href="http://nces.ed.gov/timss/%5DTIMSS%5B/url">http://nces.ed.gov/timss/]TIMSS[/url</a>] study a little more carefully before referring to international comparisons. I have lived overseas for six years (two three-year spans) and speak the language of the countries I visited. There are some amazing real-world situations of countries that were MUCH poorer than the United States when I was a kid, countries in which the MAJORITY of the population was going to school in a second language, which nonetheless far exceed the United States in educational achievement across a broad national population. Not just the top students, but the average students and below-average students too. </p>
<p>It is my observation that journalists who have traveled overseas and who also speak the languages of other countries are correctly recognizing that the United States could do better for its current level of public and private investment in schools. Things in the United States are not as bad as they possibly could be, but they still have plenty of room for systemic improvement. Especially, agreeing with Mini on this point, I think the poorest people in America should be better served by the school system, public or private, in the United States.</p>