<p>There is no competitive market for private schools except in the northeast. In most places these private schools are the only game in town, so there is no incentive to excel. Good luck in voting with your feet in this economy, you can only sell donuts, not your houses. 
</p>
<p>kraordrawoh, âhome schoolâ = school at your home city ie PHS.</p>
<p>Music lessons and marching band and cheerleading and varsity dance at PHS are all different than at PS. In fact one of the IVYs has a competitive dance team on which one gets paid. Impossible to get on without high school experiance</p>
<p>D1 all APs the last 2 years with all 5s but one 4 (and one 3 in French). Will essentially skip one year of college. Received one year merit scholarship at top poli sci school</p>
<p>D2 went to a private school for one year and hated the elite money kids (several ambassador kids, clothing competition, etc. NO supervision of freshmen. Lots of drugs on campus (expelled if caught). Single âdorm parentsâ living with boy friend (or friends). Came home and loving PHS. Doing all AP, but friends wide variety from garbage manâs daughter to mechanics son (and yes mechanicâs kids do go to Harvard)</p>
<p>D3 did not want to compete with D1 and D2 and happy at smaller private school. </p>
<p>I am not saying PS good or bad. I donât think one needs to defend choice. I do think we need to fight changes in PHS. I went school board and kept some changes from happening. </p>
<p>Looked at Stanfordâs admissions and PS much less than PHS both by % of applications and % of PS vs % PHS applied</p>
<p>@PD: Would suggest you read post #75 and #82 consecutively, a âfuture mechanicâ is unlikely to prepare himself/herself at Harvard, whereas the son or daughter of a mechanic can prepare for something totally different at Harvard or another university. </p>
<p>Separately, the notion of âschool at your home cityâ being the public school may make some sense in the suburbs, but not inside a major metropolis. Anyway, itâs those families who bought a home where there were âgood public schoolsâ who are now helping boost the application pool at the BS. </p>
<p>Everyone has personal experiences, but anecdotes do not make for good public policy. Competition on the other hand, does make for good public policy. When it âabsolutely, positively has to be there overnightâ who do YOU call? USPS? I donât think so!</p>
<p>@invent: If you want a competitive market for primary and secondary education, you need to make it possible for dollars to follow students from public schools to private or charter schools. Free those funds from the public education monopoly and youâll be amazed at what alternatives are created to meet the demand.</p>
<p>@ wcmom1958,</p>
<p>âVouchers would apply to all private schools which would eliminate the separation of church and state.â </p>
<p>The oft repeated argument regarding the separation of church and state is such a red herring. How is allowing the use of school vouchers at a parochial school any different than permitting the use of Pell Grants at Brigham Young or Catholic University, or the eligiblity of Medicare at a religious-affiliated private hospital? </p>
<p>It is the consumer who chooses the institution and not the government who imposes the religion. </p>
<p>"Who would make sure that private schools arenât teaching creationism, communism, white supremacy, etc.? "</p>
<p>By the same token, who is making sure that the public schools arenât teaching pseudo-science (i.e. save-the-spotted-owl propaganda) and pseudo-social studies (i.e. capitalism is great satan)? At this point, many of the under-performing public schools donât seem to be very good at teaching anything, let alone inspiring their students not to drop out of school entirelyâŠ</p>
<p>Actually the UPS overnight delivery is as good as fed :)</p>
<p>cure is not vouchers but increasing funding. Our PHS had one of highest %city supplements in the US 10 years ago - but the % of the budget has dropped every year while $ amount only slightly higher. There are too many older people (eg my in-laws) who feel âschools did well with amount when you were kidsâ and who want more for elderly needs that school budgets are doing poor. While I support dropping the deficit, the tea party may hurt us in the long run</p>
<p>PrincessâDad- why DID you send your children to private schools when you had such a wonderful public high school as an option? Our ONLY local public school has a pitiful band with 20 members, no dance team (although that certainly doesnât bother me!), and very few APs. Not enough to fill the last two years of a schedule, let alone provide an opportunity for a yearâs worth of college credit. When you talk about âpublic schoolâ you have to understand that not everyone has a good option. And so, I am very, very grateful for our wonderful prep school.</p>
<p>@Princess: UPS is a private company. USPS is the post office. </p>
<p>Public education has succumbed to bureaucratic overload. Spending more money doesnât guaranteed that children benefit. Even fixing outrageous union work rules and making it easier to manage teacher quality is a near impossibility here in NY. Quality delivery of services requires a customer focus, proper incentives, flexibility and ingenuity. Large government bureaucracies have none of these attributes.</p>
<p>;) LOL, weâre never going to agree. This has become political. I work for a living and spending the hours it would take here advocating for my (hard won) position isnât possible!! After serving on the school board I learned to choose my time and battles carefully. May we all rasie happy well-rounded children who care for the world and each other!</p>
<p>@Princess Dad, I was on our local school board for 5 years. I finally stepped down this past September. It started out interesting, but in recent years it was constantly battling the rest of the board about budgets and cutting just for cuttings sake.</p>
<p>@momb2k: Iâm curious. Did overall spending actually go down while you were on the local school board? Thanks!</p>
<p>^^^^^^^^^^^
hahahahaha</p>
<p>faux curiousity is so delectably volpine</p>
<p>kraordrawoh, I donât know about momb2kâs local school district, but our local public schools have been increasing the budget and cutting programs. A mandatory salary increase for teachers, (set by contract), plus sudden drops in state aid, plus an increase in outplacements, led to an increased overall budget, but cuts in FTEs, supplies, and the âextras,â such as art, music, and AP sections.</p>
<p>If a town wonât, or canât pass an override, cuts are inevitable.</p>
<p>Here, teacher salaries have been frozen for years via stagnation and/or furloughs. District costs are increasing because of health care benefit increases and the cost of mandates (like curriculum, testing, etc.).</p>
<p>Weâve had to cut programs due to decreased state aid and increased costs for teacher benefits and retirement. If the teachers would take a 1% decrease in the amount of their annual RAISE (not their entire salary), the programs could have been saved. The teachers wouldnât hear of it. </p>
<p>Itâs funny, I have a book on educational law for NY. (Donât ask why.Iâm not a lawyer.) Itâs about 500 pages. Over half of it deals with the ârightsâ of teachers, about 30% with special education and IDEA, and only a few pages about what constitutes an âappropriateâ education.</p>
<p>@Periwinkle: Essentially what you seem to be saying is that the âmachineâ delivering the educational services consumes a rising percentage of a growing budget. Thus, the purported beneficiaries, the students, get the short end of the stick.</p>
<p>neato, the teachersâ unions are the most powerful lobbying forces in many (most?) states.</p>
<p>If enrollment, state aid, state and federal mandates, % of serious sped cases, reimbursements for previous expenses, and programs offered (P.E., art, music, foreign language) had all remained steady, there would still have been less money available to support educational services, as the contract specified a raise for the teachers. However, the budget had to increase, because more students were outplaced. Our town passed an override, but the increased funds went to cover the outplaced studentsâ tuition. Other programs were trimmed to provide the raises. </p>
<p>In following years, in the normal course of affairs, the state would have reimbursed a certain percentage of the sped outlays, but the so-called âcircuit-breaker fundsâ have been less than originally forecast.</p>
<p>Iâve been reading this twisty turny thread with some interest. </p>
<p>Just want to point out that the two union-dues paying, public educators in this house needed major FA to send their kid to prep school. According to posts earlier in the thread, we donât even qualify as the middle classâŠI just canât see modest raises (when we get themâwe havenât in the past several years) or the unions that ask for them as the Problem With American Education. </p>
<p>If I pointed my finger anywhere, it would be at out-of-control costs of health insurance as the cause for most schools" financial struggles. </p>
<p>Unions care about educational quality, as well as about fighting for a decent wages and benefits. The AFTâs monthly journal is one of my most inspiring professional reads:</p>
<p>[AFT</a> - A Union of Professionals - American Educator - Issues Index](<a href=âhttp://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/issues.cfm]AFTâ>http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/issues.cfm)</p>
<p>câmama, I agree that modest union-requested raises are not The Problem With American Education. However, one BIG part of The Problem is that teacher unions most frequently seem dedicated to preserving the status quo - at a time when American public schools still need to morph from being 19th century institutions to meeting the needs of the 21st century. Every year our public schools fall further and further behind much of the world. Teacher unions appear to be in denial about this.</p>