5 ms·

The rich send their kids to private schools. Therefore, this problem does not apply to the rich. Therefore, this problem will not be solved.

forrestthewoods 11y ago
This made me pause and think for a moment. What do rich kid schools do? I have no idea. I went to a dumb kid rural high school. But for some reason through the endless education discussion I've never heard brought up what rich kid schools do differently. Even if the answer is "but we can't do that because we're poor". Man. Now you've got me all curious...
- japhyr 11y ago
  One thing "rich kid schools" do is filter out many students who are difficult to teach. Teaching and running a school is a lot easier if your goal does not involve teaching everyone who walks through your doors.
  - icelancer 11y ago
    This is by far the biggest difference between the two.
    - littletimmy 11y ago
      Well, no. There's also the small matter that private school teachers tend to be amazingly more qualified. I've heard of PhDs teaching at some of the very top private schools. By contrast, state school teachers are poorly trained and poorly paid.
      - jfoutz 11y ago
        Maybe in later grades it's helpful, I don't think it requires a phd to teach 8 year olds multiplication tables. Private school, as far as i can tell, have 18 kids with an aide per classroom. Public school will have 30-40 kids per class. I dunno. if it was easy it wouldn't be a problem. There are lots of dials to turn. As you say, qualification levels of teachers is is one, frequency of testing is another. I think the least effort improvement is just smaller classes.
        mhuffman 11y ago
        The very highest pupil to teacher ratio seems to be California with under 25. The average seems to be 16. [1] From personal experience, my child goes to a public school and his classroom is about 25 students with a teacher and 2 assistant teachers, around 8 kids per. instructor. There seems to be differing research on class size anyway, with even the most liberal interpretation of results pointing to smaller class sizes only helping "troubled" children. Also, most of the countries that have larger average class sizes than the US do better than us in rankings.[2] The definition of "troubled" seems to range from poor to lower IQ. The US seems to do about as well as Latvia and Russia in education, and not much higher than Mexico, Turkey, and Thailand, despite spending more on education per student than nearly anyone else in the world. I wonder if we might just study (with an open mind) what other countries are doing and incorporate those findings, rather than guessing and just blowing cash hand-over-fist. [1] http://www.nea.org/home/rankings-and-estimates-2013-2014.html http://www.nea.org/home/rankings-and-estimates-2013-2014.htm... [2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/class-size-around-the-world/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/class-size-arou...
  - logicchains 11y ago
    If that's the case, it seems like it would be a pretty easy problem to fix: allow schools to suspend/expel students who are repeatedly disruptive or violent in class. From a utilitarian perspective this would probably be a net win, in that whatever the disruptive students lost from being expelled would be more than made up for by what the students who actually wanted to learn gained from not having the disruptive students interrupting the learning process.
    - douche 11y ago
      It's not just the disruptive students - you've got the special-ed students, and all the students that are what my mother (an elementary special-ed teacher) refers to as "dull-normals" - those who don't really have learning disabilities that would get them labeled, but are just not very smart (80-100 IQ). Then there are the ESL students, and all the other categories I can't think of at 3AM... Public schools have to service all of these students, until they graduate, drop out, or age out.
      - logicchains 11y ago
        Why don't private schools have to deal with these "dull-normals" too? Having rich parents doesn't disqualify one from having below-average IQ.
        timpattinson 11y ago
        Private schools can choose who they want to admit
        logicchains 11y ago
        Well there must be private schools somewhere that admit children of below-average intelligence, due to the profit to be had from rich parents with said children, so perhaps it would be instructive to look at how those schools handle it.
        11y ago
  - tsotha 11y ago
    If by "difficult to teach" you mean kids who cause problems for the other kids, then yeah. I went to a Catholic high school, and they did not tolerate disruptions. That allowed them to have classes with almost 50 kids and still have better than 95% of the graduating class going on to a four year college.
    - finance-geek 11y ago
      No, "difficult to teach" often just means kids who have not had a proper meal the previous night because their family cannot afford it. Try paying attention when you are chronically hungry and you understand one of many problems very easily.
      - tsotha 11y ago
        Uh huh. How many of those kids are there, you figure, on a percentage basis?
        Kequc 11y ago
        I just did some wikipedia sleuthing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Poverty_and_demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#P... > The US Census declared that in 2010 15.1% of the general population lived in poverty: 22% of all people under age 18 13.7% of all people 19–21 and 9% of all people ages 65 and older.
        jonlucc 11y ago
        So if we take 2/10 children and subtract 2 kids from the denominator because their parents could afford to send them to private school, you get 1/4 of students in an average school. I imagine the ratio is even worse in most inner cities and certain rural areas.
        tsotha 11y ago
        Poverty statistics in the US don't include government programs. How many of those kids are hungry after welfare and food stamps?
  - jessedhillon 11y ago
    That doesn't account for all of the difference. I went to public HS in rural Sacramento county, while some friends of mine went to the public schools in nearby Folsom -- a very wealthy suburb. These were public, like I said, so they don't have that selectivity you mentioned: if you live in their district, you go there. "Just" the facts of very interested parents, investment from nearby Intel and HP, and massive spending on technology programs were enough to set this school apart. Sometimes the simple answer is the right one.
    - waterlesscloud 11y ago
      I'm just amused that if you said "Folsom" to Americans, 99% would associate it with prison, or Johnny Cash for the same reason. But it's really a wealthy suburb.
- coupdejarnac 11y ago
  I attended a private Catholic prep school. One thing we didn't waste much time on was standardized testing. In my five years at the school, I only recall taking one standardized test, aside from the sat/ act.
  - Omnus 11y ago
    Well of course you didn't - the school's funding didn't depend on taking tests. That's the point of this whole discussion.
- littletimmy 11y ago
  Less standardized testing. More socratic learning method in small-sized classes, taught by highly paid teachers. That results in better prepared less stressed students who get admissions to better universities. They then get better jobs, beget richer kids, who then get admissions into private schools, and so on it goes.
- saganus 11y ago
  From my limited experience with friends from private schools, I've seen that they usually have better infrastructure, lab equipment, etc. Also from what I was told, teachers usually are payed better so a lot of them come from better universities and also it seems that they are better updated on current technologies. Of course this will depend on school and I also think even private schools get some crappy teachers/bad syllabus, but in general I think it boils down to having either better material stuff or better trained teachers or both. Edit: Forgot to add that these two improved areas seem to combine to give much better learning experience which in the end seems to somewhat correlate to student success.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    That's fascinating to me, because when I was in high school, it was opposite. I visited a few private school science class labs because I was in a sort of city-wide science club, and the ones in private schools generally had worse infrastructure and supplies. Also, one of my teachers mentioned that she considered herself payed-up for tithing to the church for the rest of her life because she worked for less pay at a Catholic school for 4 years before moving to the public school. Maybe that is unique to St. Louis, where the private schools are almost all religiously affiliated.
    - saganus 11y ago
      Maybe it could be due to being different countries? I was talking about Mexico in this case. I'm not saying there aren't shitty private schools in Mexico. There are a lot of everything. You can find some of the best high schools and colleges from the public side, as well as from the private. But in general I found that here most private schools had at least nicer infrastructure. Maybe teachers were a mixed bag since you can also have old school catholic/religious institutions that would have really retrograde teachers, but again, at least in the infrastructure side money did seem to buy much better things. That might also have to do with the fact that taxes in Mexico are not prioritized for education and so most public schools are really lacking in pretty much everything. Students and teachers basically put a significant part of the expense in school materials as well as things like paint for the buildings, repairing broken bathrooms, etc. It's a really dire situation that gets worse every day. Under this context then, a private institution that can raise a significant amount of money from parents, will usually manage to make a very big difference. We are talking about the difference between having a public college where most bathrooms were non functional, had no toiler paper or soap (so pretty much only running water if that) vs a private college where there is a Starbucks inside campus and other such amenities (like fully functional bathrooms and plenty of them, etc). Same thing for labs and of course the students capacity to buy newer (or even any kind) of laptops, etc. Same thing for high schools where there is no space to play sports vs having a fully stocked gymnasium with a soccer field, showers, etc. I guess that was my view at least.
- slavik81 11y ago
  Private schools don't necessarily spend any more per student on teaching than public schools do. Mine spent less, though I got more out of it. One of the differentiators, I think, is that only parents who actually care about education spend >$10k/year on something they could get for free. Most of the children attending have significant support from their parents and come from stable homes.
- jostylr 11y ago
  I have tutored in private schools (rich, not religious) and have heard of how they structure their day. One prominent thing is that of more freedom. They have more time in between classes, more freedom to socialize, and more choice in their life. This is huge. Additionally, they can get tutored as I just mentioned. Related to that are all the test preps and extra-curricular activities that can be supported with money, etc. These additional resources enrich what students can bring to the classroom. It is hard, however, to ascertain whether their outcomes are better because of anything to do with the school. They have more resources, family connections, and connecting to each other who also have other resources. Fundamentally, my belief is that one should focus on grooming intelligence, not knowledge. The question then becomes how does one help a person become more intelligent? Programming them with knowledge does not help; it just creates miserable robots. Instead, allowing them to be free, moving, interacting, socializing, making a mess out of exploring reality, this is what grows the brain, IMO. I work for a Sudbury school and this is what we focus on making happen. Demonstrative anecdote: we had a student who was with us from age 5 to age 12. He never had any formal instruction. He wanted to go to a different school to join their baseball team. It is a highly respected private school in the area. They interviewed him and were impressed and let him in. In his first weeks of school, he did not know about parts of speech or that a dot meant multiplication of numbers. He quickly learned all of that (pretty simple, after all) and got 90's on his first tests. Intelligence is hard to acquire and it requires freedom to explore, freedom to move, freedom to socialize. Knowledge is relatively straightforward to acquire when the brain is ready for it.
- xjlin0 11y ago
  My sister sends her son to a private school, academia type, very intense on read/write/arithmetic, especially in their daily homework (more than 12 pages/day), and that's for age 5!!! Not exaggerate about the home work because I helped it, practicing writing many words, read short and easy stories, some summation like 12+4. Pretty surprising to see an age 5 do that, though painful for him.

forrestthewoods 11y ago

This made me pause and think for a moment. What do rich kid schools do? I have no idea. I went to a dumb kid rural high school. But for some reason through the endless education discussion I've never heard brought up what rich kid schools do differently. Even if the answer is "but we can't do that because we're poor". Man. Now you've got me all curious...

japhyr 11y ago
One thing "rich kid schools" do is filter out many students who are difficult to teach. Teaching and running a school is a lot easier if your goal does not involve teaching everyone who walks through your doors.
- icelancer 11y ago
  This is by far the biggest difference between the two.
  - littletimmy 11y ago
    Well, no. There's also the small matter that private school teachers tend to be amazingly more qualified. I've heard of PhDs teaching at some of the very top private schools. By contrast, state school teachers are poorly trained and poorly paid.
    - jfoutz 11y ago
      Maybe in later grades it's helpful, I don't think it requires a phd to teach 8 year olds multiplication tables. Private school, as far as i can tell, have 18 kids with an aide per classroom. Public school will have 30-40 kids per class. I dunno. if it was easy it wouldn't be a problem. There are lots of dials to turn. As you say, qualification levels of teachers is is one, frequency of testing is another. I think the least effort improvement is just smaller classes.
      - mhuffman 11y ago
        The very highest pupil to teacher ratio seems to be California with under 25. The average seems to be 16. [1] From personal experience, my child goes to a public school and his classroom is about 25 students with a teacher and 2 assistant teachers, around 8 kids per. instructor. There seems to be differing research on class size anyway, with even the most liberal interpretation of results pointing to smaller class sizes only helping "troubled" children. Also, most of the countries that have larger average class sizes than the US do better than us in rankings.[2] The definition of "troubled" seems to range from poor to lower IQ. The US seems to do about as well as Latvia and Russia in education, and not much higher than Mexico, Turkey, and Thailand, despite spending more on education per student than nearly anyone else in the world. I wonder if we might just study (with an open mind) what other countries are doing and incorporate those findings, rather than guessing and just blowing cash hand-over-fist. [1] http://www.nea.org/home/rankings-and-estimates-2013-2014.html http://www.nea.org/home/rankings-and-estimates-2013-2014.htm... [2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/class-size-around-the-world/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/class-size-arou...
- logicchains 11y ago
  If that's the case, it seems like it would be a pretty easy problem to fix: allow schools to suspend/expel students who are repeatedly disruptive or violent in class. From a utilitarian perspective this would probably be a net win, in that whatever the disruptive students lost from being expelled would be more than made up for by what the students who actually wanted to learn gained from not having the disruptive students interrupting the learning process.
  - douche 11y ago
    It's not just the disruptive students - you've got the special-ed students, and all the students that are what my mother (an elementary special-ed teacher) refers to as "dull-normals" - those who don't really have learning disabilities that would get them labeled, but are just not very smart (80-100 IQ). Then there are the ESL students, and all the other categories I can't think of at 3AM... Public schools have to service all of these students, until they graduate, drop out, or age out.
    - logicchains 11y ago
      Why don't private schools have to deal with these "dull-normals" too? Having rich parents doesn't disqualify one from having below-average IQ.
      - timpattinson 11y ago
        Private schools can choose who they want to admit
        logicchains 11y ago
        Well there must be private schools somewhere that admit children of below-average intelligence, due to the profit to be had from rich parents with said children, so perhaps it would be instructive to look at how those schools handle it.
        11y ago
- tsotha 11y ago
  If by "difficult to teach" you mean kids who cause problems for the other kids, then yeah. I went to a Catholic high school, and they did not tolerate disruptions. That allowed them to have classes with almost 50 kids and still have better than 95% of the graduating class going on to a four year college.
  - finance-geek 11y ago
    No, "difficult to teach" often just means kids who have not had a proper meal the previous night because their family cannot afford it. Try paying attention when you are chronically hungry and you understand one of many problems very easily.
    - tsotha 11y ago
      Uh huh. How many of those kids are there, you figure, on a percentage basis?
      - Kequc 11y ago
        I just did some wikipedia sleuthing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#Poverty_and_demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States#P... > The US Census declared that in 2010 15.1% of the general population lived in poverty: 22% of all people under age 18 13.7% of all people 19–21 and 9% of all people ages 65 and older.
        jonlucc 11y ago
        So if we take 2/10 children and subtract 2 kids from the denominator because their parents could afford to send them to private school, you get 1/4 of students in an average school. I imagine the ratio is even worse in most inner cities and certain rural areas.
        tsotha 11y ago
        Poverty statistics in the US don't include government programs. How many of those kids are hungry after welfare and food stamps?
- jessedhillon 11y ago
  That doesn't account for all of the difference. I went to public HS in rural Sacramento county, while some friends of mine went to the public schools in nearby Folsom -- a very wealthy suburb. These were public, like I said, so they don't have that selectivity you mentioned: if you live in their district, you go there. "Just" the facts of very interested parents, investment from nearby Intel and HP, and massive spending on technology programs were enough to set this school apart. Sometimes the simple answer is the right one.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    I'm just amused that if you said "Folsom" to Americans, 99% would associate it with prison, or Johnny Cash for the same reason. But it's really a wealthy suburb.
coupdejarnac 11y ago
I attended a private Catholic prep school. One thing we didn't waste much time on was standardized testing. In my five years at the school, I only recall taking one standardized test, aside from the sat/ act.
- Omnus 11y ago
  Well of course you didn't - the school's funding didn't depend on taking tests. That's the point of this whole discussion.
littletimmy 11y ago
Less standardized testing. More socratic learning method in small-sized classes, taught by highly paid teachers. That results in better prepared less stressed students who get admissions to better universities. They then get better jobs, beget richer kids, who then get admissions into private schools, and so on it goes.
saganus 11y ago
From my limited experience with friends from private schools, I've seen that they usually have better infrastructure, lab equipment, etc. Also from what I was told, teachers usually are payed better so a lot of them come from better universities and also it seems that they are better updated on current technologies. Of course this will depend on school and I also think even private schools get some crappy teachers/bad syllabus, but in general I think it boils down to having either better material stuff or better trained teachers or both. Edit: Forgot to add that these two improved areas seem to combine to give much better learning experience which in the end seems to somewhat correlate to student success.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  That's fascinating to me, because when I was in high school, it was opposite. I visited a few private school science class labs because I was in a sort of city-wide science club, and the ones in private schools generally had worse infrastructure and supplies. Also, one of my teachers mentioned that she considered herself payed-up for tithing to the church for the rest of her life because she worked for less pay at a Catholic school for 4 years before moving to the public school. Maybe that is unique to St. Louis, where the private schools are almost all religiously affiliated.
  - saganus 11y ago
    Maybe it could be due to being different countries? I was talking about Mexico in this case. I'm not saying there aren't shitty private schools in Mexico. There are a lot of everything. You can find some of the best high schools and colleges from the public side, as well as from the private. But in general I found that here most private schools had at least nicer infrastructure. Maybe teachers were a mixed bag since you can also have old school catholic/religious institutions that would have really retrograde teachers, but again, at least in the infrastructure side money did seem to buy much better things. That might also have to do with the fact that taxes in Mexico are not prioritized for education and so most public schools are really lacking in pretty much everything. Students and teachers basically put a significant part of the expense in school materials as well as things like paint for the buildings, repairing broken bathrooms, etc. It's a really dire situation that gets worse every day. Under this context then, a private institution that can raise a significant amount of money from parents, will usually manage to make a very big difference. We are talking about the difference between having a public college where most bathrooms were non functional, had no toiler paper or soap (so pretty much only running water if that) vs a private college where there is a Starbucks inside campus and other such amenities (like fully functional bathrooms and plenty of them, etc). Same thing for labs and of course the students capacity to buy newer (or even any kind) of laptops, etc. Same thing for high schools where there is no space to play sports vs having a fully stocked gymnasium with a soccer field, showers, etc. I guess that was my view at least.
slavik81 11y ago
Private schools don't necessarily spend any more per student on teaching than public schools do. Mine spent less, though I got more out of it. One of the differentiators, I think, is that only parents who actually care about education spend >$10k/year on something they could get for free. Most of the children attending have significant support from their parents and come from stable homes.
jostylr 11y ago
I have tutored in private schools (rich, not religious) and have heard of how they structure their day. One prominent thing is that of more freedom. They have more time in between classes, more freedom to socialize, and more choice in their life. This is huge. Additionally, they can get tutored as I just mentioned. Related to that are all the test preps and extra-curricular activities that can be supported with money, etc. These additional resources enrich what students can bring to the classroom. It is hard, however, to ascertain whether their outcomes are better because of anything to do with the school. They have more resources, family connections, and connecting to each other who also have other resources. Fundamentally, my belief is that one should focus on grooming intelligence, not knowledge. The question then becomes how does one help a person become more intelligent? Programming them with knowledge does not help; it just creates miserable robots. Instead, allowing them to be free, moving, interacting, socializing, making a mess out of exploring reality, this is what grows the brain, IMO. I work for a Sudbury school and this is what we focus on making happen. Demonstrative anecdote: we had a student who was with us from age 5 to age 12. He never had any formal instruction. He wanted to go to a different school to join their baseball team. It is a highly respected private school in the area. They interviewed him and were impressed and let him in. In his first weeks of school, he did not know about parts of speech or that a dot meant multiplication of numbers. He quickly learned all of that (pretty simple, after all) and got 90's on his first tests. Intelligence is hard to acquire and it requires freedom to explore, freedom to move, freedom to socialize. Knowledge is relatively straightforward to acquire when the brain is ready for it.
xjlin0 11y ago
My sister sends her son to a private school, academia type, very intense on read/write/arithmetic, especially in their daily homework (more than 12 pages/day), and that's for age 5!!! Not exaggerate about the home work because I helped it, practicing writing many words, read short and easy stories, some summation like 12+4. Pretty surprising to see an age 5 do that, though painful for him.