7 ms·

Incredibly low-priced private schools

50 points by robg 17y ago

arch_hunter 17y ago
Even most private schools in America charge less per pupil than the government pays to educate a student in a public school. Governments are rarely efficient because they do not have to be.
- tome 17y ago
  Sure, but there's also the issue that they have to educate the worst behaved pupils, who presumably cost an order of magnitude more to deal with because of all the disturbance they cause in class.
  - mootothemax 17y ago
    Governments also have a care of duty to disabled pupils as well, and I bet the private school equivalents are vastly more expensive.
- ovi256 17y ago
  >Governments are rarely efficient because they do not have to be. I'm starting to develop a theory that governments are efficient, even very much so, except to another metric. The US Gov's Education Department metric seems to be "pleasing the teacher's unions", not financial efficiency. And at that, they are very good.
  - stcredzero 17y ago
    With the result that votes for certain political parties are produced?
  - Avshalom 17y ago
    Because No Child Left Behind is just every teacher's favorite legislature, and nothing makes teachers happier than 50 hour work weeks for low wages. The two biggest problems any teacher I know can find with the current public school system are: 1. Over reliance on standardized test as the only metric of education. Making it difficult to teach kids engaging material in various subjects (Nope, can't cover history's 10 craziest revolutions, have to cover the civil war for the tenth time) because there is so much that they have to learn specifically. 2. A lack of any real power. True story: My mom once gave a child an F in english, he had a course average of 20%, the child's mom came in complained that her child COULD NOT go to summer school because they had a trip to europe already planned and booked, threatened a law suit and the principle made my mom raise change it to a D. Another: in Florida at least it had become so difficult to hold a child back a grade in middle school that freshman were coming into high school who hadn't passed 5th grade reading tests. 14% of the freshman one year were functionally illiterate. Neither of those had anything to do with "government inefficiency." It's the mandate to educate everyone. A private school can have very specific terms and as long as they got a good lawyer to draw up the contract the parents don't have a leg to stand on if the private school kicks their kid out, flunks them, holds them back, gives the detention etc. EDIT: note that when I a lack of power I mean over academic matters. Recently the supreme court said strip searching a 14 year old girl in front of the male principle because she had Tylenol in her purse was okay. That's some terrifying power.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      Teachers do not work 50 hour weeks. On average, teachers work 38 hour weeks. That's 24 minutes less per weekday and 42 minutes less per saturday than the average professional. They do this 9-10 months/year, the other 2-3 months a year they work dramatically less. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf Additionally, while their wages are low, their fringe benefits are excellent. They often get defined benefit pensions, earlier retirement than other professionals, tenure and 2-3 months vacation. http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_benefits.pdf http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be... Incidentally, while it may be the case that private schools don't educate everyone, so what? If they can educate students in category X better than public schools, but schools can educate category Y better than private, isn't it best for everyone if private schools take the X students and public takes the Y students?
      - patio11 17y ago
        I agree with everything in the above post except the one unevidenced claim: that teachers' wages are low. Teachers' wages are not low in the United States on average. Quoth the BLS: Median annual wages of kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers ranged from $47,100 to $51,180 in May 2008; the lowest 10 percent earned $30,970 to $34,280; the top 10 percent earned $75,190 to $80,970. You can scroll down the list of occupations and see some folks who get paid less than teachers. It is an eye-opener in some cases (firefighters make less than middle school teachers? Really? Whoa.)
        amalcon 17y ago
        For the most part, wage is tied directly to the amount of education required for a position. Teachers have similar education requirements to high-tech fields (bachelors is not required, but not having it is considered a special case; bachelor's is the low end; master's is typical). Which high-tech fields are on that list?
        Avshalom 17y ago
- arethuza 17y ago
  According to http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_pri_sch_stu-spending-per-primary-school-student http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_pri_sch_stu-sp... the US spends about $6K per child for primary education. I don't know about the US but private schools here in the UK are rather more than that (we pay a total of about $15K a year).
  - travisp 17y ago
    Primary education (your source) is a little cheaper, for one thing. Regional variations matter a lot. And there are a lot of other factors. According to the U.S. Census, U.S. public schools spent $9,138 per student in 2006. This varies from $14,884 in New York to $5,437 in Utah: http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/011747.html http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/ed... According to the council for private education, the average private school tuition in the U.S. for 2007-2008 was $8,549 at all levels, and $6,733 at elementary level. Non-religious schools were significantly more expensive than religiously-affiliated schools: http://www.capenet.org/facts.html http://www.capenet.org/facts.html It would be hard to directly compare spending because one school might offer more than another. For example, a private school in Orange County, California, may provide laptops to all students, expensive science labs, and fancy football fields (and would have to pay a lot for land), while a public school in rural Nevada may not have any of that stuff. That wouldn't prove that private education was more expensive or less efficient, just that the people in one region wanted different things and were willing to pay more for those things.
  - jimbokun 17y ago
    "the US spends about $6K per child for primary education." The cost for our children at a Catholic elementary school here in the U.S. is about half that.
    - smallblacksun 17y ago
      Religious schools are frequently subsidized by the sponsoring religious group, and Catholic schools tend to employ a lot of nuns, who cost the school very little.
- sethg 17y ago
  The public schools are obliged to take just about every kid who shows up, including children with severe emotional, cognitive, or physical disabilities. In the US, they are also obliged to provide disabled children with education “in the least restrictive environment”, meaning that if a disabled child can be educated with special accommodations alongside non-disabled kids, that’s what the school has to provide, even if putting the disabled child in a specialized classroom all day would be cheaper. Private schools, by contrast, have no obligation to accommodate disabled students. For that matter, they’re more or less free to say “there’s nothing wrong with your child, but s/he wouldn’t fit in to our school”.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Private schools, by contrast, have no obligation to accommodate disabled students That depends on your jurisdiction. For example, you've indicated you live in Massachusetts. Two minutes of Googling found that 151C (e) makes it unlawful for private schools to refuse admission to the blind, deaf, and students requiring use of dog guides. That is one law. I would not wager it is the extent of regulations on the matter.
    - sethg 17y ago
      A private school can’t refuse admission to a deaf student, but if (for example) the student requires a sign-language interpreter to participate in class, the private school is under no obligation to pay for one. A public school in a similar situation would have to hire an interpreter.
mml 17y ago
I've lamented the fact that we are such small thinkers today. Our neighborhood public school is among the worst in the state. Local private schools cost about 1500/mo for gradeschool. I was looked at as a wild man for suggesting we should start our own school. 20 kids' worth of parents can afford to employ a teacher at a very attractive rate for both parties I suspect.
- patio11 17y ago
  Don't beat yourself up too badly: the unions have already thought of this, and it is likely illegal in your jurisdiction. After you get past the homeschool exemption, which was a brutal battle to get approved in many jurisdictions, you'll enter a heavily regulated industry against an entrenched competitor who has a legal moat and a team of lawyers who will file papers contesting each and every one of the seventy three different approvals you'll need to open for business. This is why actual private schools in the US require strong institutional backing (i.e. a church willing to subsidize them to the tune of millions) or effort commensurate with opening a new factory rather than a new salon.
  - sethg 17y ago
    I call bullshit. I send my son to a private religious school (http://www.jcdsboston.org/ http://www.jcdsboston.org/) which is not sponsored by any synagogue of millionaires. The Supreme Court declared in 1925 (Pierce v. Society of Sisters) that parents have the right to send their children to a private or religious school, and upheld in 1972 (Wisconsin v. Yoder) that parents could even get religious exemptions to state compulsory-attendance laws.
    - patio11 17y ago
      Your school's annual operating budget is $4.5 million dollars. (Of which ~$1.2 million is subsidized by your synagogue and other fundraising.) That lets them afford a staff to do things like, e.g., keep immunization records and shuffle them around when students transfer. If they didn't, they would be shut down. One issue down, seventy two to go. I am not seeing how this makes my contentions false.
shaddi 17y ago
This is very cool, but I can't help remembering that the Wahhabi schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan (incorrectly called "madrassas", which is just a generic Arabic word for "school") would also fall into this category of small, private, low-cost schools. I wonder what can be done to ensure that schools like this that are run by potentially less scrupulous proprietors provide a quality education. I know that's not well defined, but I do not think we don't want to go down the Wahhabi road of teaching only a corrupted religious/political doctrine to advance political ends at the expense of promoting reading, math, and science -- or any number of other educational scams that one could devise. It seems that one of the advantages that a public program could have in volatile areas is some manner of centralized curriculum oversight. How are private schools in the US regulated to prevent similar situations (if they are at all)?
- _delirium 17y ago
  > How are private schools in the US regulated to prevent similar situations (if they are at all)? In practice, market forces do a decent (though not perfect) job: most private schools want to produce students who have a chance of getting into a good college, and one of the more effective ways to convince colleges you aren't insane is to: 1) have your students do well on standardized tests like the SAT; and/or 2) be accredited by an organization like the National Association of Independent Schools.
  - amalcon 17y ago
    The caveat is that this works now because most parents who pay to send their children to a private school do so to improve academic outcomes, and because getting into a good college is considered a very positive academic outcome.
    - _delirium 17y ago
      Yeah, that's true, and there's also a possible negative feedback loop if strongly religious colleges that weren't as interested in secular education made a revival. Super-Christian private high schools feeding into super-Christian colleges won't have the same sort of check on whether the student got any sort of decent secular education, because right now, the need to look good to a college with a mostly secular admissions process (even schools like BYU look at secular academics in the admissions) is one of the main motivators for religious high schools to do a decent job on their secular education.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
sethg 17y ago
If this were an article about poor people in India hiring their own militia because they couldn’t get adequate protection from the local government-sponsored police force, would anyone be considering this a model for the US to emulate?
- hga 17y ago
  No, because in the US the people are the militia, and outside of a few states and D.C. are allowed to provide their own protection. And of course in those nasty state the powerful hire their own militia (private security) anyway.
- Alex63 17y ago
  Not sure why people are down-voting this. This seems like a reasonable effort at argument by analogy. In point of fact, it is not uncommon in many parts of the world to pay for protection. Unfortunately, this creates an incentive for those providing the protection to also encourage the perception that protection is needed (possibly by committing crimes themselves). This is where the analogy seems to break down, as it is hard to see how private educators can foster the perception that public schools are failing (unless they are the people promoting standardized testing!).

50 points by robg 17y ago

Even most private schools in America charge less per pupil than the government pays to educate a student in a public school. Governments are rarely efficient because they do not have to be.

tome 17y ago
Sure, but there's also the issue that they have to educate the worst behaved pupils, who presumably cost an order of magnitude more to deal with because of all the disturbance they cause in class.
- mootothemax 17y ago
  Governments also have a care of duty to disabled pupils as well, and I bet the private school equivalents are vastly more expensive.
ovi256 17y ago
>Governments are rarely efficient because they do not have to be. I'm starting to develop a theory that governments are efficient, even very much so, except to another metric. The US Gov's Education Department metric seems to be "pleasing the teacher's unions", not financial efficiency. And at that, they are very good.
- stcredzero 17y ago
  With the result that votes for certain political parties are produced?
- Avshalom 17y ago
  Because No Child Left Behind is just every teacher's favorite legislature, and nothing makes teachers happier than 50 hour work weeks for low wages. The two biggest problems any teacher I know can find with the current public school system are: 1. Over reliance on standardized test as the only metric of education. Making it difficult to teach kids engaging material in various subjects (Nope, can't cover history's 10 craziest revolutions, have to cover the civil war for the tenth time) because there is so much that they have to learn specifically. 2. A lack of any real power. True story: My mom once gave a child an F in english, he had a course average of 20%, the child's mom came in complained that her child COULD NOT go to summer school because they had a trip to europe already planned and booked, threatened a law suit and the principle made my mom raise change it to a D. Another: in Florida at least it had become so difficult to hold a child back a grade in middle school that freshman were coming into high school who hadn't passed 5th grade reading tests. 14% of the freshman one year were functionally illiterate. Neither of those had anything to do with "government inefficiency." It's the mandate to educate everyone. A private school can have very specific terms and as long as they got a good lawyer to draw up the contract the parents don't have a leg to stand on if the private school kicks their kid out, flunks them, holds them back, gives the detention etc. EDIT: note that when I a lack of power I mean over academic matters. Recently the supreme court said strip searching a 14 year old girl in front of the male principle because she had Tylenol in her purse was okay. That's some terrifying power.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    Teachers do not work 50 hour weeks. On average, teachers work 38 hour weeks. That's 24 minutes less per weekday and 42 minutes less per saturday than the average professional. They do this 9-10 months/year, the other 2-3 months a year they work dramatically less. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf Additionally, while their wages are low, their fringe benefits are excellent. They often get defined benefit pensions, earlier retirement than other professionals, tenure and 2-3 months vacation. http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_benefits.pdf http://web.missouri.edu/~podgurskym/articles/files/fringe_be... Incidentally, while it may be the case that private schools don't educate everyone, so what? If they can educate students in category X better than public schools, but schools can educate category Y better than private, isn't it best for everyone if private schools take the X students and public takes the Y students?
    - patio11 17y ago
      I agree with everything in the above post except the one unevidenced claim: that teachers' wages are low. Teachers' wages are not low in the United States on average. Quoth the BLS: Median annual wages of kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers ranged from $47,100 to $51,180 in May 2008; the lowest 10 percent earned $30,970 to $34,280; the top 10 percent earned $75,190 to $80,970. You can scroll down the list of occupations and see some folks who get paid less than teachers. It is an eye-opener in some cases (firefighters make less than middle school teachers? Really? Whoa.)
      - amalcon 17y ago
        For the most part, wage is tied directly to the amount of education required for a position. Teachers have similar education requirements to high-tech fields (bachelors is not required, but not having it is considered a special case; bachelor's is the low end; master's is typical). Which high-tech fields are on that list?
        Avshalom 17y ago
arethuza 17y ago
According to http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_pri_sch_stu-spending-per-primary-school-student http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_spe_per_pri_sch_stu-sp... the US spends about $6K per child for primary education. I don't know about the US but private schools here in the UK are rather more than that (we pay a total of about $15K a year).
- travisp 17y ago
  Primary education (your source) is a little cheaper, for one thing. Regional variations matter a lot. And there are a lot of other factors. According to the U.S. Census, U.S. public schools spent $9,138 per student in 2006. This varies from $14,884 in New York to $5,437 in Utah: http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/011747.html http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/ed... According to the council for private education, the average private school tuition in the U.S. for 2007-2008 was $8,549 at all levels, and $6,733 at elementary level. Non-religious schools were significantly more expensive than religiously-affiliated schools: http://www.capenet.org/facts.html http://www.capenet.org/facts.html It would be hard to directly compare spending because one school might offer more than another. For example, a private school in Orange County, California, may provide laptops to all students, expensive science labs, and fancy football fields (and would have to pay a lot for land), while a public school in rural Nevada may not have any of that stuff. That wouldn't prove that private education was more expensive or less efficient, just that the people in one region wanted different things and were willing to pay more for those things.
- jimbokun 17y ago
  "the US spends about $6K per child for primary education." The cost for our children at a Catholic elementary school here in the U.S. is about half that.
  - smallblacksun 17y ago
    Religious schools are frequently subsidized by the sponsoring religious group, and Catholic schools tend to employ a lot of nuns, who cost the school very little.
sethg 17y ago
The public schools are obliged to take just about every kid who shows up, including children with severe emotional, cognitive, or physical disabilities. In the US, they are also obliged to provide disabled children with education “in the least restrictive environment”, meaning that if a disabled child can be educated with special accommodations alongside non-disabled kids, that’s what the school has to provide, even if putting the disabled child in a specialized classroom all day would be cheaper. Private schools, by contrast, have no obligation to accommodate disabled students. For that matter, they’re more or less free to say “there’s nothing wrong with your child, but s/he wouldn’t fit in to our school”.
- patio11 17y ago
  Private schools, by contrast, have no obligation to accommodate disabled students That depends on your jurisdiction. For example, you've indicated you live in Massachusetts. Two minutes of Googling found that 151C (e) makes it unlawful for private schools to refuse admission to the blind, deaf, and students requiring use of dog guides. That is one law. I would not wager it is the extent of regulations on the matter.
  - sethg 17y ago
    A private school can’t refuse admission to a deaf student, but if (for example) the student requires a sign-language interpreter to participate in class, the private school is under no obligation to pay for one. A public school in a similar situation would have to hire an interpreter.

mml 17y ago

I've lamented the fact that we are such small thinkers today. Our neighborhood public school is among the worst in the state. Local private schools cost about 1500/mo for gradeschool. I was looked at as a wild man for suggesting we should start our own school. 20 kids' worth of parents can afford to employ a teacher at a very attractive rate for both parties I suspect.

patio11 17y ago
Don't beat yourself up too badly: the unions have already thought of this, and it is likely illegal in your jurisdiction. After you get past the homeschool exemption, which was a brutal battle to get approved in many jurisdictions, you'll enter a heavily regulated industry against an entrenched competitor who has a legal moat and a team of lawyers who will file papers contesting each and every one of the seventy three different approvals you'll need to open for business. This is why actual private schools in the US require strong institutional backing (i.e. a church willing to subsidize them to the tune of millions) or effort commensurate with opening a new factory rather than a new salon.
- sethg 17y ago
  I call bullshit. I send my son to a private religious school (http://www.jcdsboston.org/ http://www.jcdsboston.org/) which is not sponsored by any synagogue of millionaires. The Supreme Court declared in 1925 (Pierce v. Society of Sisters) that parents have the right to send their children to a private or religious school, and upheld in 1972 (Wisconsin v. Yoder) that parents could even get religious exemptions to state compulsory-attendance laws.
  - patio11 17y ago
    Your school's annual operating budget is $4.5 million dollars. (Of which ~$1.2 million is subsidized by your synagogue and other fundraising.) That lets them afford a staff to do things like, e.g., keep immunization records and shuffle them around when students transfer. If they didn't, they would be shut down. One issue down, seventy two to go. I am not seeing how this makes my contentions false.

shaddi 17y ago

This is very cool, but I can't help remembering that the Wahhabi schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan (incorrectly called "madrassas", which is just a generic Arabic word for "school") would also fall into this category of small, private, low-cost schools. I wonder what can be done to ensure that schools like this that are run by potentially less scrupulous proprietors provide a quality education. I know that's not well defined, but I do not think we don't want to go down the Wahhabi road of teaching only a corrupted religious/political doctrine to advance political ends at the expense of promoting reading, math, and science -- or any number of other educational scams that one could devise. It seems that one of the advantages that a public program could have in volatile areas is some manner of centralized curriculum oversight. How are private schools in the US regulated to prevent similar situations (if they are at all)?

_delirium 17y ago
> How are private schools in the US regulated to prevent similar situations (if they are at all)? In practice, market forces do a decent (though not perfect) job: most private schools want to produce students who have a chance of getting into a good college, and one of the more effective ways to convince colleges you aren't insane is to: 1) have your students do well on standardized tests like the SAT; and/or 2) be accredited by an organization like the National Association of Independent Schools.
- amalcon 17y ago
  The caveat is that this works now because most parents who pay to send their children to a private school do so to improve academic outcomes, and because getting into a good college is considered a very positive academic outcome.
  - _delirium 17y ago
    Yeah, that's true, and there's also a possible negative feedback loop if strongly religious colleges that weren't as interested in secular education made a revival. Super-Christian private high schools feeding into super-Christian colleges won't have the same sort of check on whether the student got any sort of decent secular education, because right now, the need to look good to a college with a mostly secular admissions process (even schools like BYU look at secular academics in the admissions) is one of the main motivators for religious high schools to do a decent job on their secular education.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

sethg 17y ago

If this were an article about poor people in India hiring their own militia because they couldn’t get adequate protection from the local government-sponsored police force, would anyone be considering this a model for the US to emulate?

hga 17y ago
No, because in the US the people are the militia, and outside of a few states and D.C. are allowed to provide their own protection. And of course in those nasty state the powerful hire their own militia (private security) anyway.
Alex63 17y ago
Not sure why people are down-voting this. This seems like a reasonable effort at argument by analogy. In point of fact, it is not uncommon in many parts of the world to pay for protection. Unfortunately, this creates an incentive for those providing the protection to also encourage the perception that protection is needed (possibly by committing crimes themselves). This is where the analogy seems to break down, as it is hard to see how private educators can foster the perception that public schools are failing (unless they are the people promoting standardized testing!).