4 ms·

I went to five high schools growing up and this is not what I experienced. I personally and through others found the exact opposite to be true. Yes you can se

I went to five high schools growing up and this is not what I experienced. I personally and through others found the exact opposite to be true. Yes you can send students(whether bad or good) to both bad both public and private schools but sending bad students to good public or private schools doesn't make them a good student.

3131s 9y ago
I also doubt that it's meaningfully true. I think the troubled kid would do better in a private school because there are better resources available, and the teachers would not be overburdened with large class sizes filled with similarly troubled students like in a public school. I worked as a reading tutor at an elementary school for a year in the US. It was a terrible, terrible job because of how strictly prescribed the methodology was. We tested every kid in the school, and the test was to time the students for a minute and count how many words of a text they could read (an incredibly dumb metric). We did this twice a year and then tutored the kids that were at a slightly below average reading level, meaning that I was not even seeing the particularly troubled / low-performing kids. I had about 25 students that year and got to know a lot of them. Some of the kids didn't need my help at all, they were extremely smart but had read slowly and carefully on the test and so ended up embarrassed by having to be pulled out of regular class. But the kids that were actually struggling to read at grade level almost all had bad situations at home. There was a boy who had to move in with his aunt mid-year because someone shot up their house while looking for the kid's older brother, a girl who had four other siblings and was frequently hungry because of her father's gambling and drinking, a kid who changed schools because his father was arrested for beating the kid's little sister, a recent immigrant girl who had 15+ siblings and step siblings that her mother somehow ended up taking care of, a very strange boy with a morbidly obese mother and no father, and probably some more I'm forgetting about. My co-worker had a student whose parents were both serving life sentences for murder. This was not even in a particularly rough city or a particularly rough school (the school is maybe 60% Hmong, so many of the kids needed ESL much more than "how many words can you read in a minute?"). The point being, if you don't change home situations like that then there's not much hope for a student's education at either a public or private school. I won't even go into the daily prescribed routine of exactly how I was supposed to tutor the kids, and the constant evaluations to make sure I was, for example, counting down the timer with the correct fingers and correct hand. That seriously is / was an official Reading Corps policy and it was among many other inane policies in a broader system that was also deeply misguided.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  In a country with actual social services, there should be a feedback channel to identify such cases and help them directly (not necessarily funding but sometimes too). Of course this won't work in some countries because both socialism is frowned upon and individualism is glorified. You fall because you're a failure not because you were dealt a bad hand by life.

3131s 9y ago

I also doubt that it's meaningfully true. I think the troubled kid would do better in a private school because there are better resources available, and the teachers would not be overburdened with large class sizes filled with similarly troubled students like in a public school. I worked as a reading tutor at an elementary school for a year in the US. It was a terrible, terrible job because of how strictly prescribed the methodology was. We tested every kid in the school, and the test was to time the students for a minute and count how many words of a text they could read (an incredibly dumb metric). We did this twice a year and then tutored the kids that were at a slightly below average reading level, meaning that I was not even seeing the particularly troubled / low-performing kids. I had about 25 students that year and got to know a lot of them. Some of the kids didn't need my help at all, they were extremely smart but had read slowly and carefully on the test and so ended up embarrassed by having to be pulled out of regular class. But the kids that were actually struggling to read at grade level almost all had bad situations at home. There was a boy who had to move in with his aunt mid-year because someone shot up their house while looking for the kid's older brother, a girl who had four other siblings and was frequently hungry because of her father's gambling and drinking, a kid who changed schools because his father was arrested for beating the kid's little sister, a recent immigrant girl who had 15+ siblings and step siblings that her mother somehow ended up taking care of, a very strange boy with a morbidly obese mother and no father, and probably some more I'm forgetting about. My co-worker had a student whose parents were both serving life sentences for murder. This was not even in a particularly rough city or a particularly rough school (the school is maybe 60% Hmong, so many of the kids needed ESL much more than "how many words can you read in a minute?"). The point being, if you don't change home situations like that then there's not much hope for a student's education at either a public or private school. I won't even go into the daily prescribed routine of exactly how I was supposed to tutor the kids, and the constant evaluations to make sure I was, for example, counting down the timer with the correct fingers and correct hand. That seriously is / was an official Reading Corps policy and it was among many other inane policies in a broader system that was also deeply misguided.

AstralStorm 9y ago
In a country with actual social services, there should be a feedback channel to identify such cases and help them directly (not necessarily funding but sometimes too). Of course this won't work in some countries because both socialism is frowned upon and individualism is glorified. You fall because you're a failure not because you were dealt a bad hand by life.