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> My kids go to a private religious school in South Carolina. > They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It

> My kids go to a private religious school in South Carolina. > They are taught about world religions, evolution, have chapel twice a week and allow prayer. It’s also the best school in the entire state. My kids go there because it's a great school. I also went to a private christian high school and it was all that you say here. However I also remember many very rich, ultra religious parents that ousted three principles over religious horseshit while I attended until my latin teacher became Principal and told them all to pound sand or go somewhere else. I also went to a private catholic elementry school. While it was good at the time, recently it's falling apart. The church has distanced itself from it, attendance YoY is falling, and it'll likely close in the next few years. However unlike a public school, these private schools can close and lean on the public system to catch all of the students they shake out. Unlike the private and charter schools, the buck stops at Public schools. > The reality is that the only people with true choice in school selection have to either be able to afford private school, afford to move to a house zoned for a better school or afford to have parent who can facilitate a home school group. Charter schools kick out kids as well, so all of these problems apply to them too. The only purpose of charter schools is to make their lobbyists (like Bill Gates and Betsy DeVos) rich by siphoning public money like defense contractors. All this talk about Charter Schools is about Options for students/parents, but nobody is talking about who is Obligated to those students, parents, and the tax payer. When a charter or private school closes, it dumps its students into the pubic system [0]. > Consider City High School in Los Angeles, California, which received a $575,000 grant from the federal government. The school had barely started its second year when it suddenly closed, leaving 116 students scrambling for a new school. Similarly, a charter school in Wilmington, Delaware, received a grant of $350,000 but closed just five months into its first school year, forcing 206 students to look for a new school. > The Acclaim Academy charter school chain in Florida received grants of $375,000, $175,000, $175,000, and $19,198 for its four schools. One never opened, another was taken over by the district due to financial concerns and mismanagement, and the two other closed suddenly with no notice, in the middle of the year, leaving students, some of them seniors preparing college applications, searching to find new schools. Then there is the low attendence and fraud. > The report locates much of the blame for this waste of taxpayer money on the Department of Education’s practice of awarding grants to states with few rules and virtually no accountability. Often, grants were “doled out to individuals who had no credentials or experience to open up a new school,” according to the researchers. > The report also identified a “pattern” of charter school operators—even before their school opened—funneling money from grants to their own personal accounts, to purchases of expensive equipment, and to “for-profit consulting and education management organizations” that do not publicly divulge how they spend money. The report concluded that, due to these practices, the charter school grant program “has become a magnet for grifters, consultants, and charter entrepreneurs who see an easy way to cash-in.” The kicker: > When members of Congress repeatedly referred to those findings when questioning Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, she dismissed the findings as “political.” History is littered with corpses and bailouts. At the end of the day, it's all about privatization of public institutions for private profit. It's also an open secret that private schools rose as a response to desegregation [1] [2]. Privatization is cancer. [0]: https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-report-waste-abuse-charter-bryants-191212/ https://progressive.org/public-schools-advocate/new-report-w... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segregation_academy [2]: https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-private-schools-and-race-in-the-american-south/ https://southerneducation.org/publications/history-of-privat...

tristor 3y ago
Nice set of anecdotes. You might even be right. It is, however, obvious that you are using motivated reasoning, especially with that dig at the end essentially calling private schools and voucher proponents racist. What's galling enough I bothered to respond is that you're incorrect on that point. Private schooling predates public schooling in America by a lot. Free public education wasn't a widespread thing in the US until the 1830s, and wasn't mandatory and federally supported until the 1910s. Private schools /may/ have opened specifically to counter desegregation, but private schools long predate public schooling. Private school was the norm for most of the history of the US and the commonwealth.
- JamesLeonis 3y ago
  From [2] above: > Private schools may have a long, honorable tradition in America that goes back to colonial times, but that tradition ended—at least in the American South—in the last half of the 20th century when they were used as safe havens for Southern Whites to escape the effects of the impending and ongoing desegregation mandates. This exodus from public schools began in the 1940s, when private school enrollment in the 15 states of the South[1] rose by more than 125,000 students—roughly 43 percent—in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing segregation in graduate and professional schools in the South.[2] While the decisions only concerned institutions of higher education, it signaled to watchful Southern leaders that desegregation might soon spread to their public elementary and secondary schools, compelling them to react in ways to defend their way of life. > By 1958, the South’s private school enrollment had exploded, increasing by more than 250,000 students over an eight-year period, and boasting almost one million students in 1965. This growth was catalyzed by Southern state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools. > During this time, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) vacillated in its allowance of tax deductions for private schools. In the early 1960s, facing growing backlash from civil rights organizations, the IRS temporarily suspended applications of avowed “segregation academies” for federal tax exemptions, a tax status permitting taxpayers in Southern states to reduce their federal taxable income when contributing to racially exclusionary private schools. > As the IRS trudged along with implementation of non-discrimination policies and went back-and-forth in a series of proposed administrative procedures and Congressional hearings, private school enrollment in the South continued to grow. What was once the South’s 11 percent share of the nation’s private school enrollment had reached 24 percent in 1980.

tristor 3y ago

Nice set of anecdotes. You might even be right. It is, however, obvious that you are using motivated reasoning, especially with that dig at the end essentially calling private schools and voucher proponents racist. What's galling enough I bothered to respond is that you're incorrect on that point. Private schooling predates public schooling in America by a lot. Free public education wasn't a widespread thing in the US until the 1830s, and wasn't mandatory and federally supported until the 1910s. Private schools /may/ have opened specifically to counter desegregation, but private schools long predate public schooling. Private school was the norm for most of the history of the US and the commonwealth.

JamesLeonis 3y ago
From [2] above: > Private schools may have a long, honorable tradition in America that goes back to colonial times, but that tradition ended—at least in the American South—in the last half of the 20th century when they were used as safe havens for Southern Whites to escape the effects of the impending and ongoing desegregation mandates. This exodus from public schools began in the 1940s, when private school enrollment in the 15 states of the South[1] rose by more than 125,000 students—roughly 43 percent—in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing segregation in graduate and professional schools in the South.[2] While the decisions only concerned institutions of higher education, it signaled to watchful Southern leaders that desegregation might soon spread to their public elementary and secondary schools, compelling them to react in ways to defend their way of life. > By 1958, the South’s private school enrollment had exploded, increasing by more than 250,000 students over an eight-year period, and boasting almost one million students in 1965. This growth was catalyzed by Southern state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit, or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools. > During this time, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) vacillated in its allowance of tax deductions for private schools. In the early 1960s, facing growing backlash from civil rights organizations, the IRS temporarily suspended applications of avowed “segregation academies” for federal tax exemptions, a tax status permitting taxpayers in Southern states to reduce their federal taxable income when contributing to racially exclusionary private schools. > As the IRS trudged along with implementation of non-discrimination policies and went back-and-forth in a series of proposed administrative procedures and Congressional hearings, private school enrollment in the South continued to grow. What was once the South’s 11 percent share of the nation’s private school enrollment had reached 24 percent in 1980.