There are four private schools in the DFW area that specialize in learning disabled students. One charges less than we pay for public schools that do a lousy job.gdanaher wrote:You betcha. Those schools who are privately operated also get to cherry pick who their students are going to be. Have a learning handicap? Nope, not coming here. Require special teacher to deal with blindness or deafness? Nope, not coming here. Mother was a crack head and your eyes are crossed? Nope, not coming here.baldeagle wrote: There are a number of private schools doing a much better job of teaching students for less money than what we pay for the failure we call public education.
http://www.hillschool.org/parents/tuition-fees.asp" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://newfoundschool.com/financial.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.shelton.org/page.cfm?p=565" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.vanguardprepschool.com/Admissions.htm" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
I guess you could call that cherry picking.
This assumes that the schools themselves provide the same level of education that they did 50 years ago. If that were true, how do you explain the difference in outcomes? Did we not have any LD or difficult children 50 years ago? Or has the curriculum been dumbed down to the point that students graduate without even having the basic life skills to survive in a modern society?gdanaher wrote:Don't compare what a prep school in Highland Park or The Woodlands does with a child's education to what happens in Ysleta or Wilmer. The expectation is that the local district using state funds will raise every pupil to a minimum standard of competence, and in many cases, it isn't going to be cheap, and it isn't just the salaries that run into bucks. Special ed equipment can be insanely expensive and sometimes you have to send the stuff home with the kid and hope they bring it back. Sometimes they don't.
Set one of those private schools across the street from a low performing school, give them the same funding, require them to enroll the same student base in the neighborhood and you will have another low performing school. Some teachers aren't worth shooting and usually get out early. Those that care and love their kids, do all they can but you can't always make up for years of academic and emotional neglect and mental incapacity brought on by the mothers' gestational indiscretions.
How do you explain that children graduating from public schools after 12 years of education can't read, write or spell? Can't do simple arithmetic that we were taught in first grade? Is it all the kids' and parents' fault?
Somehow I think not. Blaming the kids and/or the parents is a cop-out that excuses the public school system for its abysmal failure. Even in "top-performing" suburban schools, kids are not anywhere near as well educated as they were just 50 years ago.
According to a recent comprehensive report "U.S. students ranked fourteenth in reading, twenty-fifth in math, and seventeenth in science compared to students in other developed countries". Is that the parents' fault? The childrens"? Or do the schools bear some of the blame for this abysmal performance?
We should be angry and marching on city hall over such horrible performance. It should be completely unacceptable. Instead we keep pumping more tax dollars into a thoroughly broken system. The US currently outspends every other nation in the world in education dollars per student. Yet we continue to lag further and further behind other nations in terms of student performance.The College Board reported that even among the narrower cohort of college-bound seniors, only 43 percent met college-ready standards. This means that, upon graduating high school, more than 50% of college-bound students need to take remedial classes in one or more subjects, though a far lower percentage actually do.
Is that the parents' fault? The students'? Seriously?