Public schools are the worst — except for all the others

[Scuba]

http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/public-schools-are-the-worst--except-for-all-the-others-b99209187z1-246265401.html

These democratically controlled decentralized public schools are now criticized as failing, declining and fundamentally broken. It is a widely accepted truism that the private sector is superior to the public sector and that private schools are superior to the failed public schools. Privatization is the answer to "government schools." It may be widely accepted, but it is not true. Democratically controlled American public schools are not the worst kind of schools. In fact, recent research (Lubienski and Lubienski, 2013) suggests that, in general, public schools outperform private schools.

The impact of poverty on educational attainment is widely accepted and is true. We have known for years that wealth and academic achievement are highly correlated and that middle-class children have an eight times greater chance of graduating from college than poor children. And we are rightly concerned that our American public schools are not eliminating achievement gaps or weakening the link between poverty and achievement.

We also have known for years that private schools exhibit, on average, higher levels of academic achievement than public schools. But we also know that private schools and charter schools tend to serve, on average, more affluent families and families that are more educationally engaged. In terms of poverty and demographics, public schools are oranges and private schools are apples. An accurate comparison of public and private schools requires comparing the performance of similar children in both types of schools.

Are the private schools' higher achievement the result of greater wealth and/or parental advantage or the result of greater private school effectiveness? When educational research controls for poverty, when student demographic data and school poverty levels are considered, when apples are compared to apples, public schools do a better job. Democratically controlled public schools are better than private schools precisely because they are less autonomous and more likely to require certified teachers and implement new reform teaching strategies. Public schools are less likely to use market-based competitive strategies to select and retain students to improve achievement.

[gopiscrap]

1. exactly, my wife taught for 16 years in a private school

Last edited Thu Feb 20, 2014, 11:45 AM - Edit history (1)

and now 14 in a public school and she found that the families in the public who didn't have to worry about survival and next meal did just as well if not better than the private and charter kids.