On 3/16/08, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > markw wrote: > > I know I could do better if I spent the tax dollars the government > > extorts from me for public schools on private schools. :) > > You could? Wow! I'm impressed. You should write a study on this > showing your methodology. I'm sure that many parents and politicians > would be interested in your procedures. > > Oh, whoops, gee, you don't have any concrete data to back that up. Oh, > and by the way, when you compare private schools in aggregate against > public schools in aggregate, the private schools actually come out worse > in that comparison. > > Surprising, actually, given the number of really expensive private > schools that should be skewing those numbers. > > > Anyone who thinks the government can spend their money more wisely than > > they can is a fool. > > Really? So you can actually find and judge the qualifications of the > individual teachers your children would be learning from? > > I'm impressed. You should write a book. > > I can't readily judge the quality of a teacher or school without > spending a whopping amount of time doing it. > > Sure, I can weed out the morons. But, even if I exclude areas in which > I am far from competent to judge (music, art, foreign languages), I > would be hard pressed to pick the winners in anything approaching an > amount of effort I am able to spend. > > Maybe you were going to rely on marketing and word of mouth? Gee, how > well does that work out for picking out a doctor or a lawyer. Pretty > inconsistently, last I checked. > > Or, perhaps, you were going to rely on standardized test scores. NCLB > has done a nice job of debunking whether or not *that* procedure is > going to work. > > And, this doesn't even take into account for what happens when your kid > doesn't make the cut for the good schools because he falls below the > profitable point on the demand curve. Everybody assumes that their > child can get into a decent private school because it works that way now > because the public schools take on the burden of everyone else. > > We've already seen this scenario. Everybody made this mistake with > healthcare. They thought HMO's were really freindly, cool, nifty, etc. > because they skimmed off the profitable and left the unprofitable in the > old indemnity plans. Well, once the indemnity plans all collapsed, > suddenly HMO's weren't so friendly, cool, nifty, etc. anymore. Oops. > > -a >
While your point is well taken, many parents aren't trying to win on every single point versus a bureacracy that scales, rather they are interested in addressing some single maybe urgent point that the inertia of the bureacracy is impotent to address. Examples are avoiding violence in schools, reducing class size [1], gaining access to better facilities and technology for their kids when they are in school (not down the road when the schools system figures out which way is up). I think many parents can, in many cases and on a tactical basis, figure out how to take advantage of circumstances in the small window where it is relevant and in ways is is relevant to their own kids and their particular circumstances. But of course if you measure against the statistical averages over a long period of time the system may look better. The problem is that students don't benefit over the long run, they benefit during their very small window of participation which is what concerns parents most. rbw [1] I know that statistics show that class size per se isn't the be all and end all of better schools but for the parent that has a kid in need of a lower teacher to student ratio in their particular class at this particular time the statistical reality over the whole for thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of students is worth less than nothing. Take for example the parent in the DPS that has a kid in that class with 60 kids... In that case the parent sure as shootin' can do a better job than the system even though the "average" class size over the whole system may not be that bad... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Public_Schools -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
