News-Record.com

I'm all for vouchers, but I think it will never happen. The public education lobbies like NEA and NSBA are much too powerful--public education is a cash cow.

Speaking of cash cow, look at our own school district. GCS will cut classroom based positions to conform within the "budget cuts" by the county commissioners, but they will add on non-classroom based positions like a statistician and a diversity officer, both of which are paid 6 figures. And don't get me started on these fly by night programs which phase in and out of the school system at the speed of light. I don't see the private schools investing in those positions/programs and their students do just as well if not better than those in public school. I think a little competition would spur some better management and cut out the fat. Just my thoughts anyway.

Of course I am all for vouchers. This could be the only way that socioeconomically disadvantaged students could attend a better school. When the School Board voted to remove the Title I status from all high schools, they effectively locked those students in to some very low performing schools. Had these schools maintained their Title I status, the students would have had the opportunity to opt out to a better performing school.

If anyone is in doubt, look at European schools. Competition is definitely a GOOD thing in education.

The public school sector has so much money, it is not easy for the private school sector to compete in some areas. One thing that can be said it that behavior is much better in private schools than public schools. It is a strange thing but a student at a public school has better scholarship opportunities than one from a private school. If you are a inter-city kid and do well in public school, you get a lot of credit. If you are a inter-city kid and do well in private (Middle of Class) the opportunities don't open up. Many parents that send their children to private school hurt their children's opportunities. Many in the bottom half of the class in private schools do not thrive and become tired of being there.

Being a Numbers-Kind-of-Guy, I enjoyed reading the NAEP study and admit that as I read it, it became clear that the statistical work wasn't without flaw. I then read the "critic" link you provided and had to agree with all that was stated there.

The bottom line is that there was enough deviation from the scientific method that the published results cannot be used as a basis for anyone to state that public schools perform as well as private schools. This statement was NOT proven in the study (based upon a lack of 100% compliance with the Scientific Method).

To Joe - with all due respect, please provide the data from which you draw your conclusions. I tend to think that the data would not substantiate your claims. I realize that you have a child that attends/attended Harvard, but that one situation can not prove a point.

MORGAN WHY DID YOU POST THIS STRAND 3 TIMES?

I will be the first to say that my observations are just that observations. More and more students that attend highly competitive universities are coming from public schools. If admission is on merit, it tells you something.
If you live on Manhattan, some families feel that they have to send their children to private school due to the poor quality of public schools. These people tend to prop up the private school scores.

The pay scales in the public schools coupled with the generous benefits makes staffing private schools a real challenge. If your children are going to private school an thriving that is great. One environment does not fit all.

Best regards,

There's an interesting story in today's High Point Enterprise notifying the public of yet another initiative that will only be open to students in Greensboro and NOT in High Point. The State DOT is launching a program to encourage kids to walk and bike to school.

The problem is that the kids in High Point can easily walk to schools, but those aren't the ones that they're allowed to attend. They, instead, must be bused to a school many, many more miles away.

I experienced some technical difficulty in posting this and am trying to delete the extra entries.

Joe,

Here's some info I found re: Yale - it appears to conflict with your observation.

"Once the Ivy League schools and Stanford opened their doors equally to students from public and private schools in the early 1960s, the percentage of students who entered those universities from public schools jumped dramatically from a minority to a significant majority, which has continued to this day. Yale, for example, was about 65% prep school men in 1955. By 1975 it was about 70% public school men and women; HOWEVER, the private sector comprises only 10% of all students at the K-12 level!

Even the students of our deficient existing private schools are still overrepresented by a factor of three to one.

Furthermore, the change in enrollment at Yale and elsewhere is clearly due in large part to the dramatic growth in the number of college bound public school students as compared to the already high number of college-bound private school students during the period in question."

The release (reluctantly) of this report does much to confirm what statisticians/economists Stephen Dubner and Stephen Levitt found in their book Freakonomics: Children with better-off parents do better in whatever school they attend. The less-well-off do about a poorly in either public or private.

The most likely way to improve test scores for the economically diadvantaged (on average, of course, not necessarily on a case by case basis) is to help their parents make more money.

Of course, making/having wealth may be as much an indicator that a parent already does impart serious import to education, may be college-educated themselves, etc., all setting a good model for the children.

The other major indicator was the age at which the child's mother had their first baby: Past age 25 was better than less than that (although evolutionarily, we are more fit at the younger aghes to bear children). The more time a mother has herself put into her own eduaction and career, it appears, the better are the hopes for her children to succeed academically.

Vouchers may be a good way for the middle classes to stop bidding up the housing in the "better school districts", and go back to living on one income while saving the second, if they have two incomes in the family. It would be a good thing for eternal renters, who don't pay property taxes and thus would get a real discount on a private eduaction (as they already do in the public schools). But what percentage of the tuition does a voucher of, say, 7,000 dollars buy at Greensboro Day School?

To quote Freddy:
"The most likely way to improve test scores for the economically diadvantaged (on average, of course, not necessarily on a case by case basis) is to help their parents make more money".

Please tell this to the school board and round it off by saying.
Bussing wont work (as the results of the choice plan clearly show)
Please also mention it to the Black politicians that insisted on bussing and the choice plan etc. Those same politicians are the ones that have NEVER set foot in Andrews and are too busy taking their own extra fair share of the cake and calling others racist to bother trying to improve the welfare of the poor!

One demographic factor that is not being discussed here is how a student performs, whether in public or private school, if he lives in a household with a single parent. This is an important factor as this country is approaching a 50% level for children born into households where the household head is a single female. Anyone have any ideas how those students perform in school? Statistics consistently indicate that problems in school are greatly impacted by 1) a parent's economic level, and 2) Whether there are two parents in the home. do these two factors outwight all others?

Joe,

I would be interested in seeing some information that supports your assertion that increasing numbers of students attending top-tier universities come from public schools. What I hear you suggesting is that public schools are performing increasingly better than private schools. I'm not sure how this was studied and measured, but without scientific data, it really is purely anecdotal.

Morgan/Jennifer, any news on when Grier will stop fudging the numbers and release.

Regarding Smith/Dudley EOC scores: Yesterday a district spokesperson said that the data was not available and didn't know when it would be.

I left a message about those test scores today with Terrence Young, chief information officer. I'll put a call out to DPI to see if they have anything at this point. The principals at both schools are in Chapel Hill this week in training and I'm not sure I can reach them there.

I've heard that both Guilford and Winston-Salem likely will release their AYP info sometime early next week, perhaps Monday.

Locally, Rockingham, Randolph, Alamance, Asheboro City, Lexington City and Thomasville City have released their data. Check out their results at www.ncpublicschools.org/nclb/abcayp/ayp/

So we're only waiting on Guilford, Winston-Salem, and Davidson to release their reports from the Triad area.

Stormy,

Most, especially private, universities tend to favor students with public education instead of, especially religious, the private sector. Good grades are a significant factor for private school kids when enrolling in especially the more elite schools but the kid who has similar successes as the private school kid will more than likely get the slot.

The primary reason for this is the perception that students enrolled in private schools have not been exposed to diverse views as a result of the perceived closemindedness that most private schools, again religious (slack on the sciences, and fervent opponents of evolution), have toward the real world. Admissions depts. feel that parents typically enroll their kids in private schools in order to shelter them from the societal challenges that make for a well rounded child.

Thus in their minds, a public educated child will have a tendency to contribute on a greater scale than the other'n.

I, too, would be interested to see such data Stormy asks for. I would venture a guess: Well-off single parents probably have children who out-perform poorer parents' kids.

On whether public school grads or private are favored at the nation's elite schools: again, I would venture those who are sent to Choate and Andover, Exeter and Miss Porter's all get into any school they wish, unless they really, really mess up.

By the way, my "solution" was more rhetorical. I have no idea how one would go about increasing the income of the millions of parents with under-performing kids, unless one went to a very socialist system. It seems to work for the Scandanavians, but I don't see it in the cards over here.

It's not even that Northern Europe is automatically more academically astute, either; there are a lot of mess-up parents there, too. But if the dads are not in the home, there is a social safety net to allow moms to go out and work, earn their way into middle class or better. Families tend to stay a bit nearer, too, allowing grandparents who are not in the labor force to help care for the children. Not so easy here. Many of the single parents have parents who are also single parents, each successive generation either on public assistance or working very low wage jobs with no time or money to spare to provide the full guidance and nurture academically their children require.

Hank W.,

Thanks for the clarification, it makes sense. So, it seems that the public schools bias by undiversities is more related to social work it does than actual education. Of course, GCS specializes in social work, rather than education, so it makes sense that universities would give preference to GCS graduates over poorly socialized private school children.

Stormy,

In a nutshell, yes, major universities view a publicly educated child as being a more well rounded student than the privately schooled student. Let's not discount the importance of grades. They are very key, but in the higher ed admissions environment the Jesus and Hare Krishna only crowd are viewed as very narrow minded and not open to evolving ideas and concepts.

FN, your examples don't represent the typical private school.

So, the typical private school in Greensboro doesn't cater to the well-heeled clientele whose children are mostly guaranteed a spot at Duke, Chapel Hill or Davidson? Elon, at the least? Hard for me to believe. The rich devise very trustworthy systems for shuttling their progeny in the direction of future prestige. It's a family business.