Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments If you send your kids to a private school R U bad?

Have some read this article?
Headline - If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
Link - http://www.slate.com/articles/doubl...d_people_send_their_kids_to_private.html

The author specifically mentions gifted kids will be fine in sub-par schools. Possibly she is unaware of the damaging social and emotional consequences of lack of academic challenge and lack of true peers?

There seem to be inconsistencies regarding her feelings and beliefs about involved/uninvolved parents?

Possibly while she laments not having been required to read much in school, she could be a life-long learner and create personal reading lists now?

How can parents encourage finding the best academic "fit" if her views are the prevalent ones in society?

I hated that article--it was poorly written and poorly argued. I have a kid who is HG, and a kid with Down syndrome. Before we moved there was no way the public school would meet either of their needs, and while I strongly believe in supporting public schools I further believe my first obligation is to my kids. So...yeah. I am not worried about pleasing people who share her opinion.

Possibly, if the author had had a decent education, she might not have written something so illogical...

What is true here, at least, though, is this: these views are common, but they're not prevalent in the sense that one has to worry about state education becoming compulsory or anything like that - for the amusing reason that in practically every powerful institution the privately educated are massively over-represented.

This article screams clickbait. I do actually think private schools contribute to the problems of public education, but the author did a ridiculously terrible job of making her point. She sounds like a fool.

Anyway, her views are not prevalent in society at all, so no worries.

I read this article and was not overly impressed with it. It states the views of one person and those views do not conform to mine. After all this is a free country and people who believe that the PS system is letting their kids down can take their kids to private schools if they can afford it.
I don't like PS for precisely the reasons that she states would make it good - I HATE aggressive PTAs that send "hitmen" after you to collect $$$$ for the "dying" PE and enrichment programs. I hate PTA fundraisers where parents need to stand around selling ice cream cones. I hate that parent volunteers fill in for PE teachers, art teachers, class room teaching aides, computer lab teachers, yard duty and lunch supervisors in place of laid off school staff. I hate that a huge part of my child's educational experience is based upon the iffy quality of parent volunteers that my local PS gets and not upon teachers/admins who are qualified and paid by the state to do such jobs. I have done all these volunteer jobs for my child's K classroom, but in the end I believe that a person with more skill than me (and more qualified than me in dealing with kids) could have made the school experience a lot better.
In my opinion, as long as budget cuts are in force and teacher unions are strong and money gets allocated to exhorbitant pension funds and not the actual resources for educating kids, the PS system will struggle no matter how involved the parents might be.

My oldest goes to a private preschool, which offers classes up through high school.

I was surprised how well-mannered the children are in this particular private school in comparison to the area’s public schools.

Moral Education has been out of style in many public schools.

If public schools offered a high-quality education, people would be far less likely to spend thousands of dollars annually on something they could get for free. Refer to the description of 20 minute lunch periods for an example of this.

Yes, there are some incredibly crappy private schools out there (though the one at that link has actually just gone bankrupt). But young-earth kooks don't excuse 20 minutes for lunch, no recess, whole-language reading, mathematics with no wrong answers, anything-goes spelling, flipped classrooms, watered down college-track subjects (so that everyone can go to college), and all the other toxic practices that our public schools have given us.

It's up to the schools to produce a better product. This is not the job of the parents of the people they're supposed to be serving. Not that they'd listen anyway, because if you haven't spent years in the classroom you can't possibly know what's wrong with schools.

I don't think whole-language is in favor anymore, is it? Also, I did see the thing about math with no wrong answers, but we have never encountered that sort of thing.


I don't really understand what you mean here. Aren't they open to competition now, from private schools? (Not to mention charters.) Do you think the public school teachers are really there for the salary?

No, whole-language isn't in favor these days, but there are still multiple fads in vogue. The fads tend to be embraced by the public schools.

I've encountered math with no wrong answers many times in reviewing grant applications and (sorry to say) in presentations about (federally) funded projects: see this example.

My main point is that public education suffers from unproven fads. There are a lot of other problems, as well, including poor financial management (e.g. spending $60 million on iPads when you're firing teachers), low expectations for subject expertise (which makes people susceptible to believing faddish ideas), and so on. Some of the problems are far less frequent at private schools (e.g. you manage the money correctly or you go under). Private schools can't issue bonds or have a referendum to raise taxes.

I'm not saying that private schools are all better, because I know they aren't. I'm saying that many people wouldn't pay for private schools if the public schools were better.

But most importantly in reference to the OP, public schools shouldn't be blaming private-school families for their own failures, any more than Apple should be blaming its users for problems with its maps app.