private schools hurt America
A great question worth considering if you support private schools:
In our desire to protect our children physically and academically, we send them to very expensive schools that are inherently segregated ethnically and economically. We, being white, educated, and comparatively affluent, are the agenda-setters in society. The agenda does not include fierce protection of the public school system we value in general terms but abandon in our own specific cases.
If you send your kids to private schools, you are hurting America. You may be acting in the best interest of your children, of course, and most parents would take that choice and make it without blinking. But that choice, being made over and over again, has a degrading and punishing effect on the American public school system. As the American public school system gets worse due to the withdrawal of the richest and most socially stable students, even more students will pull out. The downward spiral will only end when the schools near the point of collapse.
Many might dismiss this as a paranoid rant, but in the urban area I live in – at least until our house sale closes in six weeks – our public schools are horrendous and private schools are the defacto choice for all but the poorest students. If we had stayed in our current environment, we would have joined the flight to private schools. I doubt many parents with the means to do so would even think about sending their kids to schools where violence was common and test scores were abysmal… yet by sending our kids to private schools we’d be adding to the problem.
The end of the spiral has been reached in our school district. In the one we’re moving to the spiral has been averted – the public schools are vibrant, safe and dominant. Yet I feel that I’ve added to the problem by taking my kids away from the terrible school district we now live in – but I, like any other parent, would rather hurt America than my own children.
3 Responses to “private schools hurt America”
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Entirely true, especially in the city.
On the other hand, in my state the public schools are chronically underfunded and have never been adequate academically; many are unsafe. In the neighborhood where we lived when my child hit school age, to be kindergarten-ready your kid needed to know how to use a knife and a club. One neighbor’s very bright child passed into the second grade without knowing how to read: he simply listened to the teacher read the assignments aloud, memorized them, and then recited them when he “read” them to his parents at home. They figured out the game when they realized he couldn’t read the words on traffic signs and billboards.
You’d be an irresponsible parent to send your child into an unsafe environment, and IMHO it’s irresponsible to send your child to a school that’s incapable of providing the most basic education. Hereabouts, if you can’t afford private school, then you’re forced to move to the far-flung suburbs, where newer schools are temporarily OK (if you overlook academics). It’s not right, it’s not fair, and it’s not good for America…but it’s the way things are.