Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

also conservatives are right that liberals who send their kids to private schools and then oppose charter schools on the grounds that they're bad for the public schools are hypocrites.

Sorry, wrong.

Private schools are privately funded, paid for via tuition, alumni gifts, and so forth.

Charter schools are publicly funded, paid for via various grifts that all basically amount to the government contracting for a service.

I would never send my kid to a charter school, but I'm okay with private schools, the same way I believe rich people can pay for premium home security and premium firefighting services if they want. But charter schools are bullshit.

i think you misunderstand the critique. it's that if you buy your way out of the schools when it comes to your kids but don't allow ppl with less money than you get their kids out of the [presumably] inferior publicly run schooling, maybe it's not hypocrisy exactly but it's something gross. it's even worse maybe bc you're saying that only ppl w/ money deserve privately run education.

Charter schools could be fine and maybe good if they were regulated to within an inch of their lives, but the actual reality is that even the good ones are there to skim off taxpayer funds to enrich their operators, and this becomes nakedly apparent from time to time, usually with no consideration for, you know, the well-being of the children enrolled in them (hey look cheap real estate opened up across town! dear moms and dads, prepare to drive!)

I'm only aghast at private schools when it's clear the area has a really harsh private/public divide that mirrors a really stark income disparity and the public schools are underfunded

my friend who lived in Baton Rouge for a few years noted this was the case in part of Louisiana -- voters who went to bad public schools would get all ramped up for candidates who vowed to cut spending and lower taxes, public schools would get even less funding, and the politicians and moneyed class all sent their kids to private school anyway

the charter school mess is similar -- in some areas, the school board's influence is limited to the public schools and charter schools report to a city administrator. theoretically you could boot the charter company or have financial links to performance and oversight, but it doesn't really flush out that way. you just end up with a line item for education.

Mordy, that critique is mistaking the personal for the political, which is a logical fallacy beloved by conservatives, and I am surprised you fell for it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_personal_is_political

only ppl w/ money deserve privately run education

if you really hate the people who go to private school, you can say this with a sneer

because yeah buddy, you and the school where the nuns hit your kids with yardsticks, sure whatever

Have you noticed the thread title, TOMBOT

yeah the phrase "the personal is political" and the concept Tom is going for here are definitely different, but conflating the two is actually exactly what he is going for

also, lol Alfred

as a little kid I lived down the street from a family who sent their sons to private high school. they were the parents who had their kids host parties at their home, because at least then, *their* kids wouldn't be the teens driving home drunk

I swear I could use words better to win arguments had I gone to a fake private school paid for with public funds

How many of you attended public schools?

I went to public school for first grade and my parents disliked it so much that they pulled me out and sent me to private for the rest of my education.

well of course! they weren't supposed to attend it with you, no wonder they disliked it

I went to public school K-12, in probably two of the best public school systems in the country. The idea of "bad public schools" is utterly foreign to me

i don't have any friends who went to private school

#classwar

I'm starting to think that people with really good public school experiences are way too few

mine wasn't uniformly good -- we had a couple useless teachers in my elementary that a new principal cleared out, and my middle school had some serious discipline problems until we got a new principal. some sort of common thread, there.

where i grew up my elementary school was i think excellent. the middle school was ok, pretty fun times iirc. high school sucked. i think a lot of it had to do with the football team having like 17 coaches, all of them teachers or staff, all of them being more devoted to the football team than teaching. football is probably, out of all the official activities of high school, the worst thing about high school.

football is a disease and a fascist vanguard and children shouldn't be exposed to it

My only experience with public school was university.

Afaict you're paying for it one way or the other either thru private school or thru your expensive mortgage and high school taxes I don't see a huge difference class between private and public school students when we are talking about well funded public schools of the wealthy.

after high school I realized I hadn't met any gay individuals in 4 years there, and a ton of my ex-classmates came out in the years after. realized when thinking back how toxic the environment was to the gay community back then, it was no accident.

I am guessing it's probably not as bad anymore since the country's acceptance has improved, but I feel like kids that went to other schools than mine had an easier time coming out in high school.

local-tax-base-driven school funding is also unconscionable, in WA it's actually unconstitutional and the state legislature is in contempt of court for taking a million years to deal with it xp

xxp yeah, see, that's actually more of a flaw of public schools in practice -- the ones in more affluent areas will have kids that have had the benefits of living in affluent families and parents in that part of the district might spend more time at the school or donate in fundraisers, etc

in theory, funds are allocated by number of students and the needs of students in that area. in a larger city, that's more flat. affluent suburbs, not so much

silby otm, depending on the state/area how school funds are allocated varies and the different factors taken into account are political

there are a number of rural/sparse areas where schools are becoming consolidated and, while larger high schools are somewhat of a norm, the distance and amount of time kids are in transit to go to school becomes yet another factor. so you have student needs, economic disparity, distance to school, facility age and condition, and so many other things vying for priority in funding

I tend to agree that funding schools by locality leads inevitably to educational disparities that mirror economic ones. The antidotes to that involve decoupling education from the local/state level and basically federalizing it.

Which is a topic for "Reveal Your Probably Unachievable Liberal Dreams Here," not "Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here."

my belief is that no matter how much school funding you give northern florida, it's not going to do any good

I tend to agree that funding schools by locality leads inevitably to educational disparities that mirror economic ones. The antidotes to that involve decoupling education from the local/state level and basically federalizing it.

Thanks to one of the most devastating SCOTUS decisions of my lifetime yet no one discusses it: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1972/71-1332

were you... a baby in 1973? still blame you for not protesting this

I was a zygote, an elegant one.

I was public schooled from pre- through college. Is this really a rare thing?

I was too, all that proves is that a dude who goes to class enough to get Cs can get a college degree

(tbf I went to more like 75% of my classes my last year as opposed to like, 40% the other years)

I went through public schools from preschool through grade 12 and then attended a land grant public university

And I post to ilx

my mom put me in a catholic school in second grade, i'm not entirely sure why other than she was catholic, but i think it was because i got bullied a lot. spoiler alert - it didn't help. high school i went back to public school.

anyway where i grew up got gentrified like five minutes after i was born so i had the option of world-class public schools, which most people don't.

Public/private/charter teacher here. Informed opinion says choice is good, etc., but most charters are profiteering wastelands. And among the charters that are good, many are good /because/ they skim high/low income, ethnic majority/minority students from/to neighborhood publics. IOW some charters good. But many good charters are good because they are re/segregating along the prejudices of the charter's beneficiary population.

Notwithstanding that, teacher workload in well-resourced public schools is pretty awful, and kept in check only by labor contracts. Charters don't even benefit from those contracts. Non-union teachers are often far less experienced, on the whole less well trained, and burn our more quickly than career educators. Until charters will work w/ unions they're gonna stay (mostly) lower tier.

and throwing all the special needs kids and behavior issues back into the local PS system

I'm 100% public school btw, went to a state university too until I dropped out

my high school also produced a rhodes scholar

I live a couple blocks from this high school, went to the city's magnet high school with a couple of the people listed as 99/00 notable alumni
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt_High_School_(Des_Moines)#Notable_alumni

i went to public school k-12 and a public university

same

me 2

My parents were both teachers. Both were reflexively liberal, both believed fervently in public education, and all of us went to public schools PreK-grad.

And yet! My mother taught in Catholic schools most of her career, at least partly because she preferred the behavior of Catholic schoolkids.

My father, in contrast, taught at a military school (oddly, a public magnet), where many of his students ended up because no other place would take them.

I think my daughter's school would be considered a magnet school. I guess? It's public and free but it's apparently very desirable so admission is by lottery. Our district calls it a "county-wide school" (as opposed to the "neighborhood school" where my son goes). She's been there five years and I still don't understand what's different about it.

It's all a vast tapestry.

I tend to agree that funding schools by locality leads inevitably to educational disparities that mirror economic ones. The antidotes to that involve decoupling education from the local/state level and basically federalizing it.

Thanks to one of the most devastating SCOTUS decisions of my lifetime yet no one discusses it: https://www.oyez.org/cases/1972/71-1332

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, February 6, 2017 4:03 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i teach in the school district of the plaintiff from this case. this was the first case iirc in which all of nixon's FOUR appointees were on the bench. fuck richard nixon.

and fuck charter schools, fucking parasites.

cass sunstein argues that saisd v. rodriguez was the end of the court's gradual evolution to understand that the constitution guaranteed social and economic rights.

im a gov/econ teacher and last semester i taught the saisd v. rodriguez case alongside its subsequent state court case edgewood v. kirby (plaintiff won, creates the "robin hood" system which texas has jacked with over time)

public school k-12 then "prestigious east coast private university" -- was definitely at a disadvantage there, and the economic disparity of education in America was really clear to me. Had various classes where fellow students discussed false consciousness and Marxism and the evils of WalMart. I was the only one in the class that had a family that shopped at WalMart, that grew up where everyone shopped at WalMart. Loved their WalMart did the citizens of my stupid town.

Most college students shouldn't go to college. Especially humanities students.