QUOTE(thekohser @ Mon 14th March 2011, 10:56am)
QUOTE(Milton Roe @ Mon 14th March 2011, 1:04pm)
When I tought at the university ...
The letter "o" isn't even close to the letter "a" on a keyboard, Milton. I'd love to see how your noodle is ticking when you fire off these rants.
Well, how would I know? Ask my fingers. Why do they type "works" instead of "words"? that's reflex. I'm also a terrible speller, and not all the problems in my writing come from hitting the wrong key. You won't see too many of the homophones and malapropopisms of the illiterate, but you'll see letters that should have been doubled or vice versa, the wrong vowel for the schwa in unstressed syllables, and so on. I type "ou" words like cough and bought more than "au" words like caught and taught (a rare word in my writing vocabulary), and that's probably it. Beyond that, I have no idea.
QUOTE
As for this notion that private schools do better than public schools at teaching kids, I wonder what you'd say about
this study (that has the wherewithal to understand that private schools tend to be comprised of self-selected samples of the broader populations).
At the 4th grade level, after adjusting for selected student characteristics:
READING: No significant difference between private and public.
MATH: Public schools significantly better than private schools.
At the 8th grade level, after adjusting for selected student characteristics:
READING: Private schools that are not of Conservative Christian affiliation significantly better than public schools. (Conservative Christian private schools were not statistically different than public schools.)
MATH: No significant difference between private and public. However, when you break out the private schools, the Lutherans do achieve better in 8th grade math than public schools, the Catholics show no difference from public schools, and the Conservative Christians show inferior math performance than public schools.
Do these findings correspond with your "facts", Milton? How do you explain that 4th grade math skills are stronger among public school students than private school students?
There are many possible explanations, the most obvious of which is that they
massagedadjusted their raw data (which of course came out in favor of private schools) so rigorously to try to get rid of confounders, that they ended up adjusting out their primary effect, also. In epidemiology that can happen because you never know all the confounders to use to adjust with and by how much, and it's hard to estimate what their effects are, without knowing the answers already to all the questions that you're asking.
However, let's assume the results are correct and came out with the correct answer-- which is basically that there's not much difference in results between public and private schools, overall. That's still damning, as private schools do the same job, for a lot less money. Even if you subtract out the extra services offered by public schools such as meals and transport and so on, NYC kids still cost that city $5000 per pupil/year, whereas Catholic parochials in the same place, are only half of that price. Ouch.
That difference is what that huge entrenched bureaucracy and not being able to get rid of what the deadwood costs you (us). That's the moss on the trees and the barnacles on the hull. It's entropy. It's nature. It's the parasites that grow on government and business and academia unless continuously and vigorously sought and rigorously removed! Jon says his world doesn't resemble mine, where I see this everywhere, and I can only conclude that Jon must live on Mars not Massachusetts (the home of bean and of cod/ Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots/ And the Cabots talk only to those who can spell Massachusetts).
When it comes to statistical measurements of effects, you look at controlled multivariate analysis of retrospective epidemiology, if that's all you have. But if you can get prospective randomized-treatment studies, they are the gold standard, because the randomization removes a lot of the stuff that has effects you can't be sure of, when you got to control epidemiologic data. Of course, in education you have to do "intent to treat" studies, because you can't force people to go to a parochial school, but what you can do is offer them a voucher (money) to do just that, if they win a lotto, and then you use the lotto to randomize them and compare people who use the opportunity, vs. those that don't (and compare those groups to the losers.)
This has been done in at least three US studies I know of:
http://www.nber.org/chapters/c10087.pdf.
As well as one done in Columbia where much the same results were found. Which was that private schools do modestly better at educating those who get vouchers to go to them (dispensed by lotto) despite confounding effects of charter schools drawing off some of the public crowd in some places (the fraction of people who took the vouchers even when they won them, ran from 30 to 70%). The effect was stronger in African Americans, and larger in math than English. But it was robust and showed in all the studies. And the people who went to the private schools were very happy with them.
AND AGAIN, THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS WERE A HELL OF A LOT CHEAPER. I would love to see how
your noodle is ticking, when you ignore these "rants." Maybe you wouldn't mind if you took half the money you spend (one way or the other) on your kids' education, put it in the fireplace, and simply ignited it.
Okay, I suppose at this point I'll get some claim that public education is twice as expensive because it deals with special needs kids that parochial schools won't take. To which I'm going to ask: who would those kids be? Kids on ventilators, or just severe cerebral palsy, ala Timmehhh? What? Anything so extreme might benefit from a special institution, one would think. If the cost of mainstreaming 1% of kids is to double the cost of the overall system, I have to ask
1) Actually I don't believe it. Prove it, first. Then:
2) Even if it's true, is it worth it? That child not left behind would then be quite an anchor. And did you notice that you (your state education system) is sinking?