Public education still works, but not for nearly as many people as it should.

That’s true; it can work, but sometimes it’s an incredibly uphill battle.  My wife attended California public schools (almost entirely post-Prop. 13, when the budgets were gutted), and went on to attend Wellesley College, alma mater of such luminaries as Hillary Rodham Clinton and Madeleine Albright.  My wife and I both strongly desired to send both our kids to public school, but the state of CA schools today (particularly in the Pasadena Unified District, where we live) is disheartening in the extreme.  We applied to a couple of promising charter schools in our area, but after placing 118th on a waiting list for an incoming kindergarten class of 14 souls, we’d just about resigned ourselves to mortgaging everything we had to get our kids into one of our local progressive private schools, which hits you in the neighborhood of $20k per child per annum.

But no.  Those schools may be better than the best local public schools, but probably not to the tune of $20k per year, especially since we’re committed and caring and involved parents.  Since my wife teaches in the LA Unified district, we’re able to send our daughter to an LAUSD school at which my wife used to teach (one of the two halfway-decent ones Sandra Tsing Loh shows on her depressingly hilarious map of the LAUSD inside the front cover of Mother on Fire), and I can’t tell you how glad we are that we’re able to do that… and how depressing it is that this particular school, one of the most coveted in the entire district, has had to pay for at least three full-time faculty members through parent fundraisers for several years now.

Yep.  Bake sales to subsidize payroll.

Things are so, so much worse than they were when Prop 13 began.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qrjFuTbl_SA#t=196s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=qrjFuTbl_SA#t=56s

His character is just so great.

The best education I ever had came from reading books, not from a teacher, not from a school, and not from a lesson plan.

And who taught you how to read them? Either a teacher or a home-schooling parent, I bet.

Books are great but there are many reasons that books alone are an insufficient substitute for all other forms of education.

My two sisters are now practicing physicians, my brother is a mechanical engineer and I teach college. Public education still works, but not for nearly as many people as it should.

And a driven, type A, personality can also make you a great dealer, pimp, or stripper.

The most interesting and intelligent characters from “The Wire” were great examples of this.

Bottle up all the caring, intelligent kids into private schools, and of course the public system will go into a death spiral.  When there’s nobody left in a public school except thugs, thuggery is going to become most students’ career goals.

They are the kind of person who has to own the latest [insert posh brand here] car, even if s/he can’t pay for it.  It is a misguided status thing.  There are a lot of ways one can provide a higher quality education (moving to a better district, hiring a tutor, being a tutor…).  Going profoundly into debt into debt in the belief that a private kindergarten and grade school will make the difference is just stupid.

NB; ‘public schools’ is used counter-intuitively in the UK where it means a privately owned and run school that usually costs a not-so-small fortune to send the child. In deference to the audience I did not use ‘public’ in that manner above.

But I see it all the time, suburbanites, and middle-class college grads move into the city while they’re in their 20s, patronize all the local 20-something watering holes, get good paying jobs, gentrify the working-class neighborhoods and drive up property & rentals costs.

Then they have kids and abandon the city.

They treat the city like Disneyland for frat boys, then when things get real, they bail back to their “safe” suburbs. This isn’t even about the 1%.

God forbid poor little Dylan should be exposed to inner-city kids (that’s code, y’know). God forbid poor little Madison’s parents should have to take an interest in their community and work to improve the public schools.

All the money poured into private schools for these pussified, entitled, little brats could go a long way towards improving public schools for everyone.

The more people buy into the whole private school chic, the more polarized U.S. society becomes. We’re working on our own 21st century fascist state, crap like this just helps it on its way.

The ultimate in small class sizes is home-schooling. One can buy a lot of personal tutoring as well as science and other gear for what a single year in a top private school costs. Ultimately what a student learns in any setting is determined by the student’s own reading, thinking and doing, and home-schooling gives much more focus on that than even the most expensive regular schools.

Among colleges, too, I have found that the main determinant of quality is small classes. A good community college class is better than the average Ivy League lecture.

The real problem is that the system and the culture which produced it do not actually care about education, knowledge or individual thinking – its really all about the brand name, the credential, the certificate of conformity. I hope we can get beyond that shallow, faulty way of rating people, and find better, more nuanced and inclusive measures. Until then the system will continue to be warped by perverse incentives.

We tried that for 6 years.  The problem is with the paradigm.  The parents want to believe that changing the school (teachers, resources, administration, etc…) will fix the problem but the problem, as I understood it, was the prevalent culture among the students (it’s not cool to be smart).  

And to fix that, one has to alter parenting.  Good luck with that.  I can’t see any approach that seems likely to succeed except segregating kids by parents’ value of education.  And the way I could think of to accomplish this was to enroll my kids in a secular, expensive, prep-school.  So far, it’s worked out well.  There’s all kinds of diversity of skin color, eye color and hair color, but all the parents care enough about education to make a serious and sustained effort.