For all their faults (and there are many), public schools do one thing well. They are a melting pot. I grew up in a neighborhood where almost everyone was a child or grandchild of Eastern European immigrants. There were no black or Italian or Irish kids in my neighborhood.
But I had many black and Italian and Irish friends. Because I went to a public school.
Is that alone enough to give public education a pass? No. But it’s not something that should be ignored either.
If education is privatized you will lose much of that. You’ll end up with Muslims going to Muslim private schools, liberal kids going to liberal private schools, etc.
Not melting pots. Balkanization.
If education was privatized with vouchers, you would get diversity as parents would seek out the best schools for their kids.
I know a first grade teacher whose class was all brown.
Two other first grades in her school were black.
The school did this on purpose.
The problem wasn’t the kids, it was their parents.
It ain’t like your day. It has balkenized already. You went to school with people who shared western civ with you. A generation previous catholic schools were formed so that the cultural identity of Southern Europeans would not be wiped out
Leaning, I appreciate the point you made. It IS important to socialize outside of our “comfort zone” but unless and until we are of one mind where equality is concerned, I feel that grouping together as if we are solving race issues is a farce. We can’t pretend we’re “in this together without acknowledging that we are all equal. Private schools, especially parochial/christian schools enforce the principles of equality as a God given right. I can’t bring myself to “buy the world a coke” if others wish death for me and my white children.
Mooslimes already go to private schools, they call them madrassas. And if they don’t go to the madrassas they get what they don’t get taught at home, for example the memorization of the Qurap.
People conflate charter schools with private schools which is completely wrong. A lot of Charter School Organizations run your public indoctrination centers or public schools, especially in the inner city school districts, where it is 85 to 90 percent black and foreign immigrants (mostly illegal and those who can’t speak english that are somewhat legal) anyways.
Most of what you claim has already happened and its called de-segregation. Most of the race-baiters are calling for it. But so are the families that have to wake their children up 3 hours before they catch a 2 hour bus ride across the city because of the very thing you espouse.
This isn’t a race thing its a location thing. And such you will find out that inner city schools usually have the money as does the richer parts of towns have but in the inner cities that money goes to administration as the greed lies there. I know several teachers who went to administration because it was better pay for them by almost twice as much.
The fact that average salaries for teachers take almost 10 to 12 years to make gives a false impression of how much a teacher actually makes per year. Another indication of lies that teachers leave is the contracts that arenegotiated by Unions and that the Unions have the teachers back. The Administration is not bound by Unions and when Admin investigate an incident between the teacher an student, the Admin will try to get the teacher alone without a Union Rep. And teachers that become Union Reps make money for that title and do not reveal it to new teachers. So both Admin and Unions play off of one another. There would be great teachers who have worked in the field and have retired but Unions and Admins have a particular bias against those who have degrees in something other than education. Other teachers who have the degree and have never worked in the field they teach in at HS also have this bias.
Lastly, computer skills are not really taught in schools. They hand kids a tablet and then proceed to tell them to go with it. Most teachers still refuse to acquiesce to computers and the remote schooling currently is a result of this. Schools can be blended, but if schools only do computer based teaching then it is bad. This is because higher academia has said that CBT degrees are weaker. And therefore all CBT teaching is weaker than in-person learning. Don’t get me wrong there are benefits to in-person instruction but to say that brick-and-mortar schools are better than CBT schools is wrong. Parents need to get involved no matter what the teacher says they can’t be doing. If a teacher said I could not be listening to my kids instruction, then I would want to listen to see if something fishy was being taught.
People claiming CBT schooling is bad for children are idjits and are hands off their child’s learning.
My ***private*** parochial school had students of every ethnic background. Blacks, too, in my **private** parochial high school.
Re: Muslims
This is an immigration problem, not a schooling problem.
I went to ethnically homogenous public schools and I don’t feel I was deprived of anything. I learned how to read and write and barely do math. I then went to college in a big city with a really diverse student body and had zero problems adjusting.